Dress Gray

[Steve Dyer]

I liked it. This was a fine example of a well-made TV movie.
It had a rather formulaic plot, and the requisite boy-girl
love interest at its center, but within that genre, it was
very well executed. Dress Gray was hardly a "gay story";
rather it was about the myth of machismo in the armed forces
and its simultaneous attraction to and fear of things homosexual,
and the havoc such dissonance wreaks. I thought Gore Vidal's
screenplay was wonderfully subtle, and worked well within the
confines of network genteelness. Anyone else care to comment?
--
Steve Dyer
dy...@harvard.HARVARD.EDU
{bbncca,bbnccv,harvard}!spdcc!dyer

[Ron Rizzo]

I'd actually read part of Lucian Truscott's pulpy novel during a lull
in my life; I remember the book as somewhat cruder & more sordid than
the TV miniseries; on TV, the protagonist seemed very PC, and the dia-
logue was better: when I saw that Vidal had written the teleplay, the
difference was explained & I decided to watch the whole series.

The choice of Vidal was fortunate, as it rescued Dress Gray from the
mere trashiness of the book. Casting a Richard Gere clone as the main
character was amusing, I thought.

Ron Rizzo

[Steve Dyer]

Yes, I was struck by the resemblance to Gere, too. An interesting sidenote
is that both my lover and I were MUCH more impressed with the female lead!

[san...@milano.uucp]

I liked it, too. I found the script intelligible (although
rushed at the end to tie up all the loose) and the
production generally good (except that they hardly tried at all
to create a late-60's atmosphere - check for the brand new
1986 Cadillac in one scene!).

Most interesting, I thought, was a thread throughout that
subtly questioned the traditional military stance on homosexuality
by highlighting some cadet's feelings about being with other men.
For example, the closing scene has Elizabeth and Ry discussing
men's involvement in war. Ry says at one point:
"You don't know how it is when men get together."

Talk about blunt!

I was also pleasantly surprised at the degree of open discussion
about "the act" that took place. Perhaps it will help to desensitize
people who are squeamish about such things.

By the way, I have a friend who worked as a location scout for
the show. He tells me that West Point (of course!) absolutely
refused to let them film there. It was filmed mostly in New
Mexico, with interiors in LA.

I'd be interested in the comments of anyone who also read the
book as to how the transition from book to TV movie fared.

--
Charles Sandel
arpa: san...@mcc.arpa
uucp: *!ut-sally!im4u!milano!sandel (or *!ut-sally!charles)
An endangered species: native Austinite

[Steve Dyer]

In article <11...@milano.UUCP>, san...@milano.UUCP writes:
> Most interesting, I thought, was a thread throughout that
> subtly questioned the traditional military stance on homosexuality
> by highlighting some cadet's feelings about being with other men.
> For example, the closing scene has Elizabeth and Ry discussing
> men's involvement in war. Ry says at one point:
> "You don't know how it is when men get together."
>
> Talk about blunt!

I really didn't take this as a reference to explictly homosexual feelings or
attitudes, so much as an indication of the attraction of traditionally Male
sentiments such as Honor, Duty, Fraternity, and all that. I think Vidal was
being deliberately allusive and ironic by giving Ry a line with such ambiguous
overtones. But the parallelism he draws contrasts the "acceptable" eroticism
of military life, and the proscribed eroticism which led, ultimately, to the
cadet's death and the superintendent's resignation.