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http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19960426/REVIEWS/604260301/1023&template=printart

The Celluloid Closet
Release Date: 1996
Ebert Rating: ***½
By Roger Ebert Apr 26, 1996

<<When was I first aware that a movie character was intended to
behomosexual? It must have been in the early 1960s, in the final
sequence ofFellini's ``La Dolce Vita,'' when two transvestites join
the sad group that goesto meet the dawn. What ``The Celluloid Closet''
makes clear is that I had seenlots of gay characters before then--it's
just that the movies never quiteidentified them as gay, or, like a lot
of moviegoers, I didn't pick up on theclues. I remember that Peter
Ustinov, playing Nero in ``Quo Vadis'' (1951),struck me oddly in a
scene where he collected his tears in a tiny crystalgoblet, but maybe
I thought that was typical of Roman emperors.

Portrayals of homosexuality were frowned upon until the 1960s, by the
movie industry's production code and such groups as the Legion of
Decency.

Yet gays were everywhere in the movies, right from the beginning--
thisdocumentary shows two men dancing together in a Thomas Edison
short named ``TheGay Brothers,'' from 1895--and often they were hidden
in plain view. Hollywoodknew who was gay and who was not, and there
were in-jokes like John Ireland'sline to Montgomery Clift in ``Red
River'': ``There are only two things morebeautiful than a good gun--a
Swiss watch, or a woman from anywhere. You ever hada Swiss watch?''
``The Celluloid Closet'' is inspired by a 1981 book by Vito Russo,who
wrote as a gay man who found he had to look in the shadows and
subtexts of movies to find the homosexual characters who were surely
there. His book was acompendium of visible and concealed gays in the
movies, and now thisdocumentary, which shows the scenes he could only
describe, makes it clearHollywood wanted it both ways: It benefitted
from the richness that gays addedto films, but didn't want to
acknowledge their sexuality. In those few filmsthat were frankly about
gays, their lives almost always ended in madness or death (there is a
montage of gays dying on screen, of which my favorite from a Freudian
point of view is Sandy Dennis as a lesbian in ``The Fox,'' crushed by
a falling tree).

The movie, narrated by Lily Tomlin, contains interviews with a lotof
witnesses from the days when gays were in the Hollywood closet. The
chat withGore Vidal has already become famous. He recalls how he was
hired by directorWilliam Wyler to do rewrites on ``Ben-Hur.'' One of
the film's problems was thatthere was no plausible explanation for the
hatred between the characters playedby Charlton Heston and Stephen
Boyd. Vidal's suggestion: They were lovers whenthey were teenagers,
but now Ben-Hur (Heston) denies that time, and Boyd isresentful. Wyler
agreed that would provide the motivation for a key scene, butdecided
to tell only Boyd, not Heston, who ``wouldn't be able to handle
it.''The film shows the scene, which plays with an amusing subtext.

Sometimes directors deleted scenes with gay themes because of studio
or censorship pressure. Tony Curtis is droll as he recalls a scene
with Laurence Olivier in Stanley Kubrick's ``Spartacus,'' where the
two men flirted in a hot bath. (The scene was restored when the movie
was re-released in 1991.) Is it because we know stars were gay that
their scenes play differently this time around? There's a scene from
``Pillow Talk'' in which Rock Hudson plays a straight man pretending
to be gay in order to avoid an entanglement with Doris Day. Does
Hudson seem privately amused by the twist? It looks that way (and Mark
Rappaport's ``Rock Hudson's Home Movies'' finds scenes all through
Hudson's career where he seems aware of additional levels of
possibilities).

``The Celluloid Closet'' was directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey
Friedman, who won Oscars for their two previous gay-themed docs, ``The
Life of Harvey Milk'' and ``Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt'';
their track recordencourages their interview subjects to open up.
Playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein recalls that when he was young
he always liked the ``sissies'' in themovies, and Tomlin, narrating a
montage that shows how very many sissies therewere (from Peter Lorre
to Anthony Perkins), says sissies made the othercharacters seem ``more
manly or more womanly, by filling the space in between.'' ``The
Celluloid Closet'' surveys movies from the earliest times tothe
present, showing characters who were gay even though the movies
pretendednot to know (Marlene Dietrich in trousers in the 1930 film
``Morocco,'' forexample, or a musical number named ``Ain't There
Anyone Here for Love?'' in1953's ``Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,'' in
which Jane Russell dances smolderinglythrough a gym where the body-
builders studiously ignore her). It gives full dueto the ground-
breaking 1970 movie ``The Boys in the Band'' and such recent filmsas
``Philadelphia.'' I learn from Brandon Judell, a film critic on the
Internet, that thefilmmakers weren't able to include one planned
sequence because of legalobjections. They wanted to show scenes from
biopics that turned gays into straights, but couldn't get the rights.
Richard Burton's estate refused the rights to show scenes from
``Alexander the Great.'' Goldwyn wouldn't license clips from ``Hans
Christian Andersen'' (Epstein says ``somehow they got the idea we were
outing Danny Kaye as opposed to Hans Christian Andersen'').
Lawyersstepped in at the possibility that the film would identify Cole
Porter ashomosexual (!). And Charlton Heston refused permission to use
scenes from ``TheAgony and the Ecstasy'' (``because he'd done a lot of
research for his role andhe assured us that Michelangelo was not
homosexual''). And I suppose Ben-Hurwasn't, either.>>

http://www.endicott-studio.com/jMA03Summer/hans.html

<<Andersen made his first journey to England in 1847. His tales had
appeared in English in four different volumes in 1846, and, despite
uniformly poor translations, they were greatly loved by Victorian
readers. Charles Dickens was an admirer, and he made a point of
meeting Andersen, gifting the Danish writer with signed copies of his
collected works. The two maintained a warm correspondence until, on
Andersen's next journey, Dickens invited him to his country home in
Kent. The visit was a disaster. The timing was atrocious, for
Dickens's marriage was on the verge of collapse, and Andersen — never
noticing the tension in the household — proved to be a needy guest.
Dickens placed a sign on the guest room wall after Andersen's
departure: "Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room for five weeks
which seemed to the family AGES." Andersen himself never understood
why he never heard from Dickens again.

Part of the problem was that Andersen spoke virtually no English ("In
English, he is the Deaf and Dumb Asylum," Dickens sneered to a
friend), which led London society to view the writer as something of a
simpleton. Also, his tales had been rendered into the English language
by translators with limited literary skills, working from German
texts, not the original Danish. Thus the versions of the tales that
were best known to English readers were simpler, sweeter, less comic
and ironic, than the ones that Andersen actually wrote.

This lack of sophistication in the English text caused Andersen to be
labeled as a writer for children only, contrary to his broader
reputation in the rest of Europe. His quiet, confused demeanor as he
traveled through England (due to his inability to communicate) made
the clever and witty Andersen appear as naive and child-like as his
tales — and a myth was born, later portrayed on film by the actor
Danny Kaye. Andersen himself railed against the notion of being viewed
as a man who'd spent his life with children when he objected to the
designs for a statue surrounding him with a circle of tykes. "I said
loud and clear that I was dissatisfied . . . that my tales were just
as much for older people as for children, who only understood the
outer trappings and did not comprehend and take in the whole work
until they were mature — that naiveté was only part of my tales, that
humor was what really gave them their flavor."

Andersen himself was a physically awkward and homely man. "I shall
have no success with my appearance," he once wrote, appraising himself
with blunt honesty, "so I make use of whatever is available." And he
was prone to harboring passions for people he could never have.
Publicly, Andersen courted two women during his lifetime: the sister
of a student friend, who soon became engaged to another, and the
Swedish singer Jenny Lind, who could offer him only friendship. (He
wrote his lovely tale The Nightingale for Jenny Lind.) Privately, he
was more deeply obsessed with men: first with Edvard Collins, then
with a young theology student, and finally in, his later years, with a
handsome young ballet dancer — the later of whom returned his
interest, at least to some degree. This was an aspect of his life that
was long ignored by Andersen scholars until Wullschlager explored its
impact on the writer's work in Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a
Storyteller. Wullschlager notes that if Andersen had been alive today,
his life — and thus his art — would have been very different.
"Without the enormous repression of his time, he could have declared
himself to be a homosexual. Many people have asked me what would have
become of him today. He might have taken anti-depressant and been
happier, but then he would not have written his fairy tales.">>
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112651/trivia

The Celluloid Closet (1995)

<<The filmmakers originally planned a sequence discussing how gay
historical figures were portrayed as heterosexual in films. They
aborted the sequence when Richard Burton's estate denied the rights to
Alexander the Great, MGM denied use of Hans Christian Andersen
(fearing that the filmmakers were trying to "out" Danny Kaye) and
Charlton Heston declined use of The Agony and the Ecstasy (claiming
that Michaelangelo was heterosexual).>>
-----------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6546_Kaye

6546 Kaye (Absolute magnitude: 11.4) is an outer main-belt asteroid
discovered on February 24, 1987 by A. Mrkos at Klet. It is named in
honour of the actor Danny Kaye.
-----------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Kaye

<<Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminsky; January 18, 1913 – March 3,
1987)

There are persistent rumors that Kaye was either homosexual or
bisexual, and some sources claim that Kaye and Laurence Olivier had a
ten-year relationship in the 1950s while Olivier was still married to
Vivien Leigh. A biography of Leigh states that the alleged
relationship caused her to have a breakdown.>>