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  ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES USA, 1992 Watching other people's home movies generally sucks - no matter their content, you can never fully appreciate what they hold if you're not in them or if you aren't intimately acquainted with their cast, crew and locations. But even though most of us have never met a bona fide movie idol, any one of us would love to watch their home movies. Without having known them in a real way, we've been saturated with aspects of their personalities and work for so long that an artificial familiarity takes on highly charged voyeuristic overtones to make the concept thrilling, even arousing. That's why longtime out-there director Mark Rappaport - who is nothing if not original - deserves credit for having a brilliant feature-film concept with Rock Hudson's Home Movies. This one-of-a-kind 63-minute movie hijacks Rock Hudson's Hollywood movies, converting choice clips into substitute home movies and forcing modern readings on them, readings that invariably point to clues as to the star's hidden homosexuality and eventual death from AIDS. The clips are interspersed with segments narrated by a Rock Hudson lookalike (Eric Farr). The idea for the movie came from the late actor's real-life habit of showing queer clips from his oeuvre at his infamous gay house parties. Hudson may have come off as beauty with no brains on the big screen, but it didn't take a genius to see the irony in lines like "My boss wants me to camp" [from Man's Favorite Sport (1964)] or the effete Tony Randall inquiring of Rock, "Need a light, cowboy?" [Pillow Talk, 1959]. By the same token, though Rappaport assembles a truly exhaustive reel of scenes which show Rock behaving in ways that now seem clearly gay and using or reacting to dialogue that seems same-sexually charged, it's an exercise that is as banal in execution as it is clever in theory. As hit-or-miss as the clips are - and to any gay viewers, some of the clips are sure to be a hit - the device of having a modern actor impersonate Hudson is disastrous. Farr, in his only film, looks more like a swish Christian Slater than a strapping Rock Hudson, a visual difference that is especially annoying when Hudson's image is split-screened with Farr's. Worse, his awkwardly delivered monologue has him voicing feelings and thoughts that seem wildly at odds with how the real Hudson lived his life. Knee-jerk liberal comments (out of the blue, Adolphe Menjou is denounced as a right-winger, Farr as Hudson pits his beliefs against John Wayne's) are horribly misplaced coming from the lips of Hudson, who in life was a Republican who hid his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis at all costs and even continued having sex with his partner Marc Christian after he knew he was infected. Rock Hudson was hardly a gay rights activist. But even if the movie reinvents the real Rock Hudson cavalierly, Rappaport gets two things very right. First, he opens the film with a dazzling shot from The Hurricane (1937) showing gorgeous leading man Jon Hall leaping from the mast of a ship. Farr as Hudson waxes horny, identifying it as a scene he saw as a kid that simultaneously clued him in to his sexuality and that made him desire to be a movie star of Hall's caliber. Hudson says he longed to replace Hall with himself, even as he admired Hall's impossible beauty. This touch seems real, humanizing Rock and providing a nice emotional arc that stretches from beginning to end. And Rappaport's retro readings of clips that could be about AIDS if they weren't filmed in the 1950s and 1960s are impeccably well chosen. If the rest of the clips seem like dippy fun, the clips from Hudson's body of work that relate to death and disease (even "the plague!") have a rewind-worthy gravity that make you feel for the flawed man's man and actor's actor who lived and died in disguise. Overall, while Rappaport revels in his own insights into Hudson's true motivations, he makes for a rather shaky Rock scientist and turns in a film as spotty as its subject's own career. Related Reading  Film Reviews - Interviews - Features - Film Festival - About - Contact |
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