Bob Mizer was the enterprising creator of the Athletic Model Guild, a modelling agency and publishing house that celebrated 1950s-style beefacke bodybuilders through its R-rated magazine "Physique Pictorial" that was published right up until the 1990s. Mizer also made around three thousand beefcake films which were distributed to eager, closeted viewers, but refused to ever make full porn, even though he kept filming until a couple of years before his death in 1992. Mizer also kept a menagerie that included a python, a monkey and a goat, some of whom made regular appearances in his photos and movies.

This fascinating flash-frozen character, who remained devoted to the oiled-up gladiator/wrestler aesthetic long after relaxed censorship laws and changing public tastes made such work seem quaint and redundant, is the subject of this suitably sexy and delightful film from Thom Fitzgerald, the director of The Hanging Garden.

Fitzgerald's film is a mixture of real footage and eccentric dramatisations. Daniel MacIvor plays Mizer, and Carol Godsman gives a curious performance as Mizer's mother Carol, who personally ran up the silk g-string "posing pouches" in her living room while Mizer filmed in his garish poolside studio located in the backyard. Mizer also hosted an itinerant harem of models and hustlers who stayed in living quarters at the back of the house, and a couple of them are brought to life via charismatic performances from Jack Griffin Mazeika, Jonathan Torrens, Joshua Peace, to name a few.



Beefcake has a charming wackiness and the film's makers hold obvious affection for the material. Interviews with luminaries such as Joe Dallesandro and Jack LaLanne are concisely informative. Interviews with other aged AMG models, ones who didn't go on to any further modelling or acting success, are very candid and quite touching. The movie is possibly a little too lithe to do full justice to the story's darker themes of secret prostitution rings and Mizer's apparently complex psyche. We see that Mizer constructed an elaborate table of hieroglyphic personality codes to describe each model, and apparently regularly had sex with many of the models, and recommended them to other wealthy gay men around LA. The film suggests that Mizer was too naive and weird to understand the homo side of himself, but I personally would have liked to have seen a little bit more of an exploration here, rather than the movie's surfeit of fun-silly "Happy Days" spoof scenes.

Likewise, even with the interviews and the re-enactments, we don't get more than a glimmer into the hearts and minds of the models, a motley crew of mostly hetero beauties who can't have, as the film implies, been largely ignorant of the homoerotic nature of what they were doing.

But then, the strange world of 1950s physique culture is a kind of inscrutable and elusive pre-porn art form and Beefcake approaches it with an appropriate sense of adventure.