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The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender

1998, Movie, NR, 101 mins

The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender: Review

SILVER SCREEN: COLOR ME LAVENDER, THE
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Filmmaker Mark Rappaport ( ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES) once again digs deep into the celluloid closet to uncover the secret -- and often not so secret -- history of gay male characters in Hollywood movies. In what amounts to a 101-minute "cinema essay," Rappaport looks at the ways in which Hollywood, while outwardly disgusted by the very idea of romantically linked men, obsessively returns to the idea, offering up the shocking scenario, then defusing it with laughter. Thus, Rappaport finds nervous fag-gags and wacky gender confusions running rampant in countless films, from the obvious "sissies" of 1930s comedies and musicals (like the transcendently prissy Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton) and the oddly homoerotic "Road" flicks starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (who invariably wind up in an accidental lip-lock), to the schizoid, butch-femme antics of Danny Kaye and the subversively unmasculine goofing of Jerry Lewis. The best part of Rappaport's expose is his diagnosis of what he terms the "Walter Brennan Syndrome." Brennan's characters -- often the crusty old codger sidekick of such unassailably macho types as John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart -- always seemed unusually attached to the hero, never had much use for them troublemakin' fee-males, and was constantly nagging the star to settle down with him on that Utah ranch they'd always dreamed about. A stretch? Perhaps, but watching the same scene played over and again by many actors in a series of Westerns and dramas (many directed by Howard Hawks, the auteur of male bonding), it does kind of make you wonder. Of course context can be everything, and Rappaport's trick is to pluck bits from different films and place them side by side with a bit of leading commentary by Frasier's Dan Butler. But that doesn't make it all any less valid: In most cases, Hollywood's games of semiotic peek-a-boo made for a confused -- even incoherent -- system of mixed signals and messages, and Rappaport's strategy is often as incisive as it is entertaining. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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