You don't exactly have to squint to see the life of Rock Hudson as a tragic tale. Gifted with a face seemingly chiseled from Greek marble and the frame of the all-American ideal, young Roy Fitzgerald came to Hollywood, changed his name, covered up his homosexuality, and became one of America's biggest and most definitive movie stars. He lived a life in the closet, with all the hushed-up lovers, sham marriages, and whispered rumors that entails, and he died of complications from AIDS in 1985, the biggest star to date to have been claimed by that merciless plague.
- 6/27/2023
- by Joe Reid
- Primetimer
During his lifetime, Rock Hudson was a model for American masculinity. That changed after his death, when the strapping, straight-acting (but occasionally sensitive) hunk from Winnetka became the poster boy for Hollywood homophobia: a closeted star who’d been forced to play a role his entire career that wasn’t true to himself, on screen and off. “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” treats that compromise as a tragedy, leaning on the fact Hudson died of AIDS to underscore the injustice, but Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality.
Built around interviews with a handful of former lovers and friends, Kijak spills private details from Hudson’s personal life, ranging from whom he shagged to how he arranged such trysts in the first place. A...
Built around interviews with a handful of former lovers and friends, Kijak spills private details from Hudson’s personal life, ranging from whom he shagged to how he arranged such trysts in the first place. A...
- 6/11/2023
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
To those who don’t obsessively watch TCM, or generally eschew movies made before 1980, Rock Hudson is little more than a factoid, best remembered for his sexuality than for the movies he made. And yet, while Hudson today is known as a gay man, it was something that he did his best to keep hidden and, as Stephen Kijak lays out towards the end of his HBO documentary, would have taken to the grave if he could have.
“Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” is in the vein of other prominent documentaries aimed at telling the real story behind the Old Hollywood façade, including HBO’s most recent “The Last Movie Stars.” The revelations within the documentary’s 104-minute runtime aren’t revolutionary, but seek to give viewers an authentic look at a man whose life so often was swathed in artifice.
It’s impossible to underscore Hudson’s appeal...
“Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” is in the vein of other prominent documentaries aimed at telling the real story behind the Old Hollywood façade, including HBO’s most recent “The Last Movie Stars.” The revelations within the documentary’s 104-minute runtime aren’t revolutionary, but seek to give viewers an authentic look at a man whose life so often was swathed in artifice.
It’s impossible to underscore Hudson’s appeal...
- 6/11/2023
- by Kristen Lopez
- The Wrap
Warning: This story contains spoilers from the second and third episodes of the Netflix miniseries “Hollywood.”
Most of the lead characters in Ryan Murphy’s limited series “Hollywood” are fictional, and most of the ones who were real people are movie stars from the 1940s: Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel, Vivien Leigh …
But there’s one character in the miniseries, Henry Willson, who was a real-life star-maker, not a star, and who dominates nearly every scene in which he appears.
Because “Hollywood” is a fantasy that very deliberately rewrites Hollywood history to give women, minorities and the Lgbt community more agency and acceptance than they had at the time, fact-checking its storylines is to some degree beside the point. But when an actual person whose real story isn’t well known is dropped into the narrative, it’s inevitable that viewers will wonder how close the character is to the real person.
Most of the lead characters in Ryan Murphy’s limited series “Hollywood” are fictional, and most of the ones who were real people are movie stars from the 1940s: Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel, Vivien Leigh …
But there’s one character in the miniseries, Henry Willson, who was a real-life star-maker, not a star, and who dominates nearly every scene in which he appears.
Because “Hollywood” is a fantasy that very deliberately rewrites Hollywood history to give women, minorities and the Lgbt community more agency and acceptance than they had at the time, fact-checking its storylines is to some degree beside the point. But when an actual person whose real story isn’t well known is dropped into the narrative, it’s inevitable that viewers will wonder how close the character is to the real person.
- 5/13/2020
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
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