Confessions of a Teenage Heartthrob

Tab Hunter was a movie star.

"Who?" you ask. "Tab Hunter? What movies was he in?"

He was in Damn Yankees (1958), and Polyester (1981) and... uhm... well... uhm...



The new documentary on Netflix Tab Hunter Confidential is a good reminder that not all movie stars of the 1950's were in movies that we remember.

Tab Hunter (nee Arthur Kelm) was a young, blonde California he-god who in 1950 strolled onto the Warner Brothers lot and for the next ten  years or so was one of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood. There wasn't a girl's bedroom (and some boys) that didn't have a picture of the grinning sun-kissed boy on their walls. His image was breathtaking. The wide shining smile and the large blue eyes were truly unique- able to project that special brand of Fifties wholesomeness that the era thrived on.

He starred in countless films playing soldiers, sailors, and boys next door, but was never able to land in the kind of movies that would make him a serious actor like contemporaries James Dean or Rock Hudson. That didn't matter to the public. They didn't need him to be serious. They wanted him to smile tenderly and sing goofy love songs in their ears.

When Hunter moved to television he played more complex parts- but those roles are mostly lost to the tapeless ether. He would re-emerge in 1981 in the retro-fetish universe of John Waters. It was a brief resurgence, ending with Hunter giving up acting altogether to relax with his beloved horses on his California ranch.

Hunter in Confidential takes us through the evolution from young man to pin-up, to actor, to has-been, to nostalgia favorite, personally spilling the beans on his life and career. He gets the big shocking news out of the way in the first moments. Hunter is a homosexual. Closeted, Hunter was unable to be the person he wanted to be- but that didn't stop him from having relationships with figure skaters, ballet dancers, and perhaps most infamously, with rising star at the time, Anthony Perkins.

Hunter is reluctant to discuss his gay life. Perhaps being naturally shy, or just holding on to his PR training that would never allow him to discuss such things, Hunter relates the love stories of a couple beaux but in such a matter-of-fact way, that he appears emotionally disconnected from his past loves- and his gayness. 

While he admits his affair with Perkins, he doesn't open up about what that meant for him emotionally. To be head-over-heels in love with a beautiful, sensitive star like Perkins, and not be able to tell anyone- not be able to fully live a life together. To have to go on a PR double-date with aspiring starlets so that you can go out with your lover.  To be told you are forbidden to see him again because it would ruin both of your careers. 

There is an emotionally intimate story here- but either the passage of time, intense privacy, or residual shame prevent Hunter from fully opening up about it. 

I applaud Hunter's strength to tell his story the way he wanted to. There is a difference between mere confession and embracing our rich gay history. It is times like now that we need LGBT stories not to be simply told but to be celebrated.

Movies Uber Alles

You know those weekends when the movies you watch just happen to go together? Well I had one of those weekends last weekend when I wound-up watching not one- but two German foreign films from the early '80's. So grab your currywurst and sauerkraut and read on!






Kamikaze '89 (1982)

Director/actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder is weird. If I hadn't known that after watching his uber gay sailor fetish flick Querelle (1982), Vulture.com told me Kamikaze '89 was the weirdest movie I could see. To top off this weird cinema-streudel, Fassbinder died a month before the film was released. So that's all I needed to know to hightail it to BAM and check out what all the schadenfreude was about.

Kamikaze opens on a shot of a corpulent and sweaty Polizeilleutnant Jansen (Fassbinder) playing some sort of racket game in the flashing lights of a policeman's disco club. It's 1989 folks, and disco is the music of the masses. That opening shot pretty much sums up the movie- an exhausted, cheap noir set in a future full of junky pieces of the past.

Wolf Gremm shot the film in distressed neighborhoods in Berlin and Dusseldorf reminiscent of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), used trashy retro costumes including leopard print suits and feather boas that look like they were bought at Screaming Mimi's, and utilized a soundtrack from Tangerine Dream that reminds one of Vangelis' score for Blade Runner (1982).

The slick media offices that should stand in stark contrast to the graffiti-covered slums come off more as abandoned office space that Gremm filled with strange props for the two days that he had access to it. In a sense the film does feel punk, in that you can imagine the cast and crew running through abandoned work complexes one step ahead of the Polizei. But it doesn't feel like there was a conscious choice in the styling of this future world.

The movie looks like it was shot on a ten mark budget with Jansen following strange leads through a world of beat-up Audis, grungy images of American Idol-esque laughing contests, and klunky "Steve Jobs would never approve this" technology. For a film that purports to show a future dominated by an all-powerful media company, the budget makes it look more like the world is run by NY 1. Everytime I saw Fassbinder sweat through a scene, I wished he had directed this film instead of just acting in it. Then there would have been a chance at an interesting, cohesive style.

What does intrigue me about the film is its place alongside other early Eighties films that were focused on futuristic societies. Films like Blade Runner, The Apple (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Mad Max 2 (1981) each had distinct views of the future- all dystopian. The early Eighties projected its fears about the Reagan Era onto its cinema, and it would appear that trend made it all the way to the art-film scene in Berlin.

Das Boot (1982)

So after watching Fassbinder run through an industrial German ghetto with a leopard-print gun, I came home to find the Netflix DVD of classic German language film, Das Boot waiting for me. The universe was telling me to go full-on Deutschland Eighties with my weekend.
Das Boot is the story of a German U-boat crew hunting Allied freighters in the North Atlantic. Lt. Werner (Herbet Gronemeyer) joins the crew of Captain-Lt. Lehmann-Willenbrock (Jurgen Prochnow- or Duke Leto Atreides to you Dune nerds) aboard Boat U-96 to document the lives of these seafaring heroes. The tense action/drama follows the crew as they attempt to survive the devastating naval battles with Allied destroyers.

Now I know what you're saying. "Who cares if they survived? They're Germans. In World War II. I hope all those Nazi sons-a-bitches made excellent fishfood." It's a tough sell. We don't typically want to watch movies about "the enemy." But like its excellent predecessor All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), this film explores the ugliness of war by showing what it did to the work-a-day German soldiers.

The film opens with the harrowing statistic that out of 40,000 German U-Boat sailors in WWII, 30,000 of them were killed. So right off the bat, we know not to get too attached to the characters we meet. Director Wolfgang Petersen (of The Neverending Story (1984), Air Force One (1997), and Troy (2004) fame) takes great care to separate his characters from the evil shade of Nazism.

In the opening scene the officers in their uniforms drive towards a French whorehouse to celebrate before shipping out. Their car is pissed-on by a line of drunken sailors. Once inside the aforementioned Katze-house, a revered, but dead drunk Captain raises a glass, then roasts Herr Hitler, mocking this apprentice painter's naval genius.

From this scene on, there are very few "uniforms" and next to no symbols of the Nazi party. The uniform for the sailors is flannel and pull-overs, or stripped to their undershirts. The men appear less like evil Nazis, and more like working-class soldiers- going where and doing what they're told.

We also don't see their adversaries, the Allies, except through the lens of binoculars, or as dark shadows cruising over their sub. We are immersed in the world of this submarine. And in this world there are no good guys or bad guys- just a team of men fighting to survive.

The world of the submarine is brilliantly conceived with camera movement that smoothly shoots through the ship like a bullet through a gun muzzle- squeezing past crowded men, equipment, and hanging meats that take up every available piece of space.

The shots are close, with the men's faces  filling the frame- sweating, confident, terrified, joyous, broken. The claustrophobic inside of U-96 becomes our world and we don't care whether these men are the enemy. Their struggle is our struggle. And their tragedies affect us. Das Boot uses cinematic space to envelope us in the world of the "other" and contemplate the filth and despair of war.

Das Boot was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Director. Not sure why one of those nods wasn't for Best Foreign Film, but since I've never heard of the other four nominees, it's hard to say what Oscar was smoking that year. The director's cut that is available is three-and-a-half hours long, but don't be afraid of the length. The time swims by.

Auf wiedersehen for now, faithful readers!

Big Screen in the Sky- Peter Shaffer

I often complain that movies these days are all based on comic books. Whatever happened to the good old days when movies were based on hit stage plays? Sadly, one of the great play/screenwriters from that era has passed. Peter Shaffer wrote both the plays and screenplays for Equus (1977) and Amadeus (1984). Equus was notorious for its psychological examination of a young man who blinds horses, bringing up all sorts of repressed sexuality issues for the late Seventies. Amadeus dared to turn classical music god Mozart into a gifted but spoiled manchild who drank, whored, and made fart sounds while still composing some of the best known music of any era. Both scripts skillfully played against what was expected, and he was Oscar-nominated for both, winning the statuette for Amadeus.

Grazi, Mr. Shaffer.

Top 5 Marilyn Monroe Movies

I find it hard to be objective about Marilyn Monroe. In the mid- '80's when I was an impressionable teengayger, the Marilyn re-resurgence was in full swing. Madonna hommaged/ripped-off "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in her "Material Girl" video. The sensationalist best-seller Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe was published, asserting that Marilyn was murdered due to her romantic entanglements with the Kennedys.

Marilyn's face and figure appeared on everything from posters to coffee mugs at Spencer's Gifts. I was swept up in this heady '50's nostalgia wave and could not get enough of the world's most famous blonde. I rented her movies on VHS and was captivated. Soon my bedroom resembled a Marilyn shrine, that face gazing at me from every conceivable surface on my walls.

Before Marilyn, the only classic movies I watched were Disney cartoons or kitschy old horror movies that showed late Saturday nights on Creature Feature with Crenatia Mortem on  KSHB TV out of Kansas City. So in a way, Marilyn was my classic film gateway drug. I started watching for her unique charisma and film image, but then reveled in the aesthetics, style, and writing of older movies- ultimately falling in love with them as well.

Marilyn introduced me to Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Thelma Ritter. From there, the endless world of classic movies was open to me.
I will always be grateful to Marilyn for leading me into that very special world.

On what would have been her 90th birthday, here are my Top 5 Marilyn Movies:



Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) 

It's apropos that the first Marilyn film I saw was the one that made Marilyn a star. Howard Hawks directed this classic musical about a couple of showgirls who know how to turn heads to make ends meet. Marilyn is Lorelei Lee the diamond-digger with a heart of a gold. Lorelei loves millionaire Gus Edmonds, Jr., but when Gus won't propose, Lorelei gets on a boat to Europe, knowing absence makes the heart grow fonder- and in this case jealous. It's not long before Lorelei has stirred-up shipboard trouble for her and gal-pal Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell in full cross-your-heart bra mode) by chasing a diamond tiara ("I just love finding new places to wear diamonds") and the pudgy Sir who owns it. Gentlemen was a big smash and made Marilyn a bankable star, cementing her "dumb blonde" character in popular culture.

Marilyn didn't play the first dumb blonde- Jean Harlow and Betty Grable created versions of the character before. But something about Marilyn's take was different. Marilyn added a sense of vulnerability and innocence, that made her feel more available to her audience. Her overt sexuality was not ambitious or manipulative, it was welcoming- almost natural so that it didn't come off as "dirty." Men believed this angel could fall in love with them, and women wanted to throw their arms around her and protect her from wolves in men's clothing. It was a hugely successful character- so successful that unfortunately, the public believed Marilyn wasn't acting- that she was the childlike sex object she portrayed. Marilyn fought the rest of her career to prove she wasn't Lorelei- a fight in many respects, she lost.

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

If Gentlemen made Marilyn a star, Seven Year Itch made her a supernova. Marilyn played The Girl Upstairs, an actress who is staying in the apartment above overly imaginative pulp novel editor, Richard Sherman (the goofy Tom Ewell). Richard's family is shipped-off to the country for the summer so he is left alone in the sweaty city, just him and his cinematic fantasies. When The Girl surprisingly accepts his clumsy invitation to have a drink in his air-conditioned apartment, poor Dickie realizes that after seven years of marriage, he has an itch he wants to scratch.

Marilyn's performance sparkles. Under the direction of Billy Wilder, she finds levels of sensitivity that make her so much more than a ditzy sex bomb. This girl feels sorry for the Creature from the Black Lagoon because "maybe he just craved a little affection"- and when Richard proclaims that he knows what girls like her want- she re-educates him. The scene is beautifully tender- and legend has it that she did it in the first take. Marilyn also has the opportunity to play against type in a couple of Richard's fantasies, showing that she was capable of much more than the giggle and the wiggle.

The subway grate scene is so much a part of our culture, it's hard to imagine what that image of Marilyn tittering as her skirt billows up around her must have been like when it first appeared on the screen. Well... the funny thing is that what was shown in the movie was never as much as what was shown on billboards and newsreel footage. That full shot of Monroe's body from the heels all the way to her cherubic face that we are so familiar with does not appear in the movie. But the image, shot on-location in front of thousands of cheering New Yorkers was aggressively sold before the movie came out to pack the houses- and it did. So even if it wasn't in the film itself, the idea of it alone was enough to give the audience an imagined voyeuristic thrill. And it gave us a good Snickers ad.

Bus Stop (1956)

As 1955 came to a close Marilyn was at a turning point in her career. She had just divorced baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, and was anxious to get away from the image that Hollywood seemed determined to keep her trapped in. Marilyn used her considerable box-office muscle to defy the studio and demanded a new contract with better pay, director approval, and her own production company. It is a testament to her star power that the studios acceded to each of those demands.

She also had become a star pupil of Lee and Paula Strasberg of Actor's Studio fame, so she was anxious to leave the dumb blonde behind her, and have the world see her as a serious actress. Joshua Logan's production of Bus Stop was tailor-made to introduce the new Marilyn.

Marilyn is Cherie, a chanteuse in a cruddy Phoenix bar. But Cherie has bigger dreams. Bo (the too-much Don Murray) is a cowboy who also has big dreams- of taking Cherie to his Montana farm where he will marry her and live home on the range ever after. Cherie would rather head for Hollywood and Vine, so a battle of wills (and lassos) begins.

The film suffers from the inaction that can plague stage-to-screen adaptations, and Don Murray makes your teeth grit when he's on the screen- except when he's doing topless sit-ups. Maybe his abs are the reason Murray was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

But watching Marilyn spread her acting wings is a joy. She inhabits Cherie, using her vulnerability and innocence to inform a character who is dreaming of something better- of a life where she's not taken advantage of and can be respected. Unfortunately, the film did not do well at the box office, and Marilyn was not nominated for the Oscar. Hollywood essentially rejected Marilyn's attempt at serious acting.

Some Like it Hot (1959)

Marilyn teamed with Wilder a second time, and the result is what many consider the greatest film comedy of the Golden Era. Marilyn is Sugar Kane, a ukulele player on a train to Florida, playing in an all-girls band to try and get away from men. So it's ironic that two of her new pals in Sweet Sue's Society Syncopators are men dressed up as women to escape the mob. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are superb as Joe and Jerry and as Josephine and Daphne, two guys on the run in heels. Lemmon in particular is so wonderful that you can't help but wish he would stay as Daphne the rest of his life. The writing and the direction on this film are so whipsmart that I defy any viewer not to fall in love with it. It is one of the great achievements of film- and in my opinion- has not and will not show its age.

By the time Marilyn made Some Like it Hot, she was in a very different position than she had been when she worked with Wilder on Seven Year Itch. Her dependence on pills had become a daily concern. Her ability to show up ready to work was horribly compromised- and not helping issues was the fact that Paula Strasberg coddled her star and openly challenged Wilder's authority on the set. Wilder wound-up embittered against his star and according to him, much of the cast and crew were in the same boat. Tony Curtis remarked in a screening room, "Kissing Marilyn is like kissing Hitler." The comment got back to Marilyn- and it only exacerbated her serious emotional issues.

But through all of the offscreen drama, Marilyn turns in a luminous performance. Gone is the dopey blonde. Sugar is a sad sex siren, wanting so much to be loved, and tired of being used up like an old tube of toothpaste- all squeezed out. Marilyn exposes the heart of this character instead of making it a joke. It is the finest comedy performance of her career.




Don't Bother to Knock (1952)

I left this movie for last- because even though it is the earliest film of the five, I think it shows a performance that Marilyn had always strived for- but because of her success, was prevented from doing later in her career.

Marilyn plays Nell, a young woman babysitting Bunny (Donna Corcoran) in a hotel room while Bunny's parents attend a banquet downstairs. When the man across the way (Richard Widmark) shows Nell some attention, it doesn't take much time for her to invite him over. Now what to do with Bunny...? It becomes apparent that Nell is missing some cards in her deck, and what starts out as a flirtation veers suddenly into unhinged infatuation, and full-blown psychosis.

The movie is a slight thriller with laconic work by Widmark and an early appearance by Anne Bancroft as a lounge singer. But again, the focus is on Marilyn- and this time her soft voice is not used as a seductive tool. It is the voice of a young woman who is mentally disturbed, unable to grasp reality, who doesn't see things the way they are.

It is utterly unlike anything Marilyn would portray later in her career- and I think it's safe to say that the only thing that kept Marilyn from being offered serious roles like Nell was the success she would find a year later playing comic roles like Lorelei Lee. Don't Bother is a tantalizing what-if movie that hints at the actress inside this unforgettable Hollywood icon.

The 2016 Bryant Park Summer Movie Festival Lineup!

One of the best annual events in New York City is the Bryant Park Summer Movie Festival held at dusk in the lovely park behind the New York Public Library.
Where else can you gather with thousands of New Yorkers and watch some of the best movies under the stars?
Sure the fights over blanket-space, the frequent sssssh-ing, and spilled Chardonnay can be annoying- but nothing tops one of those cinematic moments when the whole lawn stops and watches in awe.

Here are my thoughts on the films for this year's festival:

June 20- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Probably one of the seminal movies of the '80's. Expect a lawn-wide "Danke Schoen" serenade and a "Twist and Shout" riot.

June 27- East of Eden (1955)

Weird choice. The movie is very long- and loses some of the brilliance of the book. But it's James Dean. Who wouldn't want to lay on a blanket with him?

July 4- Top Gun (1986)

Another seminal movie of the '80's. Expect a lawn-wide "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" serenade. Frequent snickers at the gay subtext can also be expected.

July 11- The Palm Beach Story (1942)

One of my favorite comedies. Read more about it here. There's some overt racism that might get booed.

July 18- The Omen (1976)

Personally, I prefer Damien: Omen II (1978), but there's plenty of weird deaths in this first one to keep you laughing/cringing. Satanic nannies, devil-dogs, and fun with lightning rods. It's all for you...

July 25- Three Days of the Condor (1975)

The opening of this movie haunted my childhood. In an era where workplace shootings are commonplace, it's best to always be late for work.

August 1- Harvey (1950)

It's like the film curators have been reading my blog...

August 8- High Plains Drifter (1973)

I often get my Clint Eastwood '70's westerns confused- but whichever one this is, expect shooting, sneering, and those always wonderful Eastwood one-liners.

August 15- The Big Chill (1983)

I've never sat through this one. Maybe I need to be at Bryant Park this night...

August 22- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
This is my favorite Star Trek movie. It is sci-fi fun from stem to stern- and actually has the most poignant moments in the whole franchise. The crowd-backed cry of "Khaaaaaaannnnnnn!!!" will be heard for miles.



So grab a blanket and a picnic basket (with cleverly concealed wine) and head to Bryant Park this summer!