Sunset Boulevard is a queer film not because of representation but because of sensibility, structure, and performance style — the same way All About Eve, Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life, and The Red Shoes are queer. Norma Desmond is the archetype of queer camp: her theatrical excess, her self-mythologizing, her diva worship and her performance as identity.
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Bette Davis in her greatest role with some of the best lines ever written. Both Addison and Eve are gay and he blackmails her.
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“Hype the New Fish”. Innocent Eleanor Parker spends time in a women’s prison. With Hope Emerson and Agnes Moorehead.
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Lauren Bacall is Kirk Douglas’ young man with a horn’s society wife who is also a closeted lesbian. Bacall is very good in a risque role.
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Bogart is superb, but it is Gloria Grahame who is the revelation – this is widely considered to be the finest performance of her career and she is sensational. As Laurel, she brings a weary, deeply nuanced vulnerability that perfectly balances Bogart’s aggressive volatility.
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The best play to film adaptation of all-time, with two of the greatest performances: Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski.
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Hitchcock reverses himself here, having gay actor Farley Granger play the straight character and straight actor Robert Walker play the gay character.
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It’s Howard Hawks again, this time adapting the Jule Stein/Leo Robin Broadway smash “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. With Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.
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The Best Queer Song in the History of Cinema: Day’s spectacular delivery of the Sammy Fain-Paul Francis Webster masterpiece “Secret Love.”
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The buildup to Monroe’s superstardom started here. The magnificent widescreen technicolor cinematography is by Joseph MacDonald.
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The film blends neorealist observation with a nostalgic tone, supported by a lush Nino Rota score. Like Fellini’s later autobiographical work, it captures a vivid sense of time and place.
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Stewart, Kelly, and Ritter are all magnificent. Kelly, looking radiant, gets to deliver one of the Big Screen’s all-time sexy lines.
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A Western with two female leads is that rarest of cinematic jewels and, under Nicholas Ray’s direction, both Crawford and McCambridge play to the gallery.
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Wood, Dean and Mineo form a nuclear family under the shadow of Griffith Park Observatory in Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece “Rebel Without a Cause.
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“The Big Combo” features a gay couple (played by Earl Holliman and Lee Van Cleef) whose chosen profession also adds to their fascination and their sexiness.
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By late 1956, it had become the highest-grossing French film released in the United States. It is also one of the most successful queer films of all time since, although queer coded, something is clearly going on between Christina and Nicole!
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.”Written on the Wind”: The film’s central tenet is that Kyle (Robert Stack) and his ruthless sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone) lust after the same man.
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Nancy Kelly is ON 100% of the time straddling the twin minefields of camp and drama yet managing to accomplish both simultaneously.
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“Tea and Sympathy” has aged well. What could not be said under the Hayes code lends it beauty and delicacy, especially in Deborah’s sublime performance.
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“Funny Face“, the 1957 musical romantic comedy directed by Stanley Donen, boasts Audrey Hepburn’s most charming screen performance.
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Unlike their American counterparts, French critics, including Godard and Truffaut, adored Jean Seberg in “Bonjour Tristesse.”
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Gazzara is electrifying in the lead, exuding a raw, unsettling sensuality. It remains one of the great curiosities of his career that only in his very next film, Anatomy of a Murder (1959), did he manage to recapture this level of charisma.
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“Vertigo” is anchored by the unforgettable performances of Stewart and Novak, Hitchcock’s masterful direction and Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score.
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Yes, that is Mercedes McCambridge as an unnamed lesbian gang leader getting her kicks while watching Janet Leigh getting roughed up in “A Touch of Evil.”
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Director Morton DaCosta directs “Auntie Mame” as if he were still in the theatre. He did better on his penultimate visit to Hollywood (“The Music Man”).
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Richard Brooks’ respectable adaptation of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opens with Paul Newman mourning the suicide of his best friend (read Lover), Skipper.
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The movie is risible, its few pleasures come from Hepburn’s regal (but very nasty) mother who will do anything to protect her son’s memory.
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Some Like It Hot was only the third major studio film (after Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue in 1953 and The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955) to be released without the Hays Office seal. Wilder assumed it didn’t stand a chance, and he was correct. The PCA rejected it. Instead, released by United Artists, outside of the studio system, it became an instant smash—and helped usher in the end of the Production Code.
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Imitation of Life is a queer film not because of representation but because of sensibility, structure, and performance style — the same way All About Eve, Mildred Pierce, Sunset Boulevard and The Red Shoes are queer. Douglas Sirk’s final Hollywood film is a melodrama about race, performance, motherhood, and the American dream, told through two intertwined lives: Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a white actress chasing Broadway fame, and Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a Black domestic worker who becomes Lora’s housekeeper and emotional anchor.
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Hudson’s characters has a gay alter ego named “Rex” and supporting actors Tony Randall and Nick Allen are constantly brushing off the gay ceiling.
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