REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (John Huston, 1967) – Things heat up on a military base when Marlon Brando represses his desire for "bare-backed and bare-assed" horse-riding Robert Forster by romanticizing the orderly military “life of men among men,” leading inexorably to domestic disaster with wife Elizabeth Taylor (With the second adaptation of McCullers on the list, auteur John Huston, as always, makes movies for grown-ups) THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) – A Rashomon of cruising that charts the connection between sex, commerce, and illicit subculture through the interrogation flashbacks of various hetero-male characters' private agons orbiting the murder of a female prostitute, culminating in the film’s slumming gay John alone rising above shame to civic duty and compassionate action (Bertolucci’s debut gives poetic, sensual-cinematic-heft to Pasolini’s devastating insights) Mankiewicz, 1959) – Tennessee Williams definitively reveals the exploitative decadence-"Tired of the dark ones, famished for the blond ones"-of Wildean gay culture through the unraveling of a repressed memory/mystery of a gay aesthete's bizarre death (As seen through a glass sympathetically by Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift) THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) – Three outsiders in the South, two queer white kids and a Black housekeeper, bear the social burdens of individuality and responsibility, together and-then apart (Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde create definitive American gay Myths, bringing Carson McCullers to life) MICHAEL (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924) – An older man and master artist's desire for the ideal of masculine beauty inspires art born of sacrifice, which is to say, of Love, in the midst of a definitively rendered art-world demimonde teeming with heterosexual infidelity (A Master spiritual filmmaker goes beyond his era’s fashionable politics-and ours)
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PRIDE '19: THE 19 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
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In honor of #Stonewall50, it’s time to protest the insidious, police-state-like hegemony of both contemporary Hollywood (hype) and Vito Russo/ The Celluloid Closet (pseudo-academia) with a personal chronology: