Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed
Documentary directed by Stephen Kijak
Featuring Rock Hudson, Joe Carberry, Tim Turner
Available on Prime from October 25

Roy Harold Scherer Jr. went from obscurity in his home state of Illinois via a World War II stint in the US Navy to ascending to Hollywood stardom under the name of Rock Hudson. Along the way he learned to bury the truth of his homosexuality until his last wretched months during which he died of AIDS in 1985.

As explained early in this documentary, Hudson was possibly the last of the Hollywood studio stars whose entire private life was a manufactured artifact honed by publicists.

Early in his career, Hudson was schooled in how to appear macho. Reaching the screen post-WWII he was part of a redefinition of US masculinity.

As depicted here, early cinematic masculinities, such as that of Rudolph Valentino were quite effeminate. Following the War, the tough guy became all. It is not mentioned here, but that image fed into US Cold War imagery of the clean-living USA confronting Communism.

Hudson’s carefully posed publicity shots showed him shirtless, muscular and chisel-jawed. His image was curated as every woman’s heart-throb – except he had no sexual interest in women. He was content to live the lie as long as he was paid the big bucks and he could host orgies in his hillside mansion.

From the beginning Hudson played his cards right to get ahead. An early Hollywood lover who introduced him to the studio great and powerful was promptly dropped by Hudson once his career was launched.

A lot of space in the film is given to clips from innumerable Hudson movies where he played characters who were challenged by females about covering up their true selves. In fact, he made a series of successful comedies with Doris Day in which the gag was Hudson’s straight male character having to pretend to be gay in order to get close enough to Doris Day’s character to seduce her.

So, the in-real-life gay Hudson had to stick his little finger out while holding a cup of tea to fake being gay, to the delight of audiences who thought he was caricaturing his straight image.

To the present-day audience it appears that the script writers were playing a game with Hudson and the audience, which is not investigated by the documentary makers.

Gore Vidal, who was gay and worked as a Hollywood script writer wrote a scene for Victor Mature in the film Quo Vadis in which Mature’s character declared his love for another man. Vidal did it as a joke because Mature was notorious for both his homophobia and his stupidity.

Also missing from the documentary is any political explanation of why Hollywood was culturally cleansed by the Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hayes Code.

Pre-Code films, such as Gold Diggers of 1933 were quite erotically frank, featuring songs such as Petting in the Park and sexual encounters for which women might, or might not choose to demand payment. It also depicted the poverty of returned WWI veterans, taking a side in the class struggle the year after the Hunger March on Washington was violently dispersed by the Army.

Other films had, as historian Gregory Black puts it, “sexually titillating themes and…stories that seemed to glorify gangsters and social deviants.”

The Catholic Church led the charge to stop all this, condemning “Hebrew” studio chiefs and producers. The Hayes code censoriously dominated American cinema from 1934 to 1968. As film historian Robert Sklar has explained, the Code essentially “cut the movies off from many of the most important moral and social themes of the contemporary world.”

This was done to prevent working class audiences from seeing depictions of working-class revolt, whether in the form of personal sexual experimentation, social banditry or organised labour movement struggle.

Rock Hudson’s closet was built by the Hayes Code

Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed has many interviews with Hudson’s sexual partners, who reveal that everybody in Hollywood knew Hudson’s sexual secret. However, it came as a great shock to mainstream America in 1985 when Hudson came out publicly and revealed that he was dying of AIDS.

In the America of Ronald Regan’s presidency AIDS was not being addressed but the public sympathy for Rock Hudson forced a cultural breakthrough and a change of policy. Hudson should be honoured for achieving that.

The irony of Hudson’s relationship with Ronald and Nancy Regan was that Hudson was a lifelong Republican. This again is not adequately examined in the documentary.

Was Hudson’s conservatism genuine or part of the closet in which he lived his life until the constrictions proved too tight and he finally broke out?

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Documentary Trailer:

Examples of pre-Hayes Code Hollywood films:

“Remember My Forgotten Man” in “Gold diggers of 1933”