Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall

Barrios, Richard. "Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall", Routledge, 2005. How We Were Seen Amos Lassen The way gays and lesbians have been depicted on the screen from the 1920's through the 1970's. Barrios looks at hundreds of examples beginning in 1912 with the little-known "Algie, the Miner" to "The Boys in the Band", the iconic movie. What we learn here is that through the 70's that the way that Hollywood has depicted us depended on what Hollywood wanted us to see. Barrios sharply gives the reader a wall documented look at the screen images of homosexuality in the 20th century. The author builds on Vito Russo's "The Celluloid Closet" which was the most complete work until his book and it allows us to better understand the cultural climate of America. Barrios's research led him to studio records, scripts, drafts, censor notes, cut scenes, recollections of viewers and film reviews. He then gives us a full picture of how we were portrayed on the silver screen. He further shows that even though progress has been made, we still have a long way to go. Numerous films are examined and we see their relationship to the political establishment and popular culture. The text is accompanied with over fifty photographs and looks at individual stars. It is extremely readable and a valuable addition to our literature.

This book deserves five stars just for its research alone, but it has to be said that Barrios grows steadily sourer as the present era starts riding in, like the tide. He doesn't like any show made after 1958 or so, and if you ask me, one of Doris Day's furry best friends must have escaped her palatial pet shelter in Carmel, and bitten Richard Barrios on theass, for there's no other explanation for his vitriol against the Doris Day Rock Hudson movies of the early 60s. Okay, okay, they were inane, but they did not cause cancer! And sometimes he seems unable to explain the results of his research, but unwilling to admit it, so he just blathers on covering his tracks. Maybe spends too much time following market trends (and yet this proved such a fruitful field in his previous book, A SONG IN THE DARK, about the early movie musicals of the late 20s and early 30s)? No one can really explain why so many of the big studio films of the CHILDRENS HOUR/ADVISE AND CONSENT period tanked at the box office, but Barrios just keeps doggedly analyzing and re-analyzing what went wrong. In every other respect, the book is unforgettably brilliant and, even when I disagree with his conclusions about this or that film, I respect his opinion and I admire the way he writes it up. (Okay, except for Hitchcock's ROPE, much more sympathetic a film than he gives it credit for.) Barrios' style, or banter, is generally persuasive and amusing, and he can summarize the plot of a bad film faster than an old fashioned telegram by Gertrude Stein. And when it comes time for an aria, he really knows how to let go--such as his extended tribute to the "Naked Moon" scene in Cecil B. De Mille's THE SIGN OF THE CROSS. Book is punctuated by individual star portraits in prose, of Franklin Pangborn, Cecil Cunningham, Clifton Webb, and most hilariously, Bugs Bunny, whose manic androgyny and brattiness finally get their due here. He has gone through the files of the Breen office, the Hays office, every memo Geoffrey Shurlock ever wrote, and he has pored through multiple drafts of studio screenplays to find out how same-sex encodement was pre-censored by officious agencies. They still do this, only nowadays they call it "market research," and Barrios points out how it's the same old story watching Russell Crowe in A BEAUTIFUL MIND, the strands of gay sexuality in the original material as calculatedly snipped out as they were in NIGHT AND DAY or WORDS AND MUSIC. Can't wait to see what Mr. Barrios writes next.

This literate, well written and fascinating history of the subtle and not so subtle portrayals of the gay and lesbian sensibility in Hollywood films, is comprehensive and endlessly informative and perceptive. Anyone with the slightest interest in film subtext and the wryly subversive nature which filmmakers can exhibit in their work (often under the radar of the studio brass) will find Richard Barrios a terrfic guide thorough the minefield of how Hollywood made pictures. From Clifton Webb to Marlene Dietrich, from antiques like "The Broadway Melody" to instant relics like "The Boys in the Band," the examples offered will stimulate the interest to reinvestigate many old film titles, and subsequently enrich the experience of watching them with a new perspective.

For those interested in cinematic homosexuality, this book is simply a must-have! Composed with a liberal touch of arch lingua franca, the volume is toned and textured with as many gossipy asides, innuendos, and double entendres as the films discussed. The subject is dealt a much lighter hand than Vito Russo allotted its predecessor, The Celluloid Closet. Richard Barrios is utterly tickled pink at his discoveries, where Russo often seems to chafe. Even those familiar with the torturous course of outre theater will detect tidbits previously unperceived, and those not in-the-know will probably be astonished at pre-Production Code permissiveness regarding the depiction of fey/butch images. More remarkable is the under-the-radar, Code-busting bomblettes that went unsensed by the censors--and were subsequently reviled (or reveled in) by trade reviewers. A tad too much quill is sharpened criticizing fluffy, Day-class sixties comedies, when such goose down is found in every film era. (At least the author can be commended for not reading too much into Calamity Jane--or any other feature, for that matter. After all, a lesbian cult movie does not a lesbian movie make!) Barrios could also have refrained from the occasional canard regarding sexual orientation origins and Biblical history. Overall, though, this substantial book sticks solidly to the subject, examining numerous films (including shorts and cartoons) and their interrelationship with the political establishment and popular culture. Included are over 50 crisp photos and several vignette-bios. The prose has a fabulous flow that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read and should hold the attention of anyone interested in the screen/society circle.