![]() ![]() ![]() Even director Allison Anders’ impassioned defense of Hudson’s acting chops quickly gets derailed by scuttlebutt about him hitting on “Giant” co-star James Dean. Instead, nearly all the footage Kijak pulls from Hudson’s filmography has been bent to comment on his sexual identity. The whopper - which underscores the kind of salacious gossip Kijak gravitates toward in the film - comes from Joe Carberry, who recalls, “Rock had a sizable dick, but he tried to put that thing up my ass, and I couldn’t do it.”Īt a time when the average American would be hard-pressed to name a single Rock Hudson film, is this what audiences really need to know about the star? Or might the filmmaker have spent a little more time on the biographical basics? Certainly, the wealth of seldom-seen photos, news clippings and artifacts suggests there exists enough raw material for a more well-rounded portrait of the star with the square jaw and dimpled chin. A secretly recorded phone call reveals Hudson to be a “size queen,” audibly excited by the prospect of meeting a tall, well-endowed stranger. “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” treats that compromise as a tragedy, leaning on the fact Hudson died of AIDS to underscore the injustice, but Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career - in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid - to the dimension of his sexuality.īuilt around interviews with a handful of former lovers and friends, Kijak spills private details from Hudson’s personal life, ranging from whom he shagged to how he arranged such trysts in the first place. ![]() That changed after his death, when the strapping, straight-acting (but occasionally sensitive) hunk from Winnetka became the poster boy for Hollywood homophobia: a closeted star who’d been forced to play a role his entire career that wasn’t true to himself, on screen and off. During his lifetime, Rock Hudson was a model for American masculinity. ![]()
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