Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Exuberant, eye-opening movie that serves up a dazzling hundred-year history of the role of gay men and lesbians have had on the silver screen. Film contains fabulous footage from 120 films showing the changing face of cinema sexuality, from cruel stereotypes to covert love to the activist triumphs of the 1990s.
The Celluloid Closet is a landmark documentary that carved out genuinely new territory in film criticism and LGBT cultural history. Its novelty is high — it was the first major, comprehensive survey of queer representation in Hollywood cinema, and its thesis was revelatory at the time. The compilation of 120 films with incisive commentary from an impressive roster of interviewees (Gore Vidal, Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Tony Curtis) gives the 'acting' dimension real substance, even in a doc context. The narrative arc — from silhouetted innuendo through the Hays Code repression to 1990s visibility — is coherent and engaging, earning a solid plot score. Cinematography is functional documentary-era work; the archival footage is the visual draw, not original camerawork. The ending feels slightly anticlimactic given the richness of what precedes it, settling for cautious optimism rather than a bold conclusion.