The most important thing about “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” is that, within the essential act of reclamation it provides for the star, it doesn’t just write off the Hollywood icon’s life as sad. That’s a remarkable thing for a documentary in which its last 40 minutes are as harrowing a depiction of AIDS in the ’80s there’s been in a film since “How to Survive a Plague.”
Certainly, it’s infuriating and upsetting on many levels: that Hudson wasn’t allowed to fly on a commercial airliner because of his diagnosis and had to rent an Air France Boeing 747 at the cost of $250,000 to return home to Los Angeles from Paris as it became clear his experimental treatment there had failed. And the revelation that his friend Nancy Reagan even urged her husband to deny him treatment at a military hospital is beyond enraging.
Stephen Kijak’s documentary does an illuminating job, however, of suggesting that Hudson lived, for the most part, a happy life. Being closeted to the general public did not mean that he was not out to a large group of people — he certainly expressed his sexuality, and with many partners, some of whom appear in Kijak’s film to share their memories of him.
Often in cinematic depictions, gay men have not been allowed to be sexual, and the frank descriptions of his liaisons with numerous men (during one segment, Hudson is heard setting up himself over the phone in his Grand Canyon-majestic voice conveying explicit detail) speak to the degree to which he really was liberated. Doris Day may not have known he was gay, but many, many others in his orbit did.
Kijak even goes so far as to imply that there have been few Hollywood celebrity deaths ever to have more meaning than Hudson’s, in the way it helped to normalize homosexuality and being HIV positive and spur action to improve the survival rate. To the homophobic public, if Rock Hudson, the ultimate example of movie god Americana, could be these things, so could anyone.
Where Kijak’s film falls short is in its consideration of Hudson as an actor. Allison Anders praises his performance in “Giant,” but there’s little consideration of what a precise, methodical performer he was. It’s a shame because the documentary would have been a natural place to do that, and it’s hard to imagine any other documentary on the horizon that would.
Even at the time of his greatest success in the late ’50s, Hudson’s acting gifts weren’t celebrated in the way they could have been. He was cool and reserved, inherently embracing the idea that navigating American life is all about the wearing and swapping out of masks.
He’s the actor who comes the closest to embodying the idea of Don Draper. What, I’m comparing him to Jon Hamm’s aggressively hetero “Mad Men” character? Yes, because that character was all about wearing masks, having invented his persona from the ground up, literally assuming someone else’s identity. There’s an element of self-invention that’s always essential to the idea of the midcentury American dream: You were simply who you said you were. Jay Gatsby was that on the page. Rock Hudson lived it.
Hudson was that in every sense. Not just because he was gay and projected an image of straightness, but in all the other ways his persona was manufactured. There’s a legend, possibly untrue, that he developed his mellifluous voice by screaming at the top of his lungs on a mountaintop while suffering from a head cold, breaking a vocal chord so that it artificially lowered his voice for the rest of his life. What a mad, mythic story. It’s not presented in the doc, again probably because it isn’t true, but it’s reflective of the unique place Hudson occupied between legend and reality.
In so many of his films, Hudson’s characters are navigating reality by projecting their own image of reality. There’s as much role-swapping, misdirection, and mistaken identities in “Pillow Talk” or “Lover Come Back” as in a Shakespeare play. “Magnificent Obsession” is all about him becoming a better person by being increasingly inauthentic; his authentic self is an asshole. His mysterious tree farmer in “All That Heaven Allows,” not at all an unambiguously noble hunk, seems committed to exchanging one cage for Jane Wyman’s character for another.
Issues of authenticity are at the core of Hudson’s roles in a way that speaks deeply to the American character. But he was cool and reserved where James Dean and Marlon Brando and Paul Newman burned hot. A twinkle in his eye and a wry smile as Brad Allen in “Pillow Talk” convey an internal life you have to work a bit to access — you come to him, not him to you, as he’s always going to withhold himself a bit. The Method guys? They’re all on the surface, their inner lives made external through eruptions of emotion. One of these styles of acting was thought to be “acting,” the other merely stardom.
That narrative has remained largely unchanged since the ’50s. Kijak’s film suggests that the flirtations with homosexuality in “Pillow Talk” and “Lover Come Back” was producer Ross Hunter making fun of Hudson being closeted (though the incessant use of clips from his movies to imply gay undertones, which most audiences wouldn’t have detected at the time, seems almost like Kijak doing the same). But look at Hudson’s comic timing in those movies. Look at the very self-aware (and contemporary) way he projects toxic masculinity in those films. It’s performance and critique at the same time. Dean and Brando delivered rawness; Hudson delivered irony.
For me, the ultimate example of an actor’s greatness is when he or she can elevate an otherwise bad movie. Look no further than Hudson in “The Mirror Crack’d,” a film entirely omitted from the documentary. This Agatha Christie adaptation is bad. Even Angela Lansbury (as Miss Marple) is bad in it, which almost never happened. Elizabeth Taylor turns in a forgettable performance. But… Hudson is electrifying. Yes, once again he’s a man with a secret. And he almost single-handedly elevates that movie to something grand and tragic, acting circles around his dear friend Taylor. He was a serious artist capable of delivering serious art even when serious art was very much not expected.
That Hudson is missing from “All That Heaven Allowed.” I wish it had been there. Luckily, Hudson’s films are still there to be discovered and enjoyed anew. Watch them for what’s there, not what you think is there.
