Documentary casts the movie star as a painful figure who inspired a new dialogue about Aids, but doesn’t do much to examine his Republican politics
he title of this efficient documentary, patching together archive footage with off-camera interview material, is naturally taken from the 1955 romantic drama All That Heaven Allows, directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Rock Hudson opposite Jane Wyman; it is a movie – and a genre – long since rescued from critical condescension.
How very strange Hudson’s career seems now. The open secret of his sexuality existed as an in-crowd joke in the tabloid-gossip magazines, but until the 1980s it was perfectly possible for this to be sealed off from his public persona where it was not questioned. His ex-wife Phyllis Gates , whose brief marriage to Hudson was engineered as a publicity move, claimed that she was unaware of the truth, but she herself may have been a lesbian who found the arrangement congenial.
Stephen Kijak’s film rightly recontextualises Hudson’s life in the world of gay men in Hollywood, who found that wealth, connections, a highly evolved studio PR machine and habits of discretion meant that they could be more or less insulated from homophobic prying. Kijak speaks to Hudson’s friends and lovers, including Armistead Maupin, and even seems to have access to a very frank, privately recorded audiotape interview with Hudson from 1983.
All That Heaven Allowed wants to make the point of Rock Hudson’s public life to be a kind of sacrificial martyrdom: the first celebrity to come out, or at any rate consent to be outed, as a gay man with Aids. With the support of people like Elizabeth Taylor, Hudson effectively kickstarted a new openness which meant that Aids could be properly addressed in the Reaganite 1980s.