The Silver Screen / Color Me Lavender

Mark Rappaport has a reputation to defend in making intelligent tongue-in-cheek films in a personal documentary style. In his latest film he also shines his familiar critical - and gay - light on the film heritage especially from Hollywood from the thirties to the sixties. It turns out to be as easy as pie to read gay significance into films that are very heterosexually oriented, if only because of (self-)censorship in the American film industry. Several genres, themes, characters and actors are also studied because they lend themselves to an alternative view. For instance there is the well-groomed, witty rather affected individual who regularly plays a bit part in films with stars such as Claudette Colbert or Fred Astaire. Actors like Bob Hope (in the Road to films), Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis were also able to express themselves in a very sexually ambiguous way - as a joke of course (dressed up in drag) - in the comedies of the forties and fifties. After the Second World War there was quite a play on the he-man stereotype. Striking in this entertaining cross-section of 'one' film history is how narrator Dan Butler (best known in Holland as 'Bulldog' in the TV comedy Fraser) links together, verbally and visually, the many fragments shown.