Richard Day | Straight-Jacket / 2004

reel change

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Day (screenplay, based on the play by Day, and director) Straight-Jacket / 2004

 

The film, Straight-Jacket, based on Richard Day’s play of the same name, is bound to cause problems for many LGBTQ filmgoers or even straight ones for that matter, given its shift from a cartoon-satire of a Rock Hudson-like figure of the 1950s to a more serious reaction to the homophobia of the same period stapled to the common accusations of Communist conspiracy. The work begins as a purposely trite comedy, but as the film begins to explores its own tropes it finds its real purpose, just as does its central character, through a dramatic renunciation of those who, like Hudson, played along with the Hollywood hysteria of homosexuality, devoting their lives to their careers over issues of identity and self-respect. From treating these issues merely as jokes, the movie turns in on its comic maneuvers, becoming a fairly harsh statement about the very attitudes that entertained its own audience for the first half.

  

     Audiences of the day must surely have found it difficult to chuckle along with the film’s early winking only to slapped in the face for their conspiratorial attitudes at film’s end. But, of course, that strange early confusion of its aims is what precisely what makes this film so very interesting to viewers as eccentric as I am.

      As I’ve surely made clear in the numerous essays that preceded this one, I like difficult and sometimes even unlovable movies. I enjoy solving the puzzles and exploring the issues that went into their creation. And I enjoy it when a writer and director admit their own ambivalence or even a change in perspective in the process of the creative act.

      Presumably, the play showed the same tensions, but they certainly could not have been expressed as fully as they have in film, which uses cinematic artifice to establish the caricature of the popular and good looking actor, Guy Stone (Matt Letscher) who blithefully fucks his way through every cute available Los Angeles boy in sight, from waiters to caterers, from bartenders to those who attend the bars, from Hollywood poster boys to the boys who hold up posters to point tourists to Hollywood itself—the latter with whom, a young man named Mike (Chad Linsey), Guy wakes in the first scene in bed. If Mike and others can be believed Guy offers his one-time partners the best sex of their lives.

   

     But then everything and everyone in this film, at least in this part of the film—from its depiction of a Hollywood studio director, Saul (Victor Raider-Weslert), his secretary Sally (Carrie Preston), and Guy’s neurotic fellow-actor Freddie (Jack Plotnick) to Guy’s repressed lesbian agent Jerry (Veronica Cartwright)—is as exaggerated as the figures out of the next decade’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. The theatrical sets and the creation of Guy’s moderne mansion through the manipulation of CAD (Computer-Aided-Design) software all contribute to the notion that the film we are watching is a sort of live-animated cartoon parallels the realities created by the “real” Hollywood which manufactures its own versions of “real” actors. With a Dudley-Do-Right chin and ego that makes Narcissus seem like a shrinking fairy, Chad struts through his day, his roles, and his night-time gay bars like a creature impervious to any human harm. Even when, in a fit of jealousy for Guy’s being cast for the role of Ben-Hur, Freddie, camera-in-hand, tracks him down and calls the police to raid the place, the newspaper snapshot is easily fixed by a call to Saul or Jerry.

      This time, however, they fix him up as well, demanding for his own self-protection that he marry Saul’s secretary Sally, singularly devoted to Guy’s career and Screen-Idol physique photos. Hollywood has a long history of marrying gay men off to what the industry insiders called “beards,” heterosexual partners which gave the public the illusion they were desperately in love with the opposite gender and, most importantly, were not homosexuals.

      But, in this case—as perhaps in the real incident in which Hudson was married off to the secretary, Phyllis Gates, of his actual agent Henry Willson (a man who collected more gay boys in his stable than any other agent, among them Tab Hunter, Richard Wagner, Rory Calhoun, and Guy Madison)—no one bothers to tell Sally the truth until it’s too late. But then it’s hard to feel sorry for a woman, as even Guy later describes her, who has created her own version of the man she imagines him to be.

       But if Sally before marriage appears to be a typical brainless blonde without any ambitions, she quickly becomes a dominating lover, demanding Guy give her the woman’s prerogative not only to redecorate his stunningly appointed home—tossing out what appears to be a Brancusi for a red elephant and porcelain puppies and a Le Corbusier couch for a typical Midwestern plastic-covered sofa—but to reorganize his life as well, feeding him starch-based vegetables and meat-heavy dinners based on her mother’s maxim that a fat husband never strays far from the dinner table, and planting red lipstick imprints upon him as he sleeps. 

     By the time he lays down the rules that they have separate bedrooms and will make no babies between them, he already feels as if his body, let alone his lifestyle, has been straight-jacketed and he is locked up without escape.

      But then, as if by a miracle granted by some fairy queen, he meets a beautiful young male writer, Rick Foster (Adam Greer), author of a passionate political book his film is presently turning into trashy entertainment. The sweet liberal mailman wants nothing whatsoever to do with Hollywood, let alone with Guy Stone. So principled and emphatic is the young Rick that Guy suspects that he may not really be gay. But, of course, used to having their way about everything, Saul, Jerry, and Guy hire the new beauty away from his job as a mailman to help take out the Communist references in the script so that his movie can be shot without the studio being closed down by Washington, D.C. politicos devoted to tearing the Commies out of the Hollywood Hills. Guy volunteers, as one might expect, to help the young man with every line of the script.

     As expected, Rick cannot resist Guy’s looks nor his wiles. But this time there is an important difference. Guy falls madly in love with him and from that very moment the movie shifts hands as it were, from the right hand of ridiculousness to the left hand of learnéd sincerity. Bit by bit Rick helps Guy realize that every time he gives into the strictures demanded by his sexual silence he and all others lose their abilities to make any change in the society at large. And through a series of somewhat predictable episodes, Guy is drawn out of his dependence upon the insincerity of the roles he is forced to pay, on and off the screen, to further allow his natural desires and given intelligence to define his life.

     That push and pull, pummels the movie, moving it from a cartoon into a romance—with Guy’s butler, Victor (brilliantly performed by Michael Emerson), warning him that if he does not go after Rick he will regret it rest of his life. But his comments perhaps serve only as  the middle ground between what follows: a significant cinematic lecture about what might have happened to Hollywood and the cultural angst of the 1950s had more actors followed the example of the model gay actor of the 1920s, William Haines, who in 1933 stood up against Louis B. Mayer and the entire Hollywood system by refusing a lavender marriage and quitting Hollywood instead of abandoning his lover Jimmie Shields. Haines survived, ironically, given the major home reconstruction Sally has inflicted upon Guy, by becoming a Hollywood interior decorator to the stars.

 

    Guy is finally outed by his own wife, Sally, who during a dinner party wanders into his sacred lair only to discover her hubby and Rick Foster making love. The headlines post his future across the LA skies. Yet we have to wonder whether or not Guy psychologically arranged for his own downfall, knowing that with people wandering throughout the house, doors are likely—as in all such farces—to be opened unexpectedly.

     We all know the decisions Hudson made, to continue as a movie icon until he died of the results of his hidden sexual affairs, perhaps infecting many others in the process. But here Guy—although sorely tempted, by an arrangement made by his agent Jerry, to confess that it was all a hoax to capture a real homo Commie, his own lover Rick—speaks out in a mock trial the way a few other Hollywood actors, directors, and screenwriters had earlier against their interrogations by McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

      Even the previously empty-brained Sally turns in a remarkable performance in standing up for the man who betrayed her. She’s already proven her talents on the mahogany organ she has brought for him. And she, indeed, may be hired on by the studio as a regular, even if Guy, in the end, will never play Ben-Hur (the role, reportedly, Hudson turned down, perhaps for reasons not so very different from what this movie portrays), nor ever work in Hollywood again.

  

     Guy and Rick, when we last peek in upon them, are co-writing a play they plan for a small Los Angeles theater—where in fact thousands of young actors dream out their would-be Hollywood careers—and Rick has returned to delivering the mail, having already delivered up his male into humanity.

      In the end, Straight-Jacket is an impossible movie for both writer and director Richard Day and for its audience in its attempts, metaphorically speaking, to change horses mid-stream—or perhaps, to use a more apt metaphor, to change reels at the very moment when its audience had been convinced of its insincerity, the second reel almost attempting to apologize for the first. This film is an achievement only for those who recognize that it has been willing to declare itself as an impossible failure first.

 

Los Angeles, April 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).