Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness

This revelatory study from Koresky (Films of Endearment), editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, examines how mid-century Hollywood films explored queer themes under the Motion Picture Production Code, which only allowed movies to “imply or metaphorically evoke the existence of lesbian and gay life.” Koresky brackets the book by comparing director William Wyler’s two adaptations of the 1934 play The Children’s Hour, about two female teachers accused of having an affair. Despite Wyler’s 1935 version substituting the play’s lesbian protagonists with a heterosexual love triangle, Koresky argues it maintained a distinctly queer “expression of repressed desire.” He contends that the more faithful 1961 adaptation rendered its queer protagonists with sympathy but propagated the problematic “tragic lesbian” trope by ending with a suicide. Filling in the decades in between, Koresky suggests that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, about two queer-coded murderers hiding a body in their living room trunk, can be read as an allegory for life in the closet even as it veers into “retrograde gay villainy,” and that Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer reflects screenwriter Tennessee Williams’s “fraught relationship” to his own homosexuality. Koresky wears his erudition lightly, teasing out the mixed messages of code-era films with aplomb. It’s a sterling work of film criticism. (June)