Title: Coming Out
Under Fire |
Release Date: 1994 |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 72 Minutes |
|
Distributor and Production Company: Zeitgesit/ Fox Lorber /Deep Focus |
Director; Writer: Arthur Dong, based on the book Coming Out Under Fire by Alan Berube, published in 1990 by The Free Press. |
Producer: |
Cast: |
Technical: Black and white |
Relevance to doaskdotell site: gays in the military |
Review: Boy, how I love to watch black-and-white movies. They make
me feel I'm really at the movies! I saw this at a screening arranged by Servicemembers' Legal
Defense Network in 1996 and an auditorium owned by the Motion Picture
Academy, in The draft, it will be recalled, had been reinstituted in 1940, for the first time since World War I. But shortly after World War I there had been a few scattered purges of gays from the military (especially in the military) but the subject never attracted the attention that it would in modern times. Where
Are We? Our Trip Through Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, Warner Bros/Seven Arts, dir. John Huston, based on the novel by Carson McCullers, 110 min, R) sets up a love polygon at a southern Army base involving a repressed gay field grade Army officer Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando), his wife Lenora (Elizabeth Taylor), Lt. Col Morris Langdon (Brian Keith), his wife (Julie Harris), a stables Sergeant (Gordon Mitchell) and a Private Williams (Robert Forster). Eventually there are misinterpreted signals and body language involving Weldon’s urges, leading to tragedy. The film is in anamorphic Panavision, with very muted colors that make the film interesting to students of the use of film stock. For an overview of the technical issues of color manipulation go to http://www.duke.edu/web/freewater/stock.html or similar references. Richard Haines of New Wave Film distribution wrote to me
about this movie:
"Reflections of a Golden Eye" was a Technicolor dye transfer movie
with a strange de-saturated color. They increased the contrast during
printing for the effect. A similar method was used in "Moby
Dick" in the fifties proving that dye transfer did not necessarily mean
vibrant colors although that's what it's usually associated with |
Related reviews: American Beauty, Soldier’s Girl, Any Mother’s Son, Serving in Silence, Gays in the Military |
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