in 1984-85, who says that the news of Hudson’s diagnosis “made an incredible difference in our ability to raise money. He features a man who worked for AIDS Project L.A. But Kijak certainly tried to make Hudson the hero is wasn’t. If there’s a hero in “All That Heaven Allowed,” it’s Elizabeth Taylor, who became the driving force behind and public face of fundraising to battle AIDS. Hudson’s friend/aide wrote in his diary that the admission of the AIDS diagnosis and implied admission of his homosexuality was the “orchestrated ruination of Rock Hudson’s life.” That heinous behavior doesn’t make it into the documentary, but there’s time for Evans to say, “I know he was protecting me” during the kissing scene? One former lover won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Hudson’s estate, arguing that the movie star lied to him about his diagnosis and continued to have sex with him for months. As a matter of fact, there’s an audio clip of Evans saying that people refused to work with her on the set of “Dynasty” and friends refused to visit her home after the kiss.īut there is no mention at all of the allegations that, after he was diagnosed, Hudson had unprotected sex with men who did not know he had AIDS. We know today that closed-mouth kissing (and they both kept their mouths closed) can’t transmit the virus. Remember, this was 1985, and people were terrified of AIDS. Morally, how guilty are we for not having said something to someone. Akin to watching someone receiving a possible lethal injection. I will tape the fateful footage, if not too frozen in horror. It became a huge story at the time, and the filmmakers obtained the diary of Hudson’s friend/personal assistant, who wrote: “We get to watch Rock give Linda Evans a dose of some virus in a kissing scene. There’s an extended segment about how, as a guest star on the hit TV series “Dynasty,” he kissed Linda Evans. | HBO) Rock Hudson at home with his dogs in the 1960s.Īnd there’s something deeply troubling about the way the documentary treats Hudson’s behavior after he was diagnosed. And Hudson never admitted that he was gay - other people outed him. When he reluctantly issued a statement admitting that he had AIDS, the story was already out. There are prurient interviews with several of his friends and sometimes lovers that go well beyond the bounds of good taste as they discuss everything from his penchant for young men to his … um … physical attributes.įar more troubling is the effort by director Stephen Kijak to portray Hudson as a hero of the LGBTQ+ community and of the fight against AIDS. His promiscuous personal life is called into question. To be clear, the documentary is not just one big ode to Hudson. Like a clip from “A Farewell to Arms” when Elizabeth Taylor tells Hudson, “You’re going down to town tomorrow and find yourself some gay young playmate.” A lot of it is just that on the nose. The documentary is loaded with clips from the actor’s film and TV roles, matching the clip to the narrative. It was only because of that all-controlling studio system that Hudson’s homosexuality didn’t become a mainstream news story. It’s the rags-to-riches story of Roy Fitzgerald, whose name was changed when he was signed to Universal Pictures as one of the last stars of the old studio system. “All That Heaven Allowed” (playing off the title of a 1955 Rock Hudson-Jane Wyman film, “All That Heaven Allows”) does a fine job of documenting Hudson’s life and career.
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