Director: Stephen Kijak

Taking its name from the Hudson-starring Douglas Sirk masterpiece ‘All That Heaven Allows’ this insightful documentary charts the secret history of the gay actor. When Hudson arrived in Hollywood he was snapped up by Henry Wilson, a notorious casting couch-inclined agent who carefully stage-managed every aspect of Hudson’s public hetero persona in order to keep the tabloids at bay, even engineering a marriage between Hudson and Wilson’s assistant Phyllis Gates in 1955. Despite the carefully-curated pretence, Hudson, surrounding himself with a close circle of friends seemed blithely open about his sexuality. Taking more than a little inspiration from Mark Rappaport’s ‘Rock Hudson’s Home Movies’, the picture cheekily repurposes campy, accusatory dialogue from Hudson’s movies to suggest that Rock was winking at us as to his true nature all along. Interestingly, it is revealed that the sexually ambiguous James Dean, when working with Hudson on ‘Giant’, took a dislike to the old actor and resented him for staying in the closet. For his part, Hudson confesses that he did not like the younger actor but refused to speak ill of the dead. Refreshingly, the main takeaway here is not that Hudson led a haunted life, hounded by the industry, but that he was a nice, easy-going guy who made a space for himself and was happy in it. His harrowing high-profile death by AIDS-related diseases is cited her as the reason the US Government started to take the disease seriously and make a suitable response.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm