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But talk of bisexuality doesn’t fit Kijak’s narrative, which downplays all the women Hudson kissed in his career in order to make a point about the smooch he shared with “Dynasty” co-star Linda Evans, after he’d already been diagnosed with HIV. The marriage was obviously arranged (Gates was a secretary for Wilson, whose Svengali-like control of Hudson’s image extended to giving Confidential magazine a hateful scoop about Tab Hunter in order to kill a story on Hudson), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was without emotions or intimacy. Kijak’s sources struggle to comprehend how Hudson’s wife of three years, Phyllis Gates, could have gone to her grave insisting she didn’t know Rock was gay.

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Wilson “taught them how to be heterosexual,” the movie explains, which was true to a point - Hudson got his teeth fixed, learned to lower his voice and more - though it ignores the possibility that Hudson might have swung both ways at a time when such labels were far more fluid. It was Wilson who rechristened the Illinois stud “Rock Hudson,” as he did the other matinee idols he represented: Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Guy Madison, etc. What history we get feels as tabloid-ready as Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood.” The doc describes how Roy Fitzgerald (the actor’s name when he arrived in Los Angeles) dropped an early male partner when Henry Wilson, the head of talent for Selznick Studios, took an interest in him.

Even director Allison Anders’ impassioned defense of Hudson’s acting chops quickly gets derailed by scuttlebutt about him hitting on “Giant” co-star James Dean. Instead, nearly all the footage Kijak pulls from Hudson’s filmography has been bent to comment on his sexual identity. The whopper - which underscores the kind of salacious gossip Kijak gravitates toward in the film - comes from Joe Carberry, who recalls, “Rock had a sizable dick, but he tried to put that thing up my ass, and I couldn’t do it.”Īt a time when the average American would be hard-pressed to name a single Rock Hudson film, is this what audiences really need to know about the star? Or might the filmmaker have spent a little more time on the biographical basics? Certainly, the wealth of seldom-seen photos, news clippings and artifacts suggests there exists enough raw material for a more well-rounded portrait of the star with the square jaw and dimpled chin. A secretly recorded phone call reveals Hudson to be a “size queen,” audibly excited by the prospect of meeting a tall, well-endowed stranger. “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” treats that compromise as a tragedy, leaning on the fact Hudson died of AIDS to underscore the injustice, but Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career - in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid - to the dimension of his sexuality.īuilt around interviews with a handful of former lovers and friends, Kijak spills private details from Hudson’s personal life, ranging from whom he shagged to how he arranged such trysts in the first place. That changed after his death, when the strapping, straight-acting (but occasionally sensitive) hunk from Winnetka became the poster boy for Hollywood homophobia: a closeted star who’d been forced to play a role his entire career that wasn’t true to himself, on screen and off. During his lifetime, Rock Hudson was a model for American masculinity.

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