Queering the Oscars: Visconti's "The Damned"

by Cláudio Alves

At the 42nd Academy Awards, the Best Original Screenplay category was a rarity of historical importance. You wouldn't know it in 1969, but all nominees would be studied for years to come. Whether seen as seminal works in their author's careers or cultural milestones with much to reveal about the society that produced them, the films form an illustrious bunch, going from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice's pop psychology to the revisionist brutality of The Wild Bunch. The winner was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a western which has inspired queer readings for over half a century though it was far from the queerest picture in the race. 

That would be Luchino Visconti's The Damned, marking the start of his German trilogy, the international metamorphosis of his cinema, and the most open expression of gay sensibilities in his oeuvre to that point…

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Links: Exciting Memoirs, Luscious Italians, and the Out100

• The Hollywood Reporter Paul Mescal and Josh O'Conner to star in early 20th century gay love story, The History of Sound (the curious part is that it's about America and both stars are British and the director is South African)
• The Guardian Eternals banned in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait over gay content
• People actor Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar) has come out publicly before his memoir "You Can't Be Serious" hits. He'll be marrying his partner of 11 years soon

More after the jump including a Paul Newman memoir, new roles for Joe Alwyn and Gael Garcia Bernal, Titane's Oscar dreams, luscious Italians and the annual OUT100 list...

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The Postman Rings Four Times

by Brent Calderwood

The Lana Turner / John Garfield classic The Postman Always Rings Twice opened 75 years ago in US theaters. Based on James M. Cain’s bestselling 1934 novel about a wife who colludes with her lover in an attempt to pull off the perfect murder, Postman had to gloss over the grime to get past the censors, but it remains one of the best-loved film noirs of all time, and its huge box office success has been credited with cementing Turner’s status as a top-billed star. 

While The Film Experience isn't set to celebrate the movies of 1946 until June, Postman belongs to multiple years. Here's a rundown of the four most famous screen adaptations of Cain’s crime novel, listed more or less in order of their critical reputation today...

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Death in Venice @50: Piero, I love you

by Cláudio Alves

For a cinephile, costume enthusiast, and Oscar obsessive like myself, there are few things more enticing than the lone nominee. That elusive movie that gets nominated only for the Best Costume Design statuette. Such is the case of Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel Death in Venice. To celebrate the film's 50th anniversary, I decided to explore that wondrous wardrobe that caught AMPAS' collective eye. It's one of the best works of Piero Tosi, a man who may have been the greatest costume designer to ever create for film.

After five unsuccessful Oscar nominations, Piero Tosi won an Honorary Academy Award in 2014, the first costume designer to ever do so. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving artist...

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Sundance: "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World" review

by Jason Adams

"In all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age." -- Death in Venice

The director Luchino Visconti was 64-years-young when he directed his rumination on youth and beauty seen from the opposite end of life. Death in Venice saw Dirk Bogarde vacationing in a plague-riddled seaside hotel where a teen-boy called Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) suddenly sends his overheated brain reeling across platonically idyllic places. And now here 50 years later, premiering at Sundance, comes the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which turns around and gives us Tadzio's perspective looking back. The sun doesn't shine as brightly from that direction...

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