Classic Hollywood movies with gay subtext

The relationship between T.E. Lawrence and Sheriff Ali. Director David Lean admitted to giving Peter O'Toole instruction to play Lawrence as a gay man.

R1, yes, Lawrence of Arabia is super gay

Gilda...a bisexual love triangle...very hot.

Dawson's 50 Load Weekend. I mean it's there, if you read between the lines...

Gilda. George Macready and Glenn Ford were a couple!

Everyone's favorite hitmen from the film noir, The Big Combo:

Mingo & Fante (Earl Holliman & Lee Van Cleef).

Lake Placid. Definite sexual subtext between Brendan Gleeson’s cop and Oliver Platt’s scientist. Chubby love.

It’s an obvious choice, but I’d say Strangers On A Train.

[bold]Desert Fury[/bold] (1947)

The relationship between gangster John Hodiak and his live-in henchman Wendell Corey is so blatant, you can't even call it "subtext".

North by Northwest

Fight Club

Eddie Muller, host of TCM's noir alley, interviewed Earl Holliman and he confirmed that the gay subtext in The Big Combo was deliberate

I would have eaten Burt Lancaster's ass until I got to his small intestines.

JOHNNY EAGER. It’s obvious that Van Heflin’s character is in love with Johnny, played by the inept but comely Robert Taylor.

Rope

R13 thanks for making me puke 🤮

REBECCA. Watch Mrs. Danvers as she rubs Rebecca’s fur against Joan Fontaine’s cheek. “FEEEEL this…”

For me, the absolute classic here is The Maltese Falcon. Dandy Joel Cairo with his gardenia-scented cards and way of "getting around" the boys... Wilmer the gunsel and boy-toy to the Fat Man...

Rope

John Dall and Farley Granger are 100% gay

More to the lezzie side but boy was Doris Day one in Calamity Jane.

Fast and furious

The John Hoyt character in Winter Meeting is so obvious

Rebel without a Cause... beyond the obvious adoration of Mineo and Dean, there seemed a potentially pretty kinky threesome with Wood. Mommy, Daddy, and Baby.

Sal Mineo's character in Rebel was so obviously gay

Without question, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Wings, of course.

Montgomery Clift and John Ireland in Red River.

"Public Enemy" (1931) with James Cagney. Cagney goes to a tailor who is tres gay.

Rangle River

"Laura" and "Johnny Guitar" are both very gay on every level.

Lassie Come Home.

“You are my little bitch, aren’t you girl?”

All the characters seem gay in Laura

The Three Stooges..they slept together, they bathed together, Curly would kiss Moe. They were way ahead of their time.

Charlton Heston must have been born yesterday. I was just a kid when I first saw Ben-Hur and even I knew what Masala wanted.

In Ben-Hur the looks that Boyd gives Heston are so obvious

In "The Wizard of Oz," Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory are a throuple.

And it's pretty obvious what Miss Gulch is into.

R34 & R35, yes, and Gore Vidal claims he is the one that put in the gay subtext into 'Ben-Hur'.

The character David Wayne plays in Adam's Rib.

At one point he says to Katherine Hepburn, "Well, good luck tomorrow, Amanda. I'm on your side, I guess you know that. You've got me so convinced, I may even go out and become a woman. Goodnight." And then Spencer Tracy mumbles, "And he wouldn't have far to go, either."

There's another point where Hepburn says to Wayne, "Now, you look here, Kip. I'm fighting my prejudices, but it's clear that you're behaving like a, like a - well, I'd hate to put it this way - like a [bold]man[/bold]." To which Wayne replies, "You watch your language!"

Born to kill. Elisha Cook is side kick to psychotic Lawrence Tierney. He fawns over him like a protective wife and helps him escape when he commits yet another murder and they share a bed together. Tierney looked like he could throw a mean fuck.

Auntie Mame (1958). Rosalind Russell plays her as both a lesbian aunt and a fun gay uncle.

Sylvia Fowler was flicking Crystal Allen’s bean.

Spartacus. Crassus didn’t really like oysters or snails.

Papillon (1973) had one obviously gay character, but there also was a homoerotic undercurrent throughout.

Any Fred Astaire Ginger Rodgers movie costarring Edward Everett Horton and/or Eric Blore.

R39, totally agree.

Wasn't there something hinted about Warren Beatty's depiction of "Clyde Barrow" in the historically inaccurate, "Bonnie and Clyde"?

The reak Clyde was raped as a young man in youth camp and some argue it hardened him. He was a small man.

R47, was it rape rape?

This is from the Wikipedia article on the "Bonnie and Clyde" film:

[quote] The film is forthright in its handling of sexuality, but that theme was toned down from its conception. Originally, Benton and Newman wrote Clyde as bisexual. He and Bonnie were to have a three-way sexual relationship with their male getaway driver. Penn persuaded the writers that since the couple's relationship was underwritten in terms of emotional complexity, it dissipated the passion of the title characters. This would threaten the audience's sympathy for the characters, and might result in their being written off as sexual deviants because they were criminals. Others said that Beatty was unwilling to have his character display that kind of sexuality and that the Production Code would never have allowed such content in the first place. Clyde is portrayed as heterosexual and impotent.

If they'd gone forward with that fiction, they probably would have had to cast a different actor than Michael J. Pollard as the driver. Who'd want to see him in bed with Warren Beatty? .. lol

The Rock Hudson and Tony Randall movies. The ones with Doris Day as the beard.

Send Me No Flowers is so gay. Rock and Tony even wind up in bed together!

Lawrence Tierney.....the most fucked up person who came close to being an A lister in Hollywood. Hot as hell too.

Hitchcock's "Rope", but it's really more than subtext there.

Rope has been mentioned 3 times now.

r13, why stop there?

Yes, not really subtext, R53. (This thread is nearly 10% “Rope” now. Sorry.)

Mahogany

Can't Stop The Music

Plan 9 From Outer space

Godzilla

Journey to the center of the Earth

PS your cat is dead

Doris Day was super butch in Calamity Jane

Midnight Cowboy

Clarifying R58 - I don't mean the scenes where Joe Buck picks up the dude in the movie theater, I mean that Ratso seemed to be in love with Joe.

R60 ... and the sweet part of the movie was that Joe seemed to be love with Ratso too. Am I right? Isn't that sort of clear?

Clyde Barrow having been raped is mentioned in [italic]the Highwaymen[/italic] about the Texas Rangers who took part in hunting down Bonnie and Clyde.

^ Sounds interesting

Brokeback Mountain.

Something was kind of funny about those two guys always trying to play leapfrog in a tent.

King Rat

The sadistic prison guard, "Captain Munsey," played by Hume Cronyn in "Brute Force" is often cited as a homosexual stereotype. In this scene, he's about to throttle a prisoner shackled to a chair in his office and starts playing Wagner on the phonograph. Note the artwork as well.

What is gay about Godzilla?

[quote]Godzilla

R57 = Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

James Mason and Martin Landau in “North by Northwest,” with Landau explaining his hunch by saying, “Call it my woman’s intuition.”

Various sets of buddies in war films, like “Wings” and Noah’s Ark.”

And when I saw Martin & Lewis pictures in the 50’s, I was a kid and didn’t think about it. But the characters they played were awfully close, even sharing twin beds in “Artists and Models” (1958).

[ R5 ] George Macready and Glenn Ford in "Gilda" for sure. The gay/bi subtext jumps off the screen. Aren't we introduced to Ford's character on the docks in Buenos Aires? He seems to know his way around town.

Lead actor, Edward G. Robinson, as "Rico" in the 1931 gangster film, "Little Caesar." Totally gay. The object of his unrequited(?) love is longtime friend, "Joe," played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. .. It also appears that Rico is in an intimate relationship with his adoring henchman, "Otero," played by George E, Stone. As I recall, they live together.

I'm just going to paste a description of the film from another blog:

[quote] It is subtle, but Rico is clearly intended to be gay. In the first scene, Joe tells Rico he wants to be a dancer. Rico looks at Joe and states the obvious about their life of crime, "This job isn't for guys who are soft." He is not berating Joe. He says it more out of concern. They move to another town where Joe becomes a dancer at a club. His partner Olga has eyes for him but he seems unsure of his feelings for her. "I want someone like you awfully bad. Do you believe me Olga?"

[quote] Rico is clearly upset that Joe spends more time with her than him. "You didn't quit. Nobody ever quit me. You're still in my gang. You got that? I don't care how many fancy skirts you have hanging on to you. That jane's made a softy out of you." The movie never says that Rico and Joe ever had sex but Rico sure acts like a spurned lover. Once Patrick told me that he who yells "faggot" loudest is usually a closet homosexual. When Rico wants Joe back, he says to him, "Now you're getting to be a sissy."

[quote] As Scott mentioned, Rico and Otero were clearly intended to be seen as lovers. In one scene Rico is lying in bed when Otero lays down intimately close to him. They each smile at each other. In the next scene, Rico is dressing in a suit, while standing on a table to admire himself in a mirror. Otero stands directly in front of him, straightening the folds in Rico's pants. His face is directly in front of Rico's crotch. He then stands back to admire how good Rico looks, smiling with pride. I do not know if Rico and Joe ever had sex, but I think the movie is clearly saying Rico and Otero have.

I would only add that at the end of the film [SPOILER] when Rico is gunned down, he dies on the street looking up at a large poster/billboard advertising Joe's dance act with Olga. Looking up at the image of Joe's face, he asks, "Is this the end of Rico?"

Also, the actor who played "Otero", George E. Stone, may have been gay. He had two short-lived marriages, both ending in divorce. He later started to go blind and was finding it hard to get work. To help him out, his good friend Raymond Burr got him a recurring gig on "Perry Mason" where he played the courtroom reporter in over 40 episodes.

Rico Suave!!

R34, R35, & R37 -- I remember reading that Vidal went to William Wyler with the intention of making Heston an object of Boyd's lust. Boyd was into it, but Wyler said, "Whatever you do, don't tell Chuck. He'll fall apart." (Or words to that effect.)

Not much subtext, but Harper and Elivira Powell in "Caged" were right up there with anything named so far. Funny how Harper and Agnes Moorehead as the Warden were deathly foes.

Edward G. Robinson’s character in DOUBLE INDEMNITY was in love with Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray.

Spartacus

" A suggestive scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis was saved from the cutting room floor when the slave revolt epic was restored in 1991. Eliot Wilson looks at what Stanley Kubrick wanted to depict and how it was restored to ambiguous glory."