Stream It or Skip It: ‘Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed’ on Max Puts the Matinee Idol’s Queer Life Above All Else — with Good Reason

HBO’s new documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed takes an intimate look at one of classic Hollywood’s most unknowable entities. The matinee idol was beloved by millions but only known, truly known, by a few. All That Heaven Allowed provides an intimate portrait of the man whose life in the closet was an open secret, and whose AIDS diagnosis changed the course of history.

ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rock Hudson seemingly had it all. He had fame and fortune, a statuesque physique, and enough genuine charisma to charm even the harshest of critics. He also possessed enough raw talent to take the lead in a number of genre films, from epic dramas like Giant to frothy romcoms like Pillow Talk. Hudson was a matinee idol who went on to become an idol, period. And he did it all while living in the closet.

Through plenty of archival footage and photographs from Hudson’s personal life, along with firsthand anecdotes from those who remain from Hudson’s inner circle, All That Heaven Allowed recreates as best it can the life that the movie star really led when cameras weren’t rolling. The film primarily focuses on the intersection of Hudson’s career and his secret sexuality, which somehow remained a secret only to the general population. Hudson had plenty of partners, both long-term and short-term, and learned how to play the game. So did his manager, who married Hudson off to his secretary and offered up other closeted gays to the tabloids in order to keep Rock off their radar.

The film doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of Hudson’s life, including his diagnosis with AIDS and the medical treatment he received for it in Paris — as well as the cold treatment he received from then First Lady Nancy Reagan, one of his oldest and closest friends.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This feels like a companion piece to 2015’s Tab Hunter Confidential, another doc about a big-name hunk who spent most of their career wowing ladies on screen and wooing men off-screen. That doc had the benefit of having a living Hunter as one of its interview subjects, and knowing how Hudson’s story ends makes watching All That Heaven Allowed a more somber experience.

Performance Worth Watching: It has to be Rock Hudson, of course. It becomes apparent through watching so many clips from all across his career just why he became such a big box office draw. He’s like all of the Chrises rolled up into one guy.

Memorable Dialogue: Interviewee Joe Carberry offers the most, uh, honest soundbite of the movie: “Rock had a sizable dick, and he tried to put that thing up my ass and I couldn’t do it.”

Sex and Skin: As a documentary about the secret gay life of a major motion picture movie star from the ’50s and ’60s, there are plenty of photos and footage of scantily clad hunks on the beach and at pool parties.

Our Take: Queer history is rare and precious, and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed exemplifies that in every minute. Hudson’s story — a Hollywood hunk who made women swoon but only had eyes for men — is a typical one. So many men, from Tab Hunter to Motgomery Clift (and possibly Cary Grant, but that’s a whole other doc), experienced exactly what Hudson did while leading a life in the closet. Not just famous men either! The secrecy, the arranged marriage, the hookups, the parties — this is what gay life was just like at a time when these stories could not be told. Gay people have lost so much shared, cultural memory because of the closet and — another grim truth of the queer experience intimately told in the doc — because of AIDS.

All That Heaven Allowed is about Rock Hudson’s life as a gay man. And, as the timeline progresses and the doc eases from 100% archival shots to actual on-screen interviews with the people who knew Rock, it becomes about the lives of the other gay men in his life. This is, through and through, a very gay documentary — as it should be. Anyone can learn the specifics of Hudson’s public life, his childhood, and what it was like to film McMillan & Wife, from any number of sources. That stuff wasn’t secret. The truth about Hudson’s lecherous manager, or his first love, or a hilarious “they’re just two buds sharing a house” photo spread with the man who was clearly his partner at the time — those are the stories that haven’t been widely told. They are worth telling because we so rarely get to see what it was like to be gay in the 1950s.

Hudson’s absence — like the absence of gay men of his generation — is felt in the documentary but made up for through an inventive storytelling device. The doc pulls dozens and dozens of clips from Hudson’s entire career and drops them in, not in chronological order, per se, but rather when the dialogue deals with the themes and events being discussed by the film at large. This re-contextualization actually makes it feel like Hudson is in the documentary. It allows Hudson to “comment” on what’s going on while also showing off his incredible range as an actor to the Hudson-curious.

This device may be controversial, though, as it could be seen as the doc intentionally applying a queer reading to literally every single one of Hudson’s performances as if he as an actor could not help but bring the queerness he was hiding to the screen. My take on that take is… so what? Film criticism, ranging from the pages of major publications to post-screening ramblings on the way to a parking lot, is filled with inferences and analysis that go far beyond any authorial intent. Since Hudson never himself commented on his sexuality, most likely because the world around him forbade him from doing so, the only thing we can do is infer. If Hudson’s going to have a voice at all in his doc, it has to be provided by the characters he played. Does this make any of his strapping, heterosexual leads queer? Only if the viewer wants it to, and so what if they do?

The truth is, Hudson’s filmography — while legendary and filled with lots of greats — is just that: it’s a list of films, films that no one is required to watch. But Hudson’s life? That’s queer history and a vital part of the human experience that is still very much relevant today. As much as I love Hudson’s Doris Day romcoms, they don’t even come close, re: relevancy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is an up-close and personal look at an era of queer history that still remains under-explored.