FILM REVIEW;What if Butch and Sundance Had Kissed?

The Celluloid Closet" was shown as part of last year's New York Film Festival. Following are excerpts from Janet Maslin's review, which appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 13. The film opens today in Manhattan.

The basis for "The Celluloid Closet" is Vito Russo's invaluable 1981 book examining the patterns in Hollywood's treatment of gay characters on screen. What a shame that Russo, who died of AIDS in 1990, never saw his research transformed so skillfully by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose other credits include the Oscar-winning "Times of Harvey Milk" and "Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt," into such a funny and informative documentary using the film clips he could only describe on the page.

Celebrity interviewees and glossy graphics further turn this into a colorful overview with the popular appeal of a "That's Entertainment!" and with an even more interestingly gay agenda than the history of Hollywood musical comedy. "The Celluloid Closet" ranges from obscure film clips -- two men dancing together a hundred years ago in an experimental film of Thomas Edison's -- to scenes that are eminently familiar.

But even if you've seen Marlene Dietrich cross-dressing in "Morocco," Judith Anderson stroking her late mistress's clothing in "Rebecca" or Peter Lorre toying with a walking stick in "The Maltese Falcon," count on watching those images differently this time. The film's historical context is so well established that it helps accentuate the mischief in lines like this, said by John Ireland to Montgomery Clift in "Red River": "There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun -- a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. You ever had a Swiss watch?"

"The Celluloid Closet" moves chronologically, beginning with silent films that featured simpering gay characters ("Clarence, the clerk, one of nature's mistakes in a country where men are men"). As Lily Tomlin, the film's narrator, points out, with the perceptiveness that makes this more than a frothy compendium: "The sissy made everyone feel more manly or more womanly by filling the space in between." Later on, it dwells on gay sentiments that got past the censorship of the Hays Office and a long period when gayness was treated as a sign of villainy or terminal anguish. Armistead Maupin notes that he always thought sex with another man would mean having to commit suicide. "And I got that impression from the movies," he says.

Meanwhile, much of "The Celluloid Closet" also concentrates on sheer fun, as when Paul Rudnick introduces the "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" musical number from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." As he explains, it features "a gym full of body builders who have absolutely no interest in Jane Russell."

Among the well-chosen interviewees here are Gore Vidal (very droll about the different directions given to Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston in "Ben Hur"); the writer Susie Bright (describing what it's like to be galled by the disingenuousness of a "Fried Green Tomatoes"); Mart Crowley on his watershed "Boys in the Band"; Tom Hanks on his impact in "Philadelphia," and Susan Sarandon, talking about "The Hunger" and "Thelma and Louise."

Thinking about the latter film's ending, in which the two women kissed and then drove off a cliff, she wonders what it would have been like if Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had met their fate in the same way. Ms. Sarandon speaks with a rueful awareness of Hollywood's deep-rooted prejudices. "Well, then they would have had more reason to shoot them, I suppose," she says.