Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed review – gossipy, entertaining look at a mythological man

“Rock had a sizable dick,” says Joe Carberry, a former lover of Rock Hudson. “He tried to put that thing up my ass and I couldn’t do it!” Frankly, these are the details that make Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed – a new documentary about the quintessential Hollywood hunk – sing. Hudson was a figurehead for a particular era of heterosexual-appearing on-screen beefcakery and though we now know a great deal about his private reality, he has always remained an elusive figure – an idea rather than a reality. Rather compellingly, director Stephen Kijak does not use his documentary to uncover the ‘real’ Hudson; instead he gives us an understanding of the actor by drawing on the negative space around him.

Neither does Kijak attempt to disabuse us of the notion that Rock Hudson was anything but a fluke, a Midwestern handyman who was elevated to an A-list star by dint of his good looks. On the set of Hudson’s debut film, Fighter Squadron, it allegedly took almost 40 takes to shoot his single line. Yet Kijak is extremely forgiving of Hudson and All That Heaven Allowed brims with affection for Hudson’s off-camera life. Because there’s not a comprehensive amount of footage of Hudson’s private world, he relies on the anecdotes of the people who knew him: people like Carberry; his long-time boyfriend Lee Garlington; his Dynasty co-star Linda Evans and author Armistead Maupin. They paint the picture of a gentleman, someone who lit up parties and doted on his friends. This was the Hudson people actually knew – someone quite far removed from the MGM-crafted image history knows.

Investigating how Hudson consistently maintained his dual life, All That Heaven Allowed puts it down to two things. Firstly, that Hudson, despite his humble beginnings, quickly and savvily adapted to the Hollywood machine, and secondly, he was such a likeable guy the people around him painstakingly protected him. It’s perhaps an overly generous reading of him (Kijak isn’t massively concerned with bringing light and shade to Hudson) but the documentary is alive with character, particularly when compared to Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story, released earlier this year, which was essentially an unspicy taped reading of Coward’s Wikipedia page. Here, Hudson is brought to life through gossip – he allegedly couldn’t stop flirting with James Dean during the filming of Giant – and you come away with an intimate sense of what Hudson was like at parties. To his friends, this was Hudson in his element.

His death and the circumstances leading up to it are treated rather straightforwardly. Kijak keeps the tone hopeful, reminding us of the generosity of those around Hudson like Elizabeth Taylor and Linda Evans, whilst underscoring the evil of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s response to the AIDS crisis. Disappointingly there’s little exploration of Hudson’s Republican politics and the ideological contradictions within him. The end of his life was a tragedy, but one that Kijak could have unpacked in greater depth, particularly in a documentary that’s shy of two hours.

Still, Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is a solid if single-minded documentary. As an account of Hudson the Hollywood party boy and lothario it is comprehensive, though those expecting a more complex account of the star’s inconsistencies may find themselves shortchanged.

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