Staircase-being gay was never like this, was it?

TCM is a very cool network, which more often than not, plays movies you liked the first, oh forty or fifty times you saw them. But every once in a while they play something a little different. I think Staircase falls into that category.

I like Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady is one of my all time favorites. I never liked Richard Burton. John Wayne was famous for playing himself in all of his movies and I always got the same feeling from Burton. The difference, of course, is that I liked John Wayne.

Robert Osborne, the omnipresent host on TCM talked about the reasons this movie didn’t work, chief among them being the fact that Rex and Richard are such real men that no one can seriously believe they are gay. This is funny, of course, because the most macho real man of the era was Rock Hudson. Also, it would not be much of a stretch to go ahead and image that Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering were more than just flatmates.

I didn’t make it all the way through Staircase, I fell asleep, as it was being shown in the middle of the night. But even in what I saw these characters were so stereotyped that they make all modern gay characters look like Rambo and the Terminator combined by comparison.

It was just silly. Of course, it was the sixties, so looking at this movie now, I don’t see flamboyantly dressed gay people, I just see the incredible bad taste of the mod generation.

Of course, now that this film has resurfaced, I expect some lazy ass Hollywood studio to do a remake. Let’s see, Matt Damion and Tom Cruise? Nah, too believable. George Clooney and Clint Eastwood? Nah, George wouldn’t have an old guy like Clint. George and Brad Pitt? Nah, Brad is too big a pussy since he hooked up with Angelina.

Maybe George and Angelina? Now that would be a fun gay couple movie.