Staircase (3 reels) Jenni Olson

Duration: 100 min

Year Published: 1969

Complete Record: Often deeply disturbing in its portrayal of self-hating closet queens, stars Rex Harrison and Richard Burton as a pair of aging homosexual hairdressers. Burton's mother is the constant absent presence (upstairs in the bedroom like Tony Perkins's mom in Psycho); Harrison's bitchy attacks on Burton and his continual desperate claims about his own masculinity set him up as the archetypal neurotic closet queen. A contemporary audience looking beyond the dense layer of homo-hatred that envelops the film can feel an intense sympathy for these characters who are trapped in a pre-Stonewall Cinemascope rendering of an intensely homophobic stage play.

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