Waldo lydecker gay

Gay star Clifton b plays the queer-coded villain Waldo Lydecker in the film-noir classic LAURA. Waldo Lydecker is our guide to Laura?s underworld, the urgent, unexamined desires that drive its characters and story.

And it is Waldo, the wasp-tongued columnist and radio commentator, who bookends the movie, which ends with his last gasp and begins with one of the greatest opening lines ever: “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.”. Clifton b's Waldo Lydecker is the epitome of the effete and deadly homosexual, and therein lies his great appeal as a character. That Waldo Lydecker is a gay man is obvious: the question is, how obvious was it to theatergoers in ?

It’s hard to say: on the one hand, Clifton b, the actor who played Lydecker, was an all-but-out gay man who, by the time he made Laura, had been working for decades, first as a song and dance man, then as a leading character actor. He first interviews charismatic newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, an imperious, effete older man who relates how he met Laura and became her mentor. She had become his platonic friend and steady companion, and, wishing more, he used his considerable fame, influence, and connections to advance her career.

Lydecker as a gay main character may have been a first for a Hollywood movie. The figures of the effeminate aesthete and the perfumed gigolo allowed noir to simultaneously portray and deny homosexual characters. Already have a WordPress. United States: Columbia Pictures. One of the big objections is how McPherson, after finding the murder weapon in the clock, puts it back and leaves Laura alone before Waldo has been arrested.

The characters in these cities needed to reflect this air of menace and moral ambiguity, and to live outside traditional ethical standards. Sister Celluloid Where old movies go to live. In addition, Dyer , makes a convincing case for repressed homosexuality in Captain Munsey, the vicious prison warden who enjoys beating prisoners while listening to classical music in Brute Force Barrios, R.

No doubt the famous musical theme by David Raksin has something to do with it: The music lends a haunted, nostalgic, regretful cast to everything it plays under, and it plays under a lot. Scott, A. References Barrios, R. Now streaming on:.

Laura (1944)

The Big Sleep. All five men wear handkerchiefs meticulously folded in their breast pockets. Now playing. I wrote last week about the shadow archetype. I tried to keep my essay focused on Lydecker, but I wonder if Laura was trying to remake Shelby the way Waldo remade Laura. London:British Film Institute Publishing. A brief exchange of mocking looks confirms, for both characters and audience, that the visitor Joe Cairo is a homosexual.

A common stereotype was that of the sissy, who was simultaneously ridiculous because he had traits which were supposed to belong to a woman and unsettling because, unlike the male protagonists, he understood women and womanly things. United States: Universal Pictures. McPherson must then ascertain who is the true murder victim, and if Laura herself is the culprit. In spite of his success with women, Shelby is a foil both for Lydecker and McPherson.

A being of artifice and surface and delectable violence, he constantly eludes us, challenging us to constantly try to pin him down, even though such efforts are almost always doomed to failure. Notes on film noir. While he sleeps in a chair in her apartment dreaming of her? I wanted to go back and see them together with me not watching. James M.