Post by Police Moderator on Nov 11, 2011 7:25:25 GMT -5
J. Edgar
Machiavelli on the Potomac.
Kurt Loder | November 10, 2011
Machiavelli on the Potomac.
Kurt Loder | November 10, 2011
Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar is a remarkably cheerless affair—grim, disjointed, and paced like a snail funeral. But given the movie’s subject—J. Edgar Hoover, for nearly 50 years the powerful and widely feared head of the FBI and its precursor, the Bureau of Investigation—this was probably inevitable. Hoover was a tightly buttoned-up teetotaler who was obsessed with propriety, demanding that his agents be meticulously barbered (no mustaches) and austerely clothed (no pinstripe suits!) at all times.
Intriguingly, though, Hoover was also long rumored to be gay—an assumption buttressed by the man’s intimate, 40-year relationship with Clyde Tolson, a subordinate with whom he ate lunch and dinner every day, and with whom he also vacationed. In the years since Hoover died, in 1972, speculation has persisted that the tie between the two men was homosexual, while the director’s supporters contend it was simply filial, noting Hoover’s occasional liaisons with women—among them actress Dorothy Lamour.
Whatever the case, in the movie the bond between Hoover (strikingly played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Tolson (Armie Hammer) is a central motif. Tolson is depicted as a yearning suitor for Hoover’s erotic affection, while Hoover himself is seen as non-reciprocal—a man tormented by inclinations he refuses to acknowledge.
It is to the great credit of Eastwood and his screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for his script for Milk), that they ignore the undying media myth that Hoover was a public transvestite who participated in homosexual orgies at New York’s Plaza Hotel in the 1950s. This lurid tale, retailed by a discarded society wife named Susan Rosenstiel—who was paid for telling it to gossipy biographer Anthony Summers—is too ludicrous to be credited, even though it has acquired over the years an aura of accepted truth.
Read more: reason.com