High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films

by Paul Roen

Book by Roen, Paul

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

222 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's like sitting with your favorite maiden aunt who turns out to be obsessed with sex and a charming, elderly queen with a lifetime of free-wheeling behind him, and hearing them talk about the secret gay history of movies. i learned so much! the writing is chatty, engaging, and, well, campy. lots of great recommendations. lots of excitement over good looking guys. plus a surprisingly cogent review of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan's Third Sex.

movies I now want to watch:

Adventures of Captain Marvel (actually a serial)
College Confidential
The Gang's All Here
Flamingo Road
High School Confidential
The Little Foxes
The Magic Christian
Madam Satan
Myra Breckinridge
Please Don't Touch Me!
Sitting Pretty
Springtime in the Rockies
Spy Smasher (another serial)
A Woman's Face

movies I've already watched and enjoyed:

Andy Warhol's Dracula
Autumn Leaves
Baby Face
Black Lizard
Cry-Baby
Dragstrip Girl
Fellini Satyricon
Hairspray
Hot Rod Gang
High School Caesar
JOHNNY GUITAR (one of my favorite films)
Morocco
The Music Lovers
Querelle
Rain
SCARLET EMPRESS (another favorite film)
Shanghai Express
The Women
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

[Anthony McGill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bent film criticism of the highest order! A delightful read; entertaining, witty and extremely well written.

"Carmen Miranda singing 'The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.'
Marlene Dietrich dressed as a gorilla.
Bette Davis chewing the scenery.
Joan Crawford suffering grandly.
Guy Madison butching it up.
Mae West camping it up.
Steve Reeves muscling it up.
Greta Garbo and Tony Curtis impersonating.
James Dean rebelling.
Judy Garland singing.
...... Put 'em all together and they add up to High Camp ......."

Listed in alphabetical order from 'The Adventures of Captain Marvel' to 'Zorro's Fighting Legion' a riot of in depth but fun read critiques of 200 films all edging towards the QUEER zone!

With an equally campy selection of film stills and an amusing introduction on the meaning of CAMP, CULT, and CINEMA - all beautifully packaged in 254 gorgeous pages!
254 pages.

[Ian B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two books in this series, and I read the second one first because it was easier to get hold of. I’m not sure whether it’s simply a case of too much of a good thing, and whether I would always have been slightly less keen on whichever volume I read last, but I didn’t enjoy this instalment quite as much. A note at the front invites readers to send in suggestions for the next book, and I wonder whether that worked to its advantage. Volume 1 is samey at times: we get entries on 22 of Bette Davis's films, for example. Perhaps in Volume 2, the author, faced with some unfamiliar selections, engaged his powers of wit and analysis more fully (I think he did). In this book, the criticism occasionally seems somewhat rote and the jokes rather obvious. Roen even rules on whether some of the titles are actually ‘good’ or not, which hardly seems the point in this kind of undertaking. None the less, he still provides the reader with plenty of quotable observations:

Camp - especially gay camp - is seldom found in the film noir format. I have a theory as to why this is so. Film noir, you see, is the only genre in which homosexuals and homosexuality are dealt with in a more or less overt fashion (although there’s always a certain amount of coding in order to get round the censor).

The action [of Querelle] transpires on campy, blatantly artificial sets straight out of an M-G-M musical from the Forties.

[Rudolph Valentino's] eyes have an almost reptilian cool…

I was also glad to have new ideas for further study: I’m already three-quarters of the way through The Adventures of Captain Marvel on YouTube, to which he attributes ‘a relentless homoeroticism, utterly charming in its juvenile naivité.’ I agree: it is charming.