01.01.70
There is a lustrous scene in the latter stages of Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar Hoover biopic in which he both embraces and skewers the a great extent held belief that the legendary FBI boss was a cross-dresser.
One of Hoover's victims said she saw him in a cocktail one's glad rags b put on a costume at a gay orgy and the claim went viral.
Hoover's beloved mama has just died and J. Edgar, a confirmed bachelor who never flew the coop, is so worked up he puts one of the dead woman's dresses over his own clothes and wraps her pearls around his neck.
It's a wonderfully suggestive consideration beautifully performed by Leonardo DiCaprio, alluding to both the cross-dressing news without any crass tutu-wearing scenes, as well as dramatising the crippling mum-son relationship, that goes a long way to explaining a career prying into the hidden lives of Americans while failing to own up to his own homosexuality.
Some have complained that Eastwood's attitude to this potentially salacious material is too coy, too restrained, too damned Eastwood-like. Indeed, I've also found many of his late-model period dramas a little starchy, such as the turgid Changeling.
Source: The West Australian