INTRIGUING CURIOSITIES PULLED FROM HOLLYWOOD'S 'CLOSET'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

The huge success of "The Birdcage" would indicate that tolerance, flamboyance and flagrantly overapplied eye shadow are as American as John Wayne.

And maybe they are now. But as far as Hollywood movies are concerned, this is a very recent development. "The Celluloid Closet," a fascinating documentary that's as entertaining as it is enlightening, charts the depiction of gay characters over a century of American cinema.

What it shows us is that, despite the current vogue, for most of that history our movies have shown homosexuality in a pretty unflattering light - when they acknowledged its existence at all. As was exhaustively documented in Vito Russo's source book of the same name, the film reveals, through a wealth of clips from dozens of movies, how gay men and lesbians have been ridiculed, erased, made objects of pity and demonized through succeeding eras of Hollywood productions.

Directed and produced by Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ("The Times of Harvey Milk," "Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt"), "Closet" also offers interviews and anecdotes from a variety of critics and talents who've worked on gay-themed films. Lily Tomlin delivers the film's crisp, detailed narration, which was scripted by "Tales of the City" author Armistead Maupin.

What we see is that gay characters and issues have appeared in movies since the beginning, although mostly in derisive or disguised contexts. The sissy popped up as a source of cheap laughs in turn-of-the-century westerns and Chaplin's silent classics. Even when the draconian Production Code came down heavily in the early '30s - forbidding any overt reference to homosexuality, which was classified as "sex perversion" - effeminate men and masculine women still popped up in Hollywood movies in often amusingly coded guises.

By the 1950s, films such as "Rebel Without a Cause," "Suddenly, Last Summer" and even "Ben-Hur" were telling gay stories without actually mentioning the fact. (Gore Vidal, an active screenwriter at the time, relates wry stories about the hypocrisies and subterfuges behind many of these pictures.)

Hollywood started acknowledging that gays existed in the 1960s, but almost uniformly portrayed them as tortured neurotics who often wound up dead - usually by their own hand. Later films turned gays from victims to victimizers ("Cruising," "Basic Instinct"), but gradually, over three decades, a wider variety of gay images worked their way into movies.

Some of them even strived to be positive, though they often failed to avoid long-established cliches. The great thing about "The Celluloid Closet" is the evenhanded way it presents such critical points. Informative, amusing and amazing - for both wised-up viewers and those who've never thought about such matters before - the film gives voice to an array of viewpoints from both gay and straight commentators. We not only learn how Hollywood spins its portrayals of homosexuality, but how even a thoughtlessly negative image can be interpreted positively, and vice versa.

Tony Curtis, Whoopi Goldberg, Shirley MacLaine, Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon are among the celebrities who share their thoughts. The writers, though, whether active in the closeted '50s ("Rope's" Arthur Laurents), the semi-liberated '70s ("The Boys in the Band's" Mart Crowley) or the supposedly sensitive '90s ("Philadelphia's" Ron Nyswaner), have the best anecdotes and sharpest insights.

Working from the late Russo's blueprint, Epstein and Friedman weave all these elements together into an intriguingly fun, fine piece of film scholarship. Though long overdue, we can only feel lucky that "The Celluloid Closet" has finally come out.

THE FACTS

The film: "The Celluloid Closet" (R; language, sex, nudity).

Behind the scenes: Produced and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Written by Epstein, Friedman, Sharon Wood and Armistead Maupin, based on Vito Russo's book. Narrated by Lily Tomlin. Released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Running time: One hour, 42 minutes.

Playing: Colorado, Pasadena; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Los Feliz, Los Feliz.

Our rating: Four stars

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo (1) A dapper Marlene Dietrich starred in 1930's "Morocco." (2) Jeffrey Friedman, left, and Rob Epstein produced and directed "The Celluloid Closet." Lily Tomlin narrates.