Beefcake Rating: Release Date: 19 December, 2000 Retail Price: $34.99 OUR Price: $31.49 You SAVE: $3.50! Cast: Joe Dallesandro Henry Thomas Dick An

Beefcake Reviews

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Phony baloney!
The most frustrating thing about this film is the lackadaisical way it moves back and forth between engaging interviews and authentic 50s/60s film footage and the silly, flacid narrative about a physique magazine photographer who involves his unwitting (?) family in the creation of benign bordello/porn factory. Clearly, the beefcake pictoral magazines depicted were intended to be erotically provokative in an era of censorship when postal regulations prevented anything more graphic from being distributed. But the filmmaker seems devoid of a point of view. The film is little more than a blown kiss to a blessedly bygone era. Any perspective setting comes from the talking heads, the former models (like Joe Dallesandro and Jack LaLanne) and photographers who reflect on what it was like to be in the business back then. Also, frustrating was the failure to address the issue of the prevailing double standard; at a time when Hugh Hefner was taking female nudity into the middleclass mainstream, why was the male body such a persistant taboo? As clever as the intercutting of new and vintage footage is, the vintage films are best appreciated when run in their entirety as DVD "extras" (there are six in all, including one involving alien spacemen with antennas!). Watching them provokes a lot of questions. But alas, the viewer is left to come up with his or her own answers. This could have been the "Atomic Cafe" of gay erotica, but instead it's an after-school special with a little eye candy thrown in.

Nudity galore!
Beefcake is a light-hearted, semi-documentary about the life and times of a muscle-magazine, Physique pictorial. Published during the puritanical 1950ies, it made quite a stir.

PP was the original hunk-o-rama, with hundreds of smiling, tanned and muscled young men flashing their goods at you. Of course, it was not strictly a nude-mag (the models wore small pouches in front of you know what..) but the gay readers had a field time anyway! The publishers also made short films featuring their hunky stars. It was all marketed as "promoting health and physical fitness in young minds"

Looking back at those "innocent" times from this liberal day and age, we can only smile at the cunning and bravery that went into it. The brains behind PP, Bob Mizer, was actually jailed and fined several times on charges of renting out his models as escorts to rich men. Still, the mag continued into the 60's and 70's.

Watching Beefcake is like flipping through those pages of PP, stopping occasionally for some reconstructed dramatic scenes. But the best parts are watching the guys modelling, doing some amateur acting in front of Mizer's camera and generally horsing around. Great fun!

There are several interviews with the guys who posed for the mag, one of them, Joe Dallesandro, apparently did his posing mostly nude! There is, in fact, copious nudity in Beefcake, and the men are all fabulous looking.

There are some great contemporary songs on the soundtrack, as well. A good time movie for the (mostly) gay crowd.

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