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James Franco continues his somewhat unhealthy fixation with gay history and culture in his latest turn behind the camera. His new movie was on Sal Mineo the ‘out’ gay actor who starred along James Dean in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and who was nominated twice for Best Supporting Actor Oscars. However it was hardly a celebration of his life or even a biopic as it just focused solely on the day that Mineo was sadly murdered.We follow Sal as he goes to the gym, gets his vitamin shots (which he can no longer afford), eat the lunch that his cleaning lady had brought him, and then watch him rehearse the play that he is about to open in. This last scene in particular was totally tedious and even painful to watch as Sal awkwardly verbally sparred with the actor playing Kier Dullea struggling to remember his lines, egged on by Franco off screen playing the theater director. And then as we edged to the night and to the moment of the attack we get these banal scenes of Sal making a fuss about dropping his change all over the convenience store, and then having to stop at the traffic lights, which if they were meant to build the tension, totally failed.
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Theater actor Val Lauren who had more than a passing resemblance to Mineo did a reasonable job playing him with the little he had to work with. He did an even better job defending Franco’s reasoning behind the movie in the Q & A session I caught him in after a Screening. It was, he claimed, an unconventional movie, about an unconventional man, who led an unconventional life. True, but not enough to justify why this badly photographed grainy video that looked and felt like the work of a first year film students genuinely deserved our attention. Whilst we have come to expect Franco with his enormous ego to be nothing less than self-indulgent with what he films, it’s pretentious to assume that we will automatically share his appetite for his poorly executed projects. It was no surprise to discover that this one has been languishing on studio shelves since it was finished over 2 years ago.
From the early 1960’s until his death in 1976 Mineo paid a heavy price for being one of the first major actors to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality as the offers of work dried up. His significant acting career and celebrity is almost forgotten now, and that, combined with his brave stance on coming out at that time, would deservedly make for a fascinating biopic in the right pair of hands.
P.S. After Sal is slain, we see historical news footage of his body lying indecently in a pool of blood before the police saw fit to move him. The newscaster announced that suspect there were seeking, had long blond hair. Two years later an African/American is caught and charged with the murder.
