“Very Little Wrist Movement”: Rock Hudson Acts Out Sexual Heterodoxy

Abstract

Hollywood films of the late 1950s obsessed over the idea of virginity, seeking to render it externally through acting style. Generally virginities thus spectacularized are female: male virginity belongs to the man’s past. When found, therefore, the male virgin is inevitably established as both a comic figure and a fake. Rock Hudson performances remove such assurances, however: in Pillow Talk he plays a womanizer and a potential virgin. Hudson usually offers a performance dichotomy, with the heterodox sexualities evoked by movement, the traditional male calm and still: Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964), however, reverses this trope and makes the calm, experienced, persona the fake.