Product Description

"Beefcake," Thom Fitzgerald's (The Hanging Garden) provocative blending of fiction and documentary, tells the story of Bob Mizer, the pioneering founder of the Athletic Model Guild, a company which produced still photographs and short films extolling the beauty and chiseled physiques of men. The fiction story follows photographer and enterprising businessman Mizer, who teamed up with his mother in 1945 to film his beefy star-wannabes around his sun-drenched pool. It is here that Neil, a naive, right-off-the-bus teen is lured into using his handsome looks to become a model. The wide-eyed Neil soon learns about the world of sex and prostitution. But a police raid and ensuing criminal trial soon threaten both of the men's worlds. Interspersed with the story are rare archival footage and interviews with former co-workers, customers and models.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21034 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-01-23
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Color, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 97 minutes

Amazon.com
Canadian filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald made his name on the gay film scene with his dramatic fantasia The Hanging Garden, but with Beefcake he captures a more lightheartedly dreamy tone: The film takes its lead from Valentine Hooven's lip-smackingly compulsive coffee table tome of the same name. We're offered a teasing, pseudo-history of mid-century pop male photography, featuring quaint muscle-mag shots and nude "studies" of, among others, a hungrily seductive young Joe Dallesandro (before he made his name in underground Andy Warhol flicks like Flesh). Dallesandro's here to talk, along with other "models" who mostly supply commentary on Bob Mizer, the enterprising founder of the Athletic Model Guild. Fitzgerald blends the real-life documentary material into his fictional confection concerning a sexy bumpkin who falls into Mizer's AMG set-up (it produced America's first closeted gay erotica publication, passing itself off as an innocently obsessive guide to health and fitness). The campy original story--the hero's Valley of the Dolls-inspired name is Neil O'Hara--is a bit dumb, actually, mostly because it's not even half as interesting as the real deal. Lots of innocently nude frolicking doesn't hurt, though, and the film engages when it manages to be as naively sweet and erotic as Mizer's bygone magazines. --Steve Wiecking

From The New Yorker
This partially dramatized documentary illuminates the nineteen-fifties world of male-physique magazines, a charged combination of bodybuilding and homoeroticism. Director Thom Fitzgerald uses as his focal point the figure of Bob Mizer (Daniel MacIvor), a man in love with photography and with the well-built young men he recorded in classical poses. Mizer's dream of creating an agency to represent these aspiring models and actors began with a photo catalogue and soon evolved into the leading muscle magazine Physique Pictorial and a production company that put out thousands of beefcake movies. Plenty of that footage appears here, wittily blended with staged scenes from Mizer's self-made world. Completing the unusual format are interviews with some of its principal figures, from Jack LaLanne to Joe Dallesandro. -Ken Marks
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

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.

Please Pass the Beef
First of all, for those of you out who like straight-forward plot lines with twists and turns throughout, object to male nudity and get bored if something doesn't blow up in the first 15 minutes - then do not watch this movie.

As for the rest of us, who can appreciate intelligent mock-u-mentory styled films, "BeefCake" is a fabulous way to spend a Sunday evening. Through flashback sequences, photo clips and interiews with ex-hustlers/models from the 1950's, we receive the story of Robert Henry Mizer and his Athletic Model Guild. The movie jumps around a bit between Mizer's history with his pulp art magazine, his legal troubles for running escorts as well as the interviews, which makes one wonder how scatterbrained director Thom Fitzgerald really is. But the acting is good, the scenes are funny/interesting and there's plenty of male nudity to go around. Where can you go wrong?

A MUST HAVE DVD
Well what can I say? This movie pleasantly surprised me and is a nostalgic and very revealing look at the 1950's Physique models. Gee these guys had great bodies and not the bulging muscles u see in todays magazines. If u are offended by male nudity steer clear of this one as it leaves nothing to the imagination. The soundtrack is great the acting above average and the crossovers to real interviews and back to the storyline is very good. Joe Dellesandro is featured in the interviews and in the bonus section of the DVD is a very revealing what u could call screen test of a very young and well endowed Joe. 10 out of 10