Reviews

Friday, November 2, 1984
LOS ANGELES TIMES MOVIE REVIEW

‘HARVEY MILK’ AN IMPASSIONED FILM
By SHELIA BENSON,
 Times Film Critic

"The Times of Harvey Milk" (at the Vista) is challenging, enthralling, impassioned film making. If it was the highlight of Telluride, it was no fluke.

Carefully filling in the intricate and explosive political and social climate that was San Francisco in the 1970’s, film makers Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen, with editor Deborah Hoffmann, have built a brilliant, gripping portrait of what was really lost with the deaths of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in November, 1978, at the hands of Milk’s fellow Supervisor Dan White.

The film makers have used a steady patience and intelligence, and their reward is a film aimed neither at straights nor gays. Instead, it is an intense, immensely moving, useful film for all of us.

As Harvey Fierstein narrates, we watch Harvey Milk grow from a big-eared kid, “a practical joker and a regular guy, or so his friends thought,” to a man at peace with himself and the homosexuality he’d known about since he was 14. In snippets of film the political Milk also emerges, from a brash, affable camera-store owner in the Castro, three times defeated in his attempt to run for a supervisor’s seat, to a self-confident, working supervisor who immediately established himself as a spokesman for the aged, neighborhood groups and all minorities.

The eight men and women whose memories of Milk form the fabric of the film are a smart cross-section: There is Jim Elliot, auto machinist and union delegate, whose first reaction on hearing that the candidate they had supported was gay was: “Holy Christ, how’m I gonna go back to these guys at the union and tell them we’re supporting a fruit! Then they found out he got Coors beer out of all the gay bars in San Francisco.” Elliot changed, as he discovered Milk’s real convictions.

There is speech professor Sally Gearhart, who met Milk as they became co-chairs of the United Fund to Fight the Briggs Amendment. Thoughtful, articulate, strikingly attractive, she and Milk debated Briggs and fundamentalist Rev. Batema (who in a blinding non sequitur equated homosexual teachers with prostitutes and bestiality) on television.

There is the pragmatic young Henry Der, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, who watched Milk first warily, then with growing conviction that he would cross any line to support what was right for any minority.

And there is Dan White, the ex-fireman and lifelong San Franciscan, found guilty of voluntary manslaughter for firing eight times at Moscone, reloading his gun and emptying it again into Harvey Milk. White’s portrait, necessarily less detailed than Milk’s, is no less haunting.

The music of Mark Isham (“Never Cry Wolf”) underlines the film’s emotional high point, the candlelight parade in Milk’s memory, which Gearhart correctly describes as “one of the most eloquent expressions of a community’s response to violence, meeting it not with more violence but with a deep regret and a feeling of tragedy about it.” But it does not shrink from the ugliness of the scene the night of the announcement of the White verdict, in which City Hall was attacked and police cars were burned where they stood

Village Voice October 16, 1984

Real Tales of the City
By Stephen Harvey

As political renegades go, Harvey Milk never had the time to become a house-hold name-at least in those households which don’t retain a yearly subscription to The Advocate. (As they recounted at the film festival press conference last week, the movie’s producers were peeved, if amused, when a major foundation turned down their grant proposal with the observation that the Harvey Milk Farm Fund regrettably didn’t meet its funding requirements.) Yet Milk earned an indelible footnote in the annals of American advocacy politics, perhaps more for the way in which he died than the achievements of a brief civic career. Assassinated in 1978 along with Mayor George Moscone by a disgruntled colleague on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors - a man deranged by the ingestion of too much junk food according to the defense lawyer who successfully copped a plea for manslaughter - Milk was both the first self-proclaimed gay civil servant elected to office in the nation’s self-proclaimed gay capital, and the modern homosexual movement’s first martyr. The last lamentable distinction reinforced for gays that bitter truth learned by civil rights activists in the 1960’s. For unpopular minorities, the quest for visibility spawns the promise of power, to be sure, but it also makes you more vulnerable to the manifest hatred of your enemies.

"The Times of Harvey Milk" is an unusually lucid and immensely moving example of partisan movie making. It’s entirely appropriate, in light of the forces Milk epitomized, that Robert Epstein’s film chooses to de-emphasize the private man in favor of the political animal. There’s an early medley of snapshots taking Milk from his nice Jewish boyhood in Woodmere, Long Island, through brief stints in the navy, on Wall Street, and as a Broadway impresario, to the camera store on Castro Street from which he charted his campaigns, in the mid-‘70’s, to represent a growing gay constituency in City Hall. Milk’s exuberant embrace of the notoriety which came with the territory is the sole personal trait which the film underscores. (For the delectation of the local six o’clock news, Milk gleefully trods on a doggie dump plopped especially for the occasion in the midst of his lawn, all to publicize the pooper-scooper ordinance he has sponsored.) The director’s real focus is on the climate which engendered Milk’s rise and his demise alike- gay street fairs and rallies versus the promised purges of the failed Briggs Amendment, which would have banned homosexuals and any advocates of gay rights from teaching in California’s schools. Scrupulously deadpan, Epstein reconstructs the parallel career of supervisor Dan White, subsequently Milk’s killer. Endowed with a lantern jaw and a bootblack coiffure, White looks for all the world like Batman in a J.C. Penny suit, while pontificating about the “old-fashioned values that built this country” for the benefit of an obsequious an omnipresent TV camera.

Much of the film’s immediacy comes from its adroit selection of such archival footage, in which the bouncy happy-talk coverage of Milk’s campaign acquires a queasy aftertaste from our knowledge of the bloody denouement. The poignance of "The Times of Harvey Milk" comes in large measure from the testimony of the movie’s talking heads, an articulate group drawn from his supporters in the Castro and disparate political allies throughout the city. His lesbian campaign manager describes an election committee of diesel dames and elfin clones worthy of the pages of Armistead Maupin. With remarkable candor, a grizzled machinist/labor organizer describes his own trajectory from abhorrence to admiration of Milk’s values and tactics. Interspersed with images of the candlelight procession that ran the length of Castro Street on the night of the Milk-Moscone murders, and the riots that followed White’s perfunctory sentence (he served less than five years), each of the witnesses recalls his reaction to the killings an dthe effect on the community at large. Some of them fight tears, others succumb helplessly, a few ignore the trickles down their cheeks as the litany of mourning continues; at this point, promiscuous nose-blowings erupted throughout Alice Tully Hall. Every year the film festival seems to dote on brownie-point nonfiction films sporting the right (that is, left) messages mated to the most sclerotic moviemaking - their natural destiny is the limbo of a Sunday afternoon slot on PBS while the rest of the nation is, justifiably, watching college football. How bracing, finally, to see something on the order of The Times of Harvey Milk, which combines real emotional urgency with a most compelling grasp of the documentary craft.

USA TODAY
HOLLYWOOD/ JACK MATHEWS

‘Harvey Milk’ documentary is highlight of film festival

 TELLURIDE, Colo.- The loudest buzz last weekend’s Telluride Film Festival was over Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. But the best film I saw wasn’t a feature-it was a documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk.

The film by Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen, is an extraordinarily wise and sensitive look at the career of Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor who, along with Mayor George Moscone, was assassinated by fellow supervisor Dan White in 1978.

All the elements of that bizarre episode - the double murder, the “Twinkie defense” trial and the resulting gay riot - are replayed in Times, and they are certain to rekindle outrage over White’s sentence. (He was paroled earlier this year, after serving less than six years on his convictions of voluntary manslaughter.)

But the film clearly does not intend to exploit the horror of White’s action, or the outrage over the jury’s decision. Those events tell their own story, and need no interpretation.

What the film does - brilliantly, through the intercutting of TV news footage with interviews with Milk’s friends and political associates - is show us who he was and how he gained his power.

Milk was the first openly gay person elected to office in the USA, not because gays outnumbered straights in his district, but because he united the gays and convinced enough of the others they had nothing to fear.

At a time when other states were repealing gay rights laws, Milk was successfully led the opposition movement to a proposition for repeal in California.
 Milk refocused that issue, arguing that the stakes were not gay rights. But human rights. The Times of Harvey Milk, to be shown in theaters this fall and on PBS next year, makes the argument even stronger.

THE NEW YORK TIMES   ARTS/ENTERTAINMENT
 SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1984

Film: "The Times of Harvey Milk"

"The Times of Harvey Milk" was shown as part of the 1984 New York Film Festival. Following are excerpts from Janet Maslin’s review, which appeared in the New York Times Oct.7. The film opened yesterday at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, Seventh Avenue between 56th and 57th streets.

Harvey stood for something more than just him,” someone remarks in “The Times of Harvey Milk,” and this warm, well-made documentary makes that eminently clear. The personality of the slain San Francisco Supervisor, who along with Mayor George Moscone was shot in 1978 by Dan White, a disgruntled former Supervisor, comes through strongly, but personality is not the film’s foremost concern. Robert Epstein, who co-directed the equally affecting “Word is Out,” indicates the ways in which Harvey Milk was emblematic of one segment of society and Dan White of another. And he traces the clash that arose between them.

This conflict is intrinsically so dramatic that the film can rely emotion. Mr. Epstein uses abundant news footage of both Mr. Milk and Mr. White, and the ironies are overwhelming. Mr. White, for instance, is heard advocating neighborhood baseball teams and suggesting that maybe his district could challenge Harvey Milk’s district to a game. “Dan White comes across as the kind of son any mother would be proud of,” a television reporter declares.

Harvey Milk is seen as friendly, charming, intense and instinctively political; in lobbying for a law on dog droppings, for instance, he deliberately plants a specimen in the park and steps in it during a television interview to help make his point. Mr. Milk’s friends and associates contribute many anecdotes to the film’s portrait of him, but Mr. Epstein is generally careful to keep them in the context.

Harvey Milk’s political career and the victory it represented for San Francisco’s homosexual community is contrasted with the first stirrings of the Moral Majority, stirrings to which Mr. White was especially responsive. The film examines the controversy surrounding Proposition 6, the proposed California ordinance barring homosexuals from teaching in public schools, and issue on which Mr. Milk and Mr. White were sharply divided.

It was four days after the proposition was defeated, thanks in large part to Harvey Milk’s efforts, that Mr. White resigned his post. Five days later, Mr. White announced he had changed his mind and wanted to be a Supervisor again. It was 12 days after that, on the morning when Mayor Moscone had planned to announce that he would not reinstate Mr. White, that the shootings took place.

Since Mr. Milk’s political career embodies the rise of the homosexual community’s political power in San Francisco, and since the results of Mr. White’s brief trial were evidence of a backlash, the film would have benefited from devoting closer attention to the trial itself. Mr. White’s tearful confession, which was thought to have helped sway the jury toward its verdict of involuntary manslaughter, is heard. But his comments explaining his mysterious and abrupt resignation are not, even though they might have revealed something of Mr. White’s mental state at the time and shed some light on the verdict.

If Mr. Epstein can’t fully explain what happened, he can certainly tell the story with urgency, passion and, finally, indignation. Toward the end of the film, a young black man asks rhetorically what sort of sentence he might have received for such a crime. Another interviewee speculates that Mr. White’s staunch support for middle-class values and opposition to the homosexual community’s growing power contributed to his light sentence. (He was released from prison last January.) And a third man suggests how pivotal Harvey Milk and his cause may have been to the verdict: “I think if it were just Moscone who’d been killed, he would have been in San Quentin for the rest of his life.

Return to top