Review: Charles Nelson Reilly Shines in "The Life of Reilly" (Yes, THAT Charles Nelson Reilly!)

There's a reoccurring joke in The Life of Reilly, the new film version of 70s game show icon Charles Nelson Reilly's one-man stage show Save it for the Stage where everyone think he's already dead.

In fact, Nelson Reilly died shortly after the filming of this movie, just out on DVD. The film is literally his last performance.

But what a performance — and what a legacy.

Unless you were gay in the 1970s, it's hard to understand the very weird phenomenon of flamboyant, coded-gay comedians like Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, both of whom were most famous for being "television personalities" who appeared on game shows and talk shows.

How was it that these comedians were allowed to so wildly camp it up in an era when homosexuality wasn't discussed and an actor's career was over if he came out? The bargain they made with the world was that they were allowed to allowed to be as "gay" as they wanted — providing they never actually came out, and all their gay jokes were coded with plausible deniability.

Some gay and bisexual men of the era found great comfort in these campy figures, seeing some form of themselves acknowledged and even sort of accepted for the first time. Others dismissed these men as participating in some kind of gay minstrel show, allowing themselves to be objects of scorn and ridicule for laughs.

My personal opinion is that these folks operated under very unforgiving rules that they did not write and, like most of us, they did the best they could under the circumstances. In retrospect, it seems very obvious that these men were very important cultural "stepping stones" on the way to full gay equality — and not to be too pretentious about it, maybe they were even sort of Christ-like figures, suffering the indignities of 1970s homophobia so that we all might eventually find more acceptance.

So who was Charles Nelson Reilly really?

In The Life of Reilly, we learn that first and foremost, he was an actor — a comic actor, but definitely an actor (and not a comedian). The line between "characters" and "real people" is thin for Nelson Reilly — so thin that each time he introduces a new figure from his past, he also names the actor who would "play" him or her.

But the point isn't that these people are mere characters in some performance of his life; the point is that great stage characters, to Nelson Reilly (and all good actors), are as real as people.

Nelson Reilly's early years were almost unimaginably tragic, full of alcoholism, mental illness, poverty, and death. His mother was a racist witch who openly discouraged his dreams.

"I spent my adolescence in an Ingmar Bergman film," he quips at one point. And in one of the funniest sequences in the film, he describes his extended family members, how each of them was either very eccentric or outright (literally) insane. Then he recounts how he once overheard the neighbors talking about him as a child as "odd."

"How do think I felt being the 'odd' one in a family like that?!" he rages. The jokes here — and there are plenty of them — are bittersweet, laced with anger and despair.

Later, after being encouraged to become an actor by a kind teacher, Nelson Reilly finds himself in an acting class taught by Uta Hagen. He reads a long list of his fellow unknown students, and it's an astounding who's-who of some of the greatest actors of his generation: Jason Robards, Geraldine Page, Hal Holbrook, Jack Lemmon, and on and on.

It might be strange to think of the campy joke that we know of as Charles Nelson Reilly being surrounded by great actors such as these, but by this point, we know that he is much more than the game show icon he would become. Now he just needs to convince everyone else.

It's not easy. He's told flat-out by the president of NBC, "They don't let queers on television."

But through the sheer force of his will (and obvious acting talent), Nelson Reilly proves everyone wrong, finding great success on television as a comic actor (and also on stage, winning a Tony for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and originating a role in Hello Dolly!).

Next Page! The greatest come-back in the history of The Tonight Show!