Chaotic gay hookups, a legendary director, and Angela Lansbury—why isn’t this a queer classic?
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we revisit 1970’s Something For Everyone, a forgotten gem that deserves its chance to shine again.Every week in this column, we take a deep dive into an older film that has somehow made a mark on gay culture; popular or forgotten, acclaimed or critically panned, obvious in its connection to our community or more ambiguous.
We’ve been choosing movies that are already assumed to be (in one way or another) part of the queer film canon.This week, we’re asking the question: What exactly makes a movie appeal to our sensibilities?
What makes it worthy of being part of this growing, evolving, living canon? This week’s film—the little-known and little-seen 1970 dark comedy Something For Everyone—may have given us a checklist in identifying what makes the queer community gasp, empathize, clutch our pearls, and immediately want to watch a movie again after it’s done.First, there’s the story.Something For Everyone follows Kondrad Ludwig (Cabaret‘s Michael York), a young man with seemingly no past who arrives in the German countryside with nothing but a fairytale storybook and a plan.
He is immediately taken with the magnificent Castle Ornstein, a property owned by the mysterious, widowed Countess Herthe von Ornstein (icon Angela Lansbury).
