That Man: Peter Berlin (2006)

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

That Man: Peter Berlin (2005)*** (out of 4)If you're a fan of model and actor Peter Berlin then you should get a kick out of this documentary, which covers his entire career and features interviews with the man himself as well as some of his closest friends and fans like John Waters.Director Jim Tushinski once again does a very good job at taking a subject that might not appeal to everyone and showing it in a way that is not only educational but a lot of fun. I say educational because I'm sure there are many people that would be put off by the type of films Berlin made but you could make a great argument that he should be much better known than he is.Like the documentary the same director would later do on Wakefield Poole, this here works perfectly well at introducing you to the subject as well as letting you know what type of impact they had on their professional and why calling Berlin (and Poole) ground-breaking is worthy of what they did. This documentary certainly does a very good job at taking a look at various aspects of Berlin's life and best of all is we get his thoughts on all of it.

Peter Berlin and I'll use the name that he invented for himself rather than the German name he was born with made only a very few films but has remained to this day a legend in the gay porn field. He is that to this day because he brought an artistic flair into a highly specialized field of leather fetishism. I well remember still being in the closet and looking at those ads in Greenwich Village for That Boy and thinking this was the ideal man for us all.As the film shows us even as a senior citizen Berlin lives in San Francisco a figure both of awe that even like Garbo (and the comparison is used in the film) people see him, acknowledge him, but give him a wide berth. He's no boy next door, at least not anyone like him ever lived next door to me.I'm not sure of how he would take the comparison, but a recent biography of John Wayne quotes the man as saying he was just a kid named Duke Morrison from Iowa who lucked out and got into the John Wayne business. So it was with this immigrant kid from Germany who got into the Peter Berlin business.Some gay community icons offer comment and perspective on Peter Berlin, none more than the man himself.

If you don't like self-absorbed crazy people, this film isn't for you. You should probably also avoid moving to San Francisco, because he's not really that unusual by SF standards. I remember seeing him standing around in the Castro (at Hibernia Beach!) in the seventies. Even though it was an era of sexual freedom that we can barely conceive now, seeing him was shocking. The film doesn't really convey what it was like to see this caricature of male sex in his see-through pants with enormous basket on display. The first time that I saw him, I just kept thinking, "Isn't he going to be arrested?". Later that evening, I had other thoughts. I had no idea who he was until this movie came out, but that image is still burned into my brain. It was transfixing, and this film is a nostalgic look at the era that made him an icon.

This could've & should've been a documentary short. Peter Berlin is just not that important nor that interesting to justify this stulifyingly dull & overlong shot on video documentary. If the directors wanted to make a feature length documentary they could've expanded their scope to other erotic artists at the time such as James Bidgood (of PINK NARCISSUS fame) or Wakefield Pool (TAKE ONE, BOYS IN THE SAND). Peter Berlin is a forgettable & mostly forgotten footnote in gay erotic history & this snoozer of a documentary will not change that.If you want to check out a good documentary on an obscure cult figure check out Andrew Horn's THE NOMI SONG. If you want to see a fun & fluffy look at gay erotica from the 1970s check out Joseph Lovett's GAY SEX IN THE 1970s. But skip THAT MAN PETER BERLIN. If you waste your time & money on this you'll say the same thing my boyfriend did as we exited The Cinema Village: "That man, Peter Berlin owes me $10.50 plus 85 minutes of my life!".