For camp lovers, the Eisenhower '50s was a candy-colored renaissance, the point where cultural repression and blinkered post-war optimism generated just the right kind of comedic friction. Arriving on the heels of 2003's witty Rock Hudson-Doris Day spoof Down With Love, Richard Day's Straight-Jacket trades on the same tongue-in-cheek dialogue and cheeky innuendos, but loses its sass too quickly. It would be enough to poke fun at the sexual politics and hypocrisies of Hudson's Hollywood—the lead character, in case anyone misses the reference, is Guy Stone—but writer-director Day has a regrettably serious agenda behind all those Paul Rudnick-like one-liners. Linking anti-gay sentiment with the Red Scare in an awkward union, Day makes the Pleasantville mistake of retroactively attempting to damn the intolerance of a bygone era, and the fun quickly dissipates into speechifying.
Flatly adapted from Day's stage play, Straight-Jacket gets a few early laughs from a narcissistic gay star trying desperately to conform to the ruler-straight standards of a craven studio system. When illicit photos of him leaving a guys-only soiree are leaked to the press, marquee giant Matt Letscher and his cutthroat agent (Veronica Cartwright) scramble to cover up the truth, lest he lose the title role in an upcoming production of Ben-Hur. With his career on the line, they arrange a shotgun marriage between Letscher and giddily oblivious secretary Carrie Preston, but Preston doesn't take well to the part of sham wife. Soon enough, Preston becomes a cheery suburban housewife, rearranging the décor in his estate ("Sears came!," she cheers), preparing home-cooked meals ("A fat husband can't get far!"), and keeping Letscher away from his cruising bachelor scene. But things take a turn when Letscher falls for hunky screenwriter Adam Greer, whose coal-mining drama has drawn attention from the Feds for its Communist leanings.
Working on a nothing budget, Day improvises some creative ways around period recreation, including some hilariously incongruous rear projection and other computer-animated backdrops that look like something from The Sims. He also has infectious fun lampooning Hollywood and starchy social mores, particularly once Preston's conservative values impede on Letscher's swinging gay lifestyle. But once Greer comes on the scene, Day starts taking his hero's reform seriously, and the film becomes a painfully sincere portrait of a shallow, closeted Hollywood playboy who learns to embrace his identity as a doubly damned "homosexual Communist." Though title Straight-Jacket suggests his struggle with conformity, the film feels more liberated when everyone is living a lie.