LGBTQ+ Pride 2025: Norman… Is That You?

Ben (Redd Foxx) travels to Los Angeles to see his son, Norman (Michael Warren) after his wife, Beatrice (Pearl Bailey) runs off with Ben’s brother.  Looking for comfort, he instead finds Norman at home with his “friend”, Garson (Dennis Dugan) and it soon becomes apparent to Ben that Garson and Norman are more than just friends.  This anger’s Ben who goes out and buys a bunch of books on the subject to see if he can figure out what went wrong and how he can change his son.  After a confrontation goes wrong, Norman leaves and goes to a co-worker’s home as Garson and Ben end up getting to know each other.  In the meantime, Beatrice returns and finds out the truth about her son, and at first, she is shocked and angry, but eventually begins to accept it.  With some surprising news when Norman finally returns, all of their lives get up-ended.

Norman… Is That You? Is a 1976 American comedy film based on a play of the same name.  It was released in theaters on September 29, 1976, to mostly negative reviews.  Richard Eder of The New York Times summed it up best as “It is a series of bad jokes about homosexuality, strung upon trite, situation comedy and collapsing into what is meant to be an uplifting message about people being allowed to do their own thing.”.  Redd Foxx is often mentioned as the one bright spot of the movie with Roger Ebert saying, “The movie isn’t much (and it’s based on a Broadway play that was even less), but while Foxx is onscreen, we’re willing to forgive it a lot. He stands there in a clutter of cliches, bad jokes and totally baffling character motivation, and he makes us laugh.”  The movie is often compared to a television sitcom in both talent and quality as the movie was mostly shot on video tape and transferred to film giving it a cheaper and less polished look.  Not all of the reviews were bad, Brian Perry of The Toronto Star called it “perhaps the most enjoyable comedy movie to come out of Hollywood in months”, adding that “it handles a touchy subject with a surprising amount of good taste and seldom falls into the trap of using the topic as a source of cheap or easy laughs.” He, along with a handful of other critics praise the film, again mainly for the performance of Redd Foxx.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Broadway play this is based on only lasting 10 nights during its run, although it did become a favorite of community and regional theatres.  The movie did change the location from New York to Los Angeles and the leads were not African American, but Jewish.  Neither of those changes really affect the story that much.  The film’s treatment of homosexuality isn’t the worst I have ever seen, but its use of stereotypes to generate laughs does wear thin.  More than the stereotypes, there are several plot points I found a bit uncomfortable. The fact that Norman asks Garson to move out of the apartment until he can find a way to tell his father that he is gay, felt incredibly unfair.  The sub-plot of Ben’s co-worker attempting to seduce him felt odd and out of place, and the entire ending of the movie feels unresolved with the parent conceiving of a plan meant to deceive Norman and Garson.  For the title character, Norman isn’t really in the film that much, instead it is really Ben and Garson who interact the most, and one would have hoped that after getting to know Garson and really enjoying himself, Ben would have had some kind of character shift, but he really doesn’t. There is some believability in the love between Garson and Norman, but it is overshadowed by Norman’s fear of disappointing his parents.  There are some funny moments, and I laughed from time to time, but overall, it felt overly long and tiresome and with little plot pay off in the end.  The film does hold some historical significance within the LGBTQ movie genre, as it is one of the first to address homosexuality within a black family, this was not a topic explored much at the time.