Sidney J Furie (1964)
Sidney J Furie already knew his way around British youth culture of a kind but The Young Ones (1961) hardly prepares you for this. (Furie directed another Cliff Richard film, Wonderful Life, released in the same year as The Leather Boys.) Nearly half a century on, this story of London motor-bikers stands up as a strong piece of drama, although it’s fascinating for reasons largely linked to the passage of time. The locations and details supply a rich social record (a hoarding advertising Watney’s Pale Ale particularly took my eye). When the young marrieds Dot and Reggie go into the Ace Cafe (a real place in North London), where the bikers and their girls congregate, she orders two teas and the waitress automatically turns to him for the money; at home in their tiny flat, Reggie’s peremptory demands for meals on time now seem outrageous. At the heart of the story, however, is another relationship – the one between Reggie and another leather boy, Pete.
It soon becomes clear that Pete is queer but Reggie’s sexuality remains opaque. This, according to Wikipedia, is a significant change from the source material – a 1961 novel of the same name by Gillian Freeman – in which the two men become a homosexual couple. No doubt it was caution that caused the film-makers to modify the book’s central theme – Freeman also wrote the screenplay – but what’s so interesting about The Leather Boys is that this timid approach makes the film more suggestive, especially in retrospect. When Reggie splits from Dot and goes back to live at his gran’s house, Pete becomes a lodger and they share not just a room but a double bed. I doubt that two working-class boys sleeping together in the early 1960s necessarily signified what it virtually has to signify now. (Increased sexual enlightenment and liberation may mean that two people of the same sex are more constrained about sharing a bed today than they were in the dark ages.) As far as we see, Reggie and Pete don’t exchange any physical affection in bed. What we do see is that, as a consequence, the sleeping arrangements can be sustained because Reggie needn’t worry and Pete is getting something out of their spending each night together (albeit less than he wants).
The centrality of the men’s relationship is also obscured by the casting. Dot is played by Rita Tushingham and, because she’s by some way the biggest name in the film, we tend to assume the main story will be Dot’s short-lived marriage to Reggie. When they’re on honeymoon at Butlin’s in Bognor, Reggie wants to do nothing but have sex with Dot; once we pick up their lives a few months later, he won’t touch her and it’s she who’s the frustrated one. I guess in the novel this is a clear signpost; retaining it in the screenplay without confirming Reggie’s homosexuality may amount to a loss of nerve yet it creates an indefiniteness that’s preferable to neatness. When Reggie and Pete go on a trip to Brighton they pick up a couple of girls. Reggie’s eager to do this; it’s obviously not what Pete had in mind and the encounter doesn’t lead anywhere. This too could be seen as a weakness in the script but that’s not how you experience this non-event. You experience rather a renewed sense of Reggie’s mixture of restlessness and inertia – the same two qualities, both suggesting discontent without pinpointing the cause of it, which were hinted at in the scenes of him and Dot in their Butlin’s chalet. The lighting in the chalet seems to get darker and the atmosphere there certainly does: Sidney Furie and the DoP Gerald Gibbs manage to get across in these sequences a sense of sexual uncertainty and an accompanying unhappy bafflement on Reggie’s part that feels highly expressive of the time.
Colin Campbell makes Reggie touching because he suggests, without condescension, a young man who’s not very bright. Campbell doesn’t show a wide range and it’s no surprise he didn’t go on to great things (perhaps his best-known role subsequently was in the highly successful ITV drama of the early 1970s, A Family at War). But he’s highly effective here: Reggie may be slow on the uptake and unsure of his feelings but Campbell also shows how he’s naturally, immediately drawn to the warmth of different kinds of affection – from Dot, from Pete, from his gran (beautifully played by Gladys Henson). You root for Reggie all the way through, even when he’s bawling out Dot for not getting his tea on the table. As Pete, Dudley Sutton seems bad at first, veering from one accent to another as if he’s trying out different ideas for doing the part. But the upside of this is an emotional variety and edge and Sutton’s protean quality begins to make sense: he creates a character who can – has to – get by in different environments: in his temporary labouring job, down at the Ace Cafe, making Reggie and his gran laugh with his theatricality and humour; in the gay dockside pub in the closing scenes of the film, where Reggie finally understands Pete’s sexuality and walks away. (This closing image, although striking enough, is clichéd – and doesn’t make a lot of sense. I asked Sally where she thought Reggie was heading and she thought it was anywhere, as long as this was in the opposite direction from Pete. I guess that is what we’re meant to think but, since Reggie can go straight back to his room at his gran’s, the decisive march towards camera with Pete’s figure receding at the back of the frame doesn’t really amount to much.)
Rita Tushingham’s acting is out of kilter with what Campbell and Sutton are doing. Either she or Sidney Furie or both of them appear to see it as obligatory that she gives A Performance to an extent not expected of the lesser lights. Tushingham’s facial eccentricity holds your attention but she defines Dot in a busy, mannered way. (She’s better in her quieter moments and perhaps best in her silent ones.) On a competitive bike ride to and from Edinburgh (with a few shots of the Mound), Reggie and Dot are reconciled: he began the journey with Pete and she with another biker (Johnny Briggs) but Reggie and Dot return together. When they get back, well after the others, to the Ace Cafe, Pete ambushes Reggie but the night they spend together – with Reggie in an armchair – is their last. Reggie goes to the flat intending to make a fresh start with Dot. He finds the man she started the Edinburgh trip with in her bed. The outcome is obvious but the sequence of events leading to it gives a rather scary idea of how Dot’s mind and emotions work. She thought she was going to get back with Reggie, then Pete whisked him off; although Reggie seemed a bit reluctant to go, Dot decides she must have got it wrong so she resumes with the other man instead. Simple as that. The sense that Rita Tushingham is doing a (self-conscious) turn has the effect of making the early spats between Dot and Reggie lightweight. When the rows get more serious, you can’t work out how things got to this point. This feeling of puzzlement gives the relationship’s trajectory a more lifelike quality.
I don’t mean to suggest that The Leather Boys is merely a series of happy accidents. Furie consistently gets a good rhythm between the actors, even if Tushingham’s playing sometimes halts it. He stages the rows between two people better than ones involving more than two. (An argy-bargy outside an old people’s home involving Reggie and Dot and several members of Reggie’s family, as they make unsuccessful attempts to try and put his grandmother in it, is particularly crude.) But it’s the scenes without cross words but full of tensions you can’t always fathom that are especially strong. Furie also shows fine judgment in conveying how the bikes give the boys a more stimulating life and identity but this isn’t overdone – it’s part of the film’s texture rather than a foreground theme. At the same time, the road sequences impart excitement and danger. And Gillian Freeman writes excellent realistic dialogue, most subtly in the early scenes between Dot and Reggie, with the repetitions in what they say hinting at the possibility of suffocating routine ahead. (Freeman must have had a thing about leathers: four years later, she also worked on the screenplay for Jack Cardiff’s The Girl on a Motorcycle.)
21 February 2012
