DIRECTOR: John Schlesinger
BOTTOM LINE: So fashionable in 1965, so dated today. Never has a film demonstrated how rapidly modishness withers. Still, it does feature a star-making and Academy Award-winning turn by the impossibly beautiful Julie Christie, even if far more people saw her as Lara in David Lean’s equally lackluster “Doctor Zhivago,” released the same year. Christie is Diana Scott, a young, successful model in swinging sixties London who plays with the affections of two older men (Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey), one of whom is married (Bogarde).
Bogarde and Harvey were both gay. The latter gained massive advances in his career because of his decade-long relationship with producer James Woolf. Woolf, with his brother John, had founded Romulus/Remus Films in the early 50s and produced Harvey’s star-making performance in “Room at the Top.”
Director John Schlesinger would go on to direct far better Queer Films such as “Midnight Cowboy” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which will be covered in my follow-up essay on Queer Cinema: “Queer Cinema Comes Out (1967 – 1976).”
The Oscar-winning original screenplay is by Frederic Raphael.
STREAMING: Amazon Prime
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967-table-summary
https://thebrownees.net/fifty-two-post-hays-code-queer-films-released-in-the-decade-1967-1976
