Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) Queer Film B-

DIRECTOR: Douglas Hickox.

Joe Orton, the brilliantly anarchic gay playwright who detonated onto the British theatre scene in the swinging sixties, left behind a small but ferociously influential body of work before his lover Kenneth Halliwell murdered him in 1967 and then took his own life. Their relationship—and its violent end—was later immortalized by Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina in Stephen Frears’s superb 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears.

Douglas Hickox’s 1970 screen adaptation of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, scripted by the ever-reliable Clive Exton, inevitably loses some of the play’s sting. Orton’s Sloane should radiate danger: a seductive, amoral drifter whose beauty is both weapon and camouflage. Peter McEnery, alas, is directed toward blandness. Instead of the magnetic, predatory youth who destabilizes an entire household, we get a polite young man who seems barely capable of corrupting a houseplant. The sexual opportunism remains—Sloane still beds both siblings, Kath and Ed—but the charge is muted, the transgression oddly domesticated.

Beryl Reid and Harry Andrews, however, are a delight as our aging sister and brother. Reid leans into Kath’s grotesque neediness with gusto (even surviving some truly unforgiving wardrobe choices), while Andrews gives Ed a sly, buttoned-up authority that makes his attraction to Sloane both funny and unexpectedly touching. Their final-act “marriage” arrangement—Ed officiating Kath’s union with a protesting Sloane, followed by Kath’s cheerful blessing of Ed’s own partnership—lands as both outrageous farce and a strangely hopeful premonition of queer futures. The joke is that it’s absurd; the subtext is that it’s also perfectly reasonable.

Alan Webb rounds out the quartet as “the Dadda,” doing a rather shameless Barry Fitzgerald impression. His early demise—after glimpsing too much of Sloane’s extracurricular activity—removes him from the action but not from the plot. His rigor-mortised corpse becomes a prop in the film’s gleefully macabre finale, a reminder that Orton’s comedy always had a corpse or two rattling beneath the floorboards.

It’s worth noting that McEnery had already played a gay character with far more nuance in Victim (1961), opposite Dirk Bogarde, a landmark of early queer cinema. That earlier performance only underscores how defanged his Sloane is here.

The result is a film that entertains but never quite captures Orton’s wickedness. The play’s original cocktail of sex, violence, and social satire becomes something milder—still enjoyable, but missing the dangerous sparkle that made Orton such a thrilling, subversive voice.

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