Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970) is a British comedy directed by Douglas Hickox. What matters is the angle through which it’s presented in the extras festooning the new Blu-ray from Severin Films. Nowadays, this campy collision of swinging Swinging Sixties London, the sexual revolution, and cinema’s loosening censorship is perceived as a Joe Orton film.
The controversial Orton was an English playwright of three scandalous comedies that combine sex farce with a classier Oscar Wilde tradition. Entertaining Mr. Sloane was the first of these in 1963.
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Just as he was riding high, Joe Orton was murdered at 34 in 1967, an event re-enacted with tragic aplomb in a biopic called Prick Up Your Ears (1987), directed by Stephen Frears and scripted by Alan Bennett from John Lahr’s 1978 biography of Orton. Joe Orton’s death at the hands of his gay lover was fresh in public memory, amid tut-tutting schadenfreude from cultural conservatives, when the film of Entertaining Mr. Sloane was released.
Douglas Hickox, who’d co-founded Canterbury Films with Douglas Kentish to produce commercials, bought the rights to Joe Orton’s play because he perceived it as a good opportunity for their first feature, with Kentish producing and Hickox directing. Aided by Clive Exton’s screenplay, Wolfgang Suschitsky’s photography, and the excellent actors, Hickox combines style, pace, and dialogue into a film that’s still sharp and uncomfortable in its amoral insouciance.
[See the age-restricted trailer on YouTube.]
Sex and Death and Entertaining Mr. Sloane
Perhaps reflecting the filmmakers’ experience with commercials, the opening shot of Entertaining Mr. Sloane begins with an ad. On a red London double-decker bus approaching from the distance, the camera picks out a slogan from Pan Am: “You look like you could use a rest”. Is this product placement or a happy accident?
We hear a caw, and the focus shifts to the foreground and drops down to reveal a raven, harbinger of death, perching on a gravestone in a cemetery as though doing a spot of foreshadowing. So that’s the “rest” we could use. A headstone says “In loving memory of” and then Joe Orton’s name appears before the title, seemingly in acknowledgement of the playwright’s death.
Focusing on an even closer plane, the camera brings us to a woman’s arm draped across a bench. The camera follows her arm across her sheer, flimsy, green, lavender paisley frou-frou to a buxom decolletage of golden cross and plastic beads. Panning up, her other hand introduces a phallic red and white ice lolly to her lips.
A funeral is happening, and the camera cuts between the sensual tactility of licking the lolly and the priest’s persnickety handling of the dirt he tosses into the grave. Nor will these moments be the last gestures with mouths and hands, for Entertaining Mr. Sloane is edited with an advertiser’s eye for cheeky cutaways.
Finishing her snack, the frumpy middle-aged woman rises from the bench to display how inappropriately dressed she is, according to standards of taste, with the mini-dress fluttering up to reveal her underwear in the sun. She’s oblivious to what anyone thinks, as though she’s determined not to let Swinging London pass her by.
Suddenly, in a new foreground detail, a shirtless young man sits bolt upright, coming into view like the original Nosferatu popping erect out of a coffin. The woman shamelessly addresses him, complimenting his smooth skin and inviting him home amid pseudo-motherly remarks. When she asks his name, he hesitates a moment before saying Mr. Sloane. As they walk offscreen, the camera shows that name on a headstone from which he’s just plucked his moniker.
Peter McEnery plays the so-called Mr. Sloane as a sort of bleached boy toy in the mode of Joe Dallesandro in Andy Warhol’s films. The woman is Kath (Beryl Reid), who announces herself as more or less a widow and says she’s lost her son. We’ll never quite learn the details, but her not-quite-husband was the Navy chum of her jealous brother Ed (Harry Andrews). Their feisty yet doddering Dada Kemp (Alan Webb) doesn’t speak to Ed since discovering him in a sexual felony with a male friend, and now Dada recognizes Sloane as the man who killed his ex-employer. Dada and Kath live in a large house in the cemetery.
The film version of Entertaining Mr. Sloane uses a real cemetery, as explained in a bonus on the locations. In Joe Orton’s play, they lived in a dump, not unlike something out of Samuel Beckett, and Kath picked up Sloane at the library. In real life, Orton and his partner notoriously spent a few months in jail for defacing library books by altering the covers with new illustrations.
Clive Exton’s screenplay preserves Kath’s assertion that she met Sloane at the library, a claim now turned into a prevarication. She’s very much about covering her appetites with middle-class hypocrisies and conventional phrases, and Ed’s the same. He promptly hires Sloane as a leather-clad chauffeur for his garish pink Pontiac Parisienne when he discovers the lad lounging and leering in tight white underpants as though posing for a crucifix.
Sex and Death and Joe Orton
Joe Orton’s works are in-your-face black satirical comedies of sex and death calculated to shock the bourgeois with an utter lack of morals. Orton encapsulated a postwar generational mood that didn’t quite come out of nowhere. He tapped into traditions: Elizabethan revenge plays, Restoration comedies, vaudeville, and the novels of Evelyn Waugh, whose The Loved One (1965) was filmed by Tony Richardson and scripted by Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. Other ’60s cage-rattlers of macabre merriment include Bryan Forbes’ The Wrong Box (1966), Basil Dearden’s The Assassination Bureau (1969), and Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class (1972), co-starring Harry Andrews, from Peter Barnes’ 1968 play.
Joe Orton’s specialty was throwing in queer and polymorphous sexuality during a period when laws were on the eve of loosening but English homosexuals were still being arrested. The 1967 decriminalization of such acts led British filmmakers of England-filmed projects towards a brief vogue in bisexual triangles.
In the same year Hickox filmed Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Harold Prince directed an English cast, including Michael York and Angela Lansbury in Something for Everyone, in which York’s unscrupulous scoundrel sleeps his way to privilege. He’s the satirical, morally bankrupt, materialistic equivalent of Terence Stamp’s polyamorous angel in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). As writer David McGillivray points out in another extra, Something for Everyone is very Ortonesque and comes from another British writer, Hugh Wheeler, who was probably a Joe Orton fan.
The Double-Bind of Distastes
Beryl Reid starred in another pioneering work of queer cinema. For The Killing of Sister George (1968), directed by Robert Aldrich from Frank Marcus’ British play of 1964, Reid received a Golden Globe nomination for her memorable portrayal of an aging actress who’s being axed from a soap opera amid personal politics. Adding insult to infamy, her younger lover (Susannah York) is being poached by her producer (Coral Browne).
Slapped with an X rating from the newly formed MPAA, The Killing of Sister George wasn’t especially well received, and some gay activists, such as Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet (1981), sniffed that its images weren’t affirmative. In other words, it applied the same cynical realism to queer characters that heterosexuals received in the new cinema of the late ’60s, and which characterizes all Aldrich films.
We understand the social context of starving for “positive” models. Still, it’s also true that art should impress later generations in their contexts to survive as more than a curiosity. That psychologically and socially convincing portrayals will always be positive in that sense.
Entertaining Mr. Sloane was subject to a similar double-bind of distastes. Some mainstream or conservative viewers didn’t think its topics and attitudes were appropriate, while activists in search of the progressive could complain that it presented unpleasant predatory characters, a mixture of the pathetic and manipulative. To a certain extent, gay critics have always been suspicious of bisexual opportunism in drama, and Entertaining Mr. Sloane heralded a mini-wave of largely British-accented projects that might be called fluid or flexible or whatever’s the new adjectival bottle for vintage tastes.
A Cluster-Flock of Queer Cinema
Other titles in the roll call include Mark Rydell’s The Fox (1968), from a D.H. Lawrence story; Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), starring Michael York as a thinly disguised version of Isherwood; and John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) written by Penelope Gilliatt. That’s quite a cultural cluster-flock.
Other examples include William Friedkin’s 1970 film, The Boys in the Band, from Mart Crowley’s 1968 Off-Broadway play. Nor should we overlook the often overlooked but engaging Staircase (1969), directed in London by Stanley Donen from a play by England’s Charles Dyer. Things were popping and hopping, partly under England’s decriminalization and partly under the American impetus of the Stonewall protests in the summer of 1969.
Also, notice how many of these films derive from plays. Joe Orton’s success can safely be cited as a driving force, especially for the cheeky comical projects that cock a snoot at so-called middle-class morality.
As a film director, Douglas Hickox’s career wasn’t prolific or illustrious. He moved on to the campy Vincent Price vehicle Theatre of Blood (1973), in which a ham actor perpetrates Shakespearean revenge on critics who’ve trashed him.
Clive Exton, meanwhile, was an accomplished writer for the small screen. During this period, he was branching into intriguing films such as Karel Reisz’ biopic Isadora (1968) and Richard Fleischer’s beautifully grubby true-crime tale 10 Rillington Place (1971). Still, he mainly stuck with television and remained successful in comedies and mysteries.
Severin Films’ Blu-ray of Entertaining Mr. Sloane presents a rich, eye-pleasing 2K scan from the negative and tons of Ortonian extras, including interviews with McEnery, Lahr, Orton’s sister, and with several actors who played Sloane on stage. A profile of Reid’s career is especially welcome.
A commentary track in which film historian Nathaniel Thompson chats with Joe Orton scholar Dr. Emma Parker ranges widely over Orton’s contemporaries like Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, as well as later artists influenced by Orton. Parker discusses the fact that, rather incredibly, an earlier production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane aired on British TV in 1968; that would have been a fabulous Blu-ray extra in the spirit of excess.