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'Brilliant, moving...' The Times on AEINY 19/03/09
The Times reviews 'An Englishman in New York', 19th March 2009.
In the last scene of the 1975 TV film The Naked Civil Servant John Hurt, as the master exhibitionist Quentin Crisp, makes short work of a group of young "queer-baiters" trying to extort money from him in a park. "You can't touch me now. I'm one of the stately homos of England," he says, in that arch, camp brogue - and sallies forth, blue-waved hair, make-up and all.
For Richard Laxton, the director of the much-anticipated sequel, An Englishman in New York - which will receive its UK premiere next week at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival - Crisp has always inspired ambivalence. "To be honest," Laxton says, "when I watched that I didn't think, ‘Great, what a brave man', but more, ‘Oh no, that is exactly the kind of gay man my parents would be horrified for me to grow into'."
For all his profound individualism and openness, especially being openly gay at a time when it was illegal and so socially proscribed, Crisp was not only rejected by homophobic straights but also gays who viewed him as being too obvious and embarrassing. Crisp didn't care, or seem to.
That first film still feels fresh watching it today: this is partly down to its unapologetic and endlessly quotable subject and also to the inventive and whimsical, sharp script of Philip Mackie as well as Jack Gold's spare, beautiful direction. In the first film, a gay club rips up Crisp's membership. He is put in the dock on a trumped-up charge of soliciting. He takes to the witness box (mindful of playing to an audience) and manages to secure an acquittal by declaring not only his homosexuality but the impossibility of managing to solicit anyone because of his outré appearance.
Crisp took every sling and arrow and made a great quote from them. "On the day that war was declared, I went out and bought two pounds of henna," he says in the film. "For all I knew we could have been in for a very lean time." "Why do you want to join the Army?" a recruiting sergeant, witheringly eyeing his effeminacy and dyed hair, asks. "To avoid starvation." "What use do you think you will be in the Army?" "Well, anyone can get killed."
In the moving and funny sequel, written by Brian Fillis, Hurt again plays Crisp - who died aged 90 in 1999 - during his final years in New York. Whereas the first film was quite properly celebratory, Laxton's film burrows beneath the slap to uncover the real Crisp. "That was difficult: even with his closest friends, and maybe even to himself, Quentin revealed very little beyond that façade," Laxton says.
He is still deliciously quotable: "Beauty is in the eye of the possessor"; "The moment I saw Manhattan I wanted it. It was more like the movies than I had ever dreamt."
Crisp became a film critic and incurred the wrath of New York gays when he described Aids as a "fad". He was utterly at sea with modern gay dress codes and sexual mores. Laxton also intriguingly investigates the fault line between Crisp's desire for solitude and what Laxton feels may have been simple loneliness. His famous musing about the "great dark man" that so eluded him - the more effeminate he was, the less likely he felt that any man would ever be attracted to him - is revisited. Cynthia Nixon (Miranda in Sex and the City) plays Penny Arcade, the activist and performer he shares a stage with.
Crisp's New York friendships are fragile and some of the most moving moments in the film come when he realises how much his close friends, an artist and a journalist, mean to him. This is not overdone: Crisp remains crisp at all times, but in Laxton's film there is a sense that Crisp knows that his absolute refusal to be anyone but himself, to never explain himself or apologise or move with the times, does have a cost. "Quentin was stubborn," says Laxton. "He felt that if he admitted he was wrong then the scaffolding would crumble." (A lovely scene touching on this features secret cheques and Elizabeth Taylor.)
Hurt had been sent countless scripts for a sequel, but "rather loved" this one, Laxton says. The director was nervous: "I knew how much that first film meant to so many people, not just gays but to anyone who felt trapped by society. It broke John a career. He absolutely was Quentin Crisp - people remember him-as-Crisp rather than Crisp-as-Crisp. Who am I to tell him how to play it? We both felt strongly that it needed to tell us something about Quentin that a documentary wouldn't. And it couldn't feel like a sequel for the sake of it."
Crisp was so loved in New York, and Hurt does such a magnificent impression, that during shooting one passer-by was overheard saying: "I just saw Quentin Crisp. I thought he had, like, died ten years ago." Hurt himself is very protective and respectful of the Crisp he knew: when Laxton mulled whether to have Crisp masturbate in one scene, Hurt rejected the idea. Instead there is a poignant scene of Crisp drying himself after his morning shower, which with great simplicity implies the reality behind the rouge. Hurt has no vanity, Laxton says, and didn't demand to see rushes every day. He is thrilled with the film. His wife was moved.
From feeling slightly queasy about Crisp and his significance, Laxton came to respect his drily held philosophy of life and his strength. "His story is the story of how each individual reconciles who they are with themselves," Laxton says. "If the first film is about injustice and bravery, then the sequel shows the ridiculousness of any kind of ghettoisation."
We leave Crisp before his death, at one of his last engagements in America, playing to an audience in Tampa. Laxton decided not to show him dying "on some musty bed in Manchester" (he had returned to the UK for a speaking tour). "There's always that ‘Get on with it' sense about deathbed scenes," Laxton says. "I wanted to leave Quentin on a note of celebration."
"You should make no effort to try to join society," Crisp tells his audience. "Stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you." It certainly worked for him.
Tim Teeman