Prick Up Your Ears (1987)
Directed by Stephen Frears

Film Review

A genius like us

Joe Orton's brutal murder in August 1967, perpetrated by his long-term lover Kenneth Halliwell, made a shocking news story - enough to make everyone in the country prick up their ears in morbid surprise.  What made the event so newsworthy was the fact that Orton had enjoyed a meteoic rise to fame in the three years preceding his death.  His two West End successes - Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot - had been vilified and lauded in equal measure on account of their brazenly farcical treatment of the two great social taboos - sex and death - but Orton was the new darling of the more liberal-minded critics.  He was on the brink of national, if not international, stardom when, suddenly, his life was violently snuffed out - ironically by the one man who was closest to him and to whom he owed a large measure of his success.   Orton's short and eventful life saw a barely educated drop-out blossom into a gifted man of letters with a burning desire to thrust into the public gaze the sordid truths about human beings that lay hidden beneath a thick veneer of sham respectability.  It is a rich and fascinating story, one that would seem to offer abundant material for a '60s-era biopic, although the writer's continuing (ill-deserved) reputation as a mischievous purveyor of lewd filth ensured that this could be a highly risky enterprise for any filmmaker.

Two decades on from Orton's tragic demise, up-and-coming director Stephen Frears and established playwright Alan Bennett joined forces to take on this formidable feat, albeit somewhat less successfully than you might have hoped.  Frears and Bennett would seem to be ideally suited for this venture, both (now) having a proven track record at getting under the skin of their (often unconventional) subjects and exposing the unpalatable truths of the human condition in their well-regarded body of work.  In their hands, the bizarre and grimly ill-fated story of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell is - regrettably - cleaned up, simplified and recast as a whimsical mix of fairytale romance and skewed black comedy, a pretty conventional tale of love and ambition that ends discordantly in pure horror.   Prick Up Your Ears may not have been an out-and-out success when it was first seen in 1987 (the release timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Orton's death) but it is now considered an essential classic of British queer cinema, although, sadly, it is a film that now appears dated and pretty unsympathetic to the gay cause, too unwilling to break with convention and take the kind of chances that made Orton such a standout figure in his time.

Joe Orton's oeuvre may be modest, but, si j'ose dire, it is perfectly formed, consisting of three widely performed full-length plays (the finest being his uproariously funny last work, What the Butler Saw) and six minor plays (four of which originated as dramas for radio or television).  There's also an unused madcap screenplay (originally commissioned by The Beatles) and a handful of highly innovative novels (none published in his lifetime), including the brilliantly weird Head to Toe.  Despite dying at the age of 34, Orton had a life that is as extraordinary and fascinating as his literary output, and the American writer John Lahr did a superb job of getting to the truth of the man in his meticulously researched 1978 biography of Orton.  The publication of Joe Orton's diaries in 1986 - which are both hilarious and shocking in their frankness, particularly in regard to the author's unbridled sexual escapades - gave us a further blistering insight into a man who might very well, if he had lived longer, surpassed Harold Pinter (a great admirer of his work) and become the pre-eminent British dramatist of his generation.

Unlike his university-educated contemporaries, success did not fall easily into Orton's lap.  In fact, he would seem be a prime candidate for the poster boy of self-improvement.  His personal transformation from impoverished, working class nobody to highly regarded literary celebrity, achieved through long years of hard slog and almost super-human self-denial, was possibly the most incredible of his achievements.  When he left school at the age of 16, John Orton (as he was then named) was a puny, asthmatic, inarticulate semi-literate but he had a fantastic dream: to be an actor.  For the next few years he put everything he had into fulfilling this ambition, taking elocution lessons to rid himself of his working class Leicestershire accent and taking whatever work he could find in local drama societies.  Through a combination of good luck and judicious cunning, he evaded National Service and found a place at RADA, the country's top acting school.  When he finally realised that an actor's life was not for him, Orton immediately switched to writing, battling on against a barrage of rejection slips from stuffy publishers unimpressed by his early literary offerings.

When he finally managed to make a name for himself in his early thirties, Orton (now named Joe) had completed his metamorphosis.  Having refashioned himself into one of the most promising writers of his age, he was confident, charming, articulate and driven by a clear sense of purpose: to ram a dirty great torpedo (or whichever phallic symbol you can imagine) through the accepted norms of conventional society.  He was more than a writer, though.  He was a social and sexual revolutionary, utterly fearless in his efforts to expose the unsavoury truths that stinkingly festered behind the thickly lined curtain of British propriety.  Orton's obsession with bodybuilding allowed him to transform his body as well, giving him a svelte, muscular physique that would have allowed him to pursue a parallel career as a professional male model if he had wished it.  A will of iron was undoubtedly the main driver in Orton's desire to recreate himself, but no less important was the support he enjoyed over a sixteen-year period from the man who was the most significant person in his life - his flatmate, mentor, co-author and lover Kenneth Halliwell.

In the diary in which he meticulously (and humorously) charts the last eight months of his life, Orton freely admits the debt he owed Halliwell but in public, once he had secured fame for himself, he kept this fact to himself.  He couldn't allow his friend so much as the merest hint of recognition for the part he had played in his intellectual and cultural development, let alone the possibility that he had some input into his work.  As they shared everything else in life, so Orton and Halliwell shared ideas in their separate projects and Halliwell provided an invaluable service in editing, refining, galvanising and commenting on Orton's work.  It was Orton's seeming ingratitude towards the man who had played so large a role in his personal transformation that was to be his undoing.  Halliwell grew to resent Orton's success and, fearing an imminent end to their long and intensely hermetic relationship, succumbed to the mental instability that would have such terrible consequences for both men.  Reading Lahr's biography, or watching the film which it engendered, it is hard not to have sympathy for Halliwell as his world collapses in ruins and self-revulsion whilst Orton's becomes ever more glorious with every passing day.  Yet Halliwell was never a sympathetic man - he was narcissistic, pretentious and unable to connect with anyone other than his talented young disciple.  Such is the stark brutality with which this sad man dispatched his friend, literally beating out his brains as he slept, that it is impossible to see him as anything other than the villain in Orton's story, the story of a complete outsider who was determined above all else to make his time on Earth count for something.

Raging too correctly

Frears' film takes its title from Lahr's biography, which is fair enough as this is the main source for the material shown on screen (albeit with some obvious omissions and alterations to reduce the likelihood of causing offence).  Orton himself had originally conceived Prick Up Your Ears as a working title for his abandoned Beatles screenplay (re-titled Up Against It) and later chose it for the title of his fourth play, a historical farce set during the coronation of Edward VII - a project he planned to start after completing work on What the Butler Saw.  Oddly, the film's title (a multi-layered pun that typifies Orton's clever mischief at word play) is the most risqué thing this surprisingly tame biopic has to offer.  The more sordid aspects of Orton's life (some described in lubricious detail in the writer's jaw-droppingly explicit diaries) are daintily glossed over, and the factors that hardened the writer's resolve as he committed himself to his Sisyphus-like treadmill (his family history, his obsessive yearning for recognition, his utter contempt for social norms and phoney values) are not given anything like the emphasis they deserve.  The Joe Orton that Frears and Bennett present us with is an appallingly watered down, barely interesting imitation of the real man, essentially just a pretty boy wannabe writer who hits the big time by happenstance, only to get himself cut down in his prime by his estranged lover.  For the most part, it's depressingly glib and soapy, and does hardly any justice to the subject at all.

Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina are both gifted actors and it is fair to say they each turn in some exemplary work on this film.  Yet their portrayal of Orton and Halliwell is so wide of the mark that you can only weep at the waste of talent.  It could be the fault of the dialogue or merely the actors' preconceived notions of what a gay man of this era looked and sounded like, but something is definitely off, with Oldman and Molina both casually embellishing their otherwise solid performances with a noticeable air of femme campness.  In real life, neither Orton nor Halliwell lived up to the stereotypical picture of gayness - indeed Orton was by all accounts pretty contemptuous of effeminate homosexuals and insisted that in the staging of each of his plays all of the gay or bisexual characters be played as ordinary blokes, with no outward sign of their sexual orientation.  Not only did no one in Orton's family have the slightest inkling of his true sexuality (including his beloved younger sister Leonie), Orton had no difficulty passing himself of as a heterosexual divorcee when he became a public figure.  (Naturally, Orton could not reveal he was gay as such an admission risked him being sent to prison - homosexuality was not decriminalised in the UK until two weeks before his death.)  Oldman's physical appearance may be a fair approximation to Orton's, but Molina can't help looking like a grotesque caricature of Halliwell.  Whereas the real Halliwell bore quite a striking physical resemblance to Orton (once he had acquired an adequate wig to conceal his premature baldness), Molina's portrayal is somewhere between the Addams Family's Uncle Fester and a sinister interloper from a Harold Pinter play.

Oldman and Molina not only fail to convince in their portrayal of their respective characters, there is also something distinctly off in the way they interact.  There is nothing to account for the Svengali-like power of attraction that Halliwell exerted over Orton in the early stage of their relationship, and in the later scenes the two men end up looking like a jaded couple in a crappy television sitcom, endlessly squawking and bitching.  Apart from a truly creepy seduction scene (in which we can just about make out Orton and Halliwell kissing in near darkness), there's no sense of the mutually felt eroticism that Orton describes in his diaries (which endured even in their last few months of life) - indeed there's hardly any sign that the two men felt anything at all for one another except resentment for being stuck in the same room.  Prick Up Your Ears's main failing as a biopic is that it offers scarcely a clue as to just what it was that drew Orton and Halliwell together in the first place and why they stayed together for so long, sharing a single room that was barely large enough to accommodate two single beds and a desk, let alone two overgrown egos.

As Lahr makes clear in his biography, it was Orton's relationship with Halliwell that was the most crucial thing in his life.  Halliwell not only gave Orton the domestic and emotional security he desperately craved (and which had been denied him by his god-awful parents), but also the exceptionally broad literary education that was essential for an aspiring writer.  To gloss over such a vital part of the Joe Orton story, as Frears' film does with such apparent indifference, is to lose sight of possibly the single most important element of Orton's incredible development from uneducated boy from the slums to fearless literary innovator.  This is a shame as Oldman does a reasonably good job at portraying Orton's physical transformation, ultimately exuding the true-to-life mix of cocksuredness and careless insensitivity that ultimately led the writer to his doom.  Molina also makes the most of the material he is given, bringing a genuinely felt poignancy to his depiction of Halliwell, a man who was as much traumatised by his own personal tragedies (the death of his mother from a wasp sting and his father's subsequent suicide) as his inability to find his way as an artist whilst his friend blazed a sure path to literary glory.

Alan Bennett's over-simplistic, over-tentative script is probably most to blame for this unfortunate misrepresentation of Orton and Halliwell.  It is indeed odd, in view of the fact that Bennett is himself openly gay and has no qualms about writing about homosexuality in his plays and stories (often with immense tact and sensitivity), that he should fail so drastically to capture the true Joe Orton in his screenplay.  Orton's hedonistic indulgences are admittedly referenced in a few scenes - his habit of gratifying the lust instinct in men's public lavatories and taking trips to Morocco to buy willing Arab teenage boys for sex - but it is always with a cold, almost prudish sense of detachment, carefully avoiding showing anything that might rile the censor or shock the average cinemagoer.  The raunchiest scene - referencing the most flagrantly erotic entry in Orton's diary, the Saturnalian orgy in a London pissoir - is artfully choreographed but leaves just about everything to the imagination.  Bennett's downplaying of the prurient details of Orton's life is hard to account for but may have been a consequence of the public backlash in the wake of the AIDS pandemic of the early-to-mid 1980s.  It was a time when homophobia in the general public was at its height and the film's authors may have been justifiably concerned over how their film might be received.  To focus too much attention on Orton's risky sex life could well have been seen as condoning the kind of dangerous sexual behaviour that was turbo-charging the deadliest public health crisis in living memory.

Missing out on the best comedy of all

What Prick Up Your Ears lacks in authenticity it makes up for in entertainment value.  Amusing cameo appearances by Frances Barber, Julie Walters, Margaret Tyzack and Richard Wilson add to the film's charm and amusement, in the way that a good sauce manages to pep up a slightly undercooked steak.  Sad to say, none of the characters played by this illustrious roll call has the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the drama - another obvious deficiency in a generally unsatisfactory screenplay which merely underscores the film's superficiality and lack of coherence.  Given the importance that Orton's monstrously cruel mother and zombie-like father had on shaping the man he became and his oeuvre (they crop up again and again in his plays) it seems incredible that they scarcely get a mention in the film.  Orton's raging against authority and prim respectability were doubtless seeded by the ill-treatment he received by his mother, who took a sadistic delight in tormenting her offspring and humiliating her husband.  Facets of Mrs Elsie Orton crop up again and again in the greater part of her son's work, from the grotesquely self-interested Kath in Entertaining Mr Sloane and Fay in Loot to the frightening cavalcade of power-yielding, man-oppressing matriarchs in Head to Toe.  Played by Julie Walters in the film she is nothing more than a harmless old biddy.

The characterisation is undeniably a weak point of the film, but so is its hackneyed elliptical narrative structure, which is an unsuccessful attempt at bringing an illusion of coherence to a script that is manifestly lacking in structure and substance.  The film opens with the discovery of the two dead bodies on the morning after Halliwell's murderous assault and suicide, and then proceeds to tell the story, in an unevenly patchy manner, through the somewhat lame device of Orton's biographer, John Lahr, seeking information from the author's literary agent, Peggy Ramsay.  A strong performance from Vanessa Redgrave makes Peggy appear the central character in the drama, drawing the focus needlessly away from Orton and Halliwell and thereby diminishing the film's depth and emotional impact.   Despite the credible performances from Oldman and Molina - both highly accomplished actors who would go on to shine in subsequent screen roles - we end up with only the sketchiest impression of the characters they are playing.

The film is crying out for a more Ortonesque treatment, revelling in the anarchy and mischief that made Orton's voice so fresh and distinctive that you just had to prick up you ears and listen to what he had to say.  But this just isn't Alan Bennett's style and so what the film delivers is a too inhibited, too self-consciously sanitised account of Joe Orton's life, often excessively simplistic as it casually intersperses factually accurate episodes (as recounted in Lahr's biography or Orton's diaries) with some obviously fictional embellishments.  The scene depicting Orton's apparent deflowering by Halliwell whilst watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on television in 1953 is a typically Bennett-esque flight of fancy.  (It might be possible to accept the ludicrous premise that two impecunious social drop-outs might have gotten their hands on a television set at this time, but it is utterly laughable that the convention-hating Orton would have sat through such a spectacle of pomp and majesty, even whilst being molested by a man seven years his senior).  The reality is that the two men were already sharing the same bed (and enjoying doing so) as early as 1951, at the time Orton was living in Halliwell's London flat (with two other students) in their RADA days.

What is perhaps more surprising is what manages to get left out of the story.  Orton's nightmarish experience of having to constantly rewrite his play Loot during its seemingly doomed tour of the UK (an ordeal that drove him to distraction and very nearly led him to give up writing for good) is completely omitted, along with his grimly Kafkaesque attempt to obtain a temporary visa so that he could visit New York and oversee rehearsals for a Broadway production of Entertaining Mr Sloane.  Other oversights include: Orton's close friendship with the actor Kenneth Williams, his guest appearance on the TV show Call My Bluff and a disastrous holiday excursion to Libya that is too hilarious for words.   Fortunately, the library book defacing episode and subsequent trial and imprisonment are accurately portrayed in the film, and rightly so as Orton's incarceration was the defining moment that gave him the impetus to become a great writer.

Whilst it is patently lacking the authenticity, depth and rigour of John Lahr's biography, Frears' Prick Up Your Ears does a reasonable job of introducing a mainstream audience to a largely (and justly) forgotten literary talent who still manages to influence and inspire other writers to this day, without shocking their delicate bourgeois sensibilities.  The biopic has often been considered one of the least satisfactory of cinema genres, and very few films of this kind have lived up to expectations.  With that in mind, and given the controversial nature of its subject, a biopic on Joe Orton was always going to be a pretty hit-and-miss affair.  On the plus side, the film is handsomely photographed, in a way that accurately evokes the period and locations in which Orton lived, and benefits from an excellent cast and Frears' typically meticulous mise-en-scène.  Not long before this, Frears had won acclaim for his gay-themed drama My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and would go on to gain international prominence with his lavish period piece Dangerous Liaisons (1988).  Alan Bennett's dialogue is mildly witty and coyly suggestive - adequate perhaps for a mainstream movie depicting gay men hoping to recover its production costs, but not what is required in a biography of a man who revelled in being scurrilously mischievous and laugh-out-loud funny.  Whatever shortcomings Prick Up Your Ears may have, Stephen Frears would redeem himself handsomely three decades later with his marvellous TV mini-series A Very English Scandal (2018), which offered a for more truthful and explicit account of the scandalous love affair that destroyed the political career of the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe.

There is one thing that we can be reasonably confident about - Joe Orton would almost certainly have loathed just about everything that Frears and Bennett did with his life story.  Snared up in the trite conventionalities of the day and showing all too clearly a shameless reluctance to engage with the underlying truths of what make us tick, Prick Up Your Ears is almost the absolute antithesis of a Joe Orton work.  You can just imagine what cold poison would flow from the pen of Mrs Edna Welthorpe (Orton's alter ego, a fictional standard-bearer of self-righteous middle-class morality): 'Dear Mr Bennett, I cannot tell you how glad I am that, in the interests of public decency, you have seen fit to expurgate the filth and depravity from the life of that terrible Mr Orton.  I enjoyed your film immensely and was especially delighted with the happy ending.' And should we be so shocked by the film's ending, a twisted inversion of that of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men?  There is ample evidence that Joe Orton was habitually tickled by the absurdities of life and appeared not to have the slightest qualm over dying before his time.  On 14th July 1967, just under a month before Halliwell killed him, Orton wrote in his diary: 'I shall be a disgusting old man myself one day...  Only I have high hopes of dying in my prime.'

Film Synopsis

On 9th August 1967, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell are found dead in the top-floor Islington flat they have shared for almost a decade.  Halliwell died by overdosing on barbiturates, presumably after having bludgeoned his lover to death in his bed.  The murder and suicide are a cause célèbre, as Orton had recently achieved fame and critical acclaim as a playwright, with two successful stage plays under his belt and a third on the way.  A decade on, Orton's agent Peggy Ramsay recalls her memories of the writer and his strained relationship with Halliwell to John Lahr, an American author preparing an extensive biography of Orton.  Peggy recounts her first meeting with Orton, agreeing to act as his agent after he had just sold his first script to BBC radio.  Orton's next play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, was enthusiastically received by the critics and established him as one of the country's most promising new writers, although the play was condemned for its overt portrayal of illicit sexual relationships.

The author's next play Loot proved to be an even bigger hit, attracting large audiences during its West End run and landing Orton a £25,000 cheque from a film company keen on adapting the play.  Soon after, an invitation to script The Beatles' next film fell into Orton's lap, although the writer's plans for the Fab Four weren't quite what their manager Brian Epstein had wished for.  It was an unlikely outcome for someone who grew up on a poor housing estate in Leicester, who failed his eleven-plus exams and opted to become a writer after his dreams of making his name as an actor came to nothing.  For over fifteen years, Orton shared his life with one person - Kenneth Halliwell - who was both his lover and mentor, a man eager to share his erudition and love of literature with his younger acolyte.  Orton had an intense yearning for a complete literary education, so it was a stroke of luck that he had found someone so willing to give him one.  The years rolled by without the slightest sign of success heading their way.  To relieve the monotony, the two men had fun stealing and defacing library books, covering the walls of their pokey London flat with pictures ripped from the stolen books.  One day, their crime is discovered and they end up serving a six month stretch in prison.  (Thankfully the fact they were practicing homosexuals had not come up at their trial, otherwise they would have met with a much stiffer penalty).

For Joe Orton, his experience of prison was a liberation and almost immediately afterwards he began to find success as a writer.  Halliwell, by contrast, stayed in his rut as a failed artist, having to content himself with acting as his friend's personal assistant and gofer.  As his relationship with Halliwell deteriorated further, Orton's sexual escapades became increasingly bold and risky.  It is only during their stays in Morocco that the harmony of the couple's relationship is briefly restored, helped by the availability of recreational drugs and male teenage prostitutes.  Back in London, with Orton caught up in his burgeoning literary success, Halliwell is left at home contemplating his own evident failure.  One fateful night Halliwell takes a hammer and brings a dramatic end to his own personal tragedy - by killing his one and only friend.