Trick Up Your Ears' is a soft-core,
sleazy toilet tour of playwright's life
By Scott Harrah,
Senior Editor
“Prick lip Your Ears,” (Britain,
1987). Showing at the Sheldon Film
Theater Thursday through Satur
day. Screenings are at 7 and 9 p.m.
with matinees Saturday at 3 p.m.
British playwright Joe Orton was
the Oscar Wilde of the 1960s, an irrev
erent working-class bad boy whose
personal life mirrored the energetic
farces that brought him fame.
His plays broke theatrical barriers
and set new standards for social satire.
One would think he would be remem
bered for that alone.
But director Stephen “My Beauti
ful Laundrctte’' Frears and screen
writer Alan Bennett instead chose to
mock and sensationalize Orton’s sala
cious lifestyle in their docudrama
“Prick Up Your Ears.”
Orton, like his 19th-century
counterpart Wilde, was a flamboyant
Movie Review
homosexual. Although he maintained
a grisly relationship with his lover,
Kenneth Halliwell, for 16 years, he
lived for nightly sojourns into the
world of “tearooms,” men’s public
restrooms where anonymous sex
abounds.
The film unfairly exploits Orton’s
desperate search for the ultimate five
minute “trick” and winds up looking
more like soft-core gay pom than a
biography about a great writer.
Gary “Sid and Nancy” Oldman
brilliantly plays Orton, a snide, devil
may-care rebel caught up in the un
precedented cross-currents of “mod”
’60s London. Orton meets his lover
Kenneth (Alfred Molina) at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the
pair's zest for the perverse and the
socially offensive helps them form a
quirky, tragic bond.
Their favorite activity is borrowing
library books so they can change the
jacket covers and rewrite them as dirty
porno plot summaries. At first it is
Halliwell who wants to be the writer
— Orton unsuccessfully pursues act
ing. The two spend 10 years together
co-writing novels no publisher will
touch. They cover the walls of their
grim North London Hat w ith collages
of photos culled from defaced books.
Din wnen mey arc imprisoned lor
defacing the books, they arc sepa
rated. Orton pours out his anger in the
diary he has kept since childhood.
During his six-month prison term
Orton hones his writing skillsand pens
a one-act radio play tnc BBC broad
casts after he is released.
Orton soars into the limelight
shortly afterward with his plays “En
tertaining Mr. Sloane” and “Loot,”
which isawarded Best Play of 1966 by
the London Evening Standard.
Halliwcll is bitterly jealous of
Orton’s notoriety, claiming he came
up with many ideas for the plays. He
wallows in domestic hell while Orton
soaks up stardom and continues to
chronicle his nightly restroom sleaze
romps in his diary.
And the film camera follows him
from trick to trick. We sec Orton have
a toilet orgy on the night he wins the
Standard award. Little is explained
about the reasons behind his uncon
ventional life. Wc are forced to sit
through numerous travels through the
gutter that the film glorifies.
Orton’s angst stems from his bleak
childhood, but all the audience sees
are a few fights he had with his mother
(Julie “Educating Rita” Walters) over
his career choice and a penchant for
masturbating on her “good bed
spreads.”
Of course, when his mother dies
and Orton goes to his hometown for
the funeral there’s an inevitable scene
in which he picks up a beer-swilling
factory worker for a quickie.
“Prick Up Your Ears,” in its inces
sant pursuit of unbuttoned jeans, fails
to capture the “mod” scene that em
braced Orton. He was asked by the
Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, to
write a screenplay for a Fab Four film,
and we sec Orton triumphantly enter
Paul McCartney’s limousine to dis
cuss details. But the “hip” London that
nurtured the author’s revolutionary
zeal is shown as a mere backdrop for
satyric activity. England evidently
thought a person endorsed by the
Beatlc empire was more than a mem
ber of the after-dark urinal set.
Based on John Lahr’s biography,
the film uses a “Citizen Kane” frame
work to move in and out of Orton’s
life, showing his literary agent Peggy
Ramsey (wonderfully portrayed by
Vanessa Redgrave) finding
Halliwcll’sand Orton’s corpses in the
beginning.
i ne remamucr oi me mm vacil
lates between Orton’s life, and Ram
sey and Lahr discussing the biogra
phy. The final murder scene, in which
Halliwell, overcome with jealousy,
axes Orton and then swallows a bottle
of pills, is intentionally depicted flip
pantly. Halliwell ga/es at Orton’s
sliced-up body, then eyes the heavy
London Evening Standard award
statue and crudely simpers, “Maybe 1
should’ve used that. ... It would’ve
been more dramatic.”
It seems Frears and Bennett
couldn’t decide whether they were
making a serious drama, a farce or a
skin flick, so they created a combina
tion of the three. Frears pioneered gay
realism in “My Beautiful Laun
drette,” showing the inequities the
working class and sexual infidels suf
fer in Thatcher’s draconian Britain.
But here he’s done the opposite. He’s
guilty of drumming stereotypes in the
name of shock value while maligning
a major voice of the ’60s by exposing
his weaknesses. The thematic homo
phobia of “Prick Up Your Ears” is
affronting and sickening. Why should
the world care what Joe Orton did in
his spare time and how he stained his
mommy’s bedspread with early de
pravity? The film closely resembles
the Paul Cameron/Anita Bryant no
tion: “See! This is how they ALL
live!”
The talented, renowned cast seems
to be unjustly in the center of this
cesspool, dusting dime-novel dia
logue with ardor and effort it hardly
deserves.
Gary Oldman is especially effec
tive, giving Orton a scurrilous passion
and warmth that begs to be spared
from the Frcars/Bcnnctt sleaze
Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Co.
Orton and Haliiwell
sledgehammer.
Frears established himself as a
radical auteur with “Laundrette,” but
“Prick Up Your Ears”puts him back in
the cinematic dark ages. The audience
cannot help but feel they’ve been
caught with their pants down, too
embarrassed to identify with the su
perficial bugger in a raincoat Orton
hardly resembled in life.
(-V
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