Not exactly a hit on its release,"The Leather Boys"was generally thought to be an addendum to the body of work collectively known as "British Neo-Realist Cinema - a New Frankness".Miss Rita Tushingham was known for her performances in earlier examples of the genre where she displayed her artful artlessness to good advantage.Here she plays a young girl who is little more than a child rushing headlong into a plainly doomed marriage with Mr Colin Campbell,a guileless boy who would have been better off staying at home with his copies of "Spick","Span" or "Harrison Marks Presents..." A marriage that soon enough would have settled into an arena of simmering hatred and resentment is challenged from without by Mr Dudley Sutton,one of British theatre's hidden heroes.Able to play anything from roue to raging queen with equal conviction,Mr Sutton has been quietly stealing movies,plays and TV series for 50 years.He gradually insinuates his way into the young couple's life,eventually attempting to persuade Mr Campbell to bat for the other side. Close friendship between men had generally been portrayed on the screen as the gruff,back - slapping,fiercely non - sexual kind.For "The Leather Boys",over forty years ago,to suggest that homosexual love might just have for some men the the legitimacy of the more orthodox variety,was at the very least avant garde. At the end,confronted with some of Mr Sutton's less modest and retiring friends,Mr Campbell decides to join the "Don't knows" which some of the audience might have seen as a bit of a fudge on the part of the film -makers. To most people in the early sixties,"Gay Movies" meant Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers waltzing their way through Central Park at night with silk scarves and big hats much in evidence.In recent parlance of course it has come to refer to something rather different.In those terms,"The Leather Boys" might be considered by some to be a "Gay Movie",but I prefer to see it now as I did then,an exposition of the old proverb about books and covers.Or - as Mrs Gump was to say many years later, "Life is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to get".
Review of The Leather Boys
