Prick Up Your Ears
Original post date: 6 June 1987
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
The title of this movie is never really explained in the movie, but I have been given to understand that, if you think about it in such a way as to come up with something nasty, you will get the idea. That’s the sort of guy Joe Orton was. He also was constantly making things up that weren’t true just to mess up people’s minds. The facts here are well known. Orton wrote a few plays, dark comedies, and was very successful. In 1967 his lover and roommate Kenneth Halliwell killed him with a hammer and then committed suicide. This sounds like it could be a real downer of a movie, but it is actually quite funny and entertaining. Even the occasion of the murder provides a blackly funny line as does the cremation afterwards. The movie portrays the two main characters’ relationship as a marriage and suggests the jealousies that doomed the couple afflict all marriages to some extent. Halliwell’s envy at his former protégé surpassing him is echoed by the wife of the biographer, who is gathering Joe’s life story, as she shares in the work with no credit or glory. This film makes three winners in a row for director Stephen Frears, who also did The Hit with John Hurt and last year’s My Beautiful Launderette.
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
The title of this movie is never really explained in the movie, but I have been given to understand that, if you think about it in such a way as to come up with something nasty, you will get the idea. That’s the sort of guy Joe Orton was. He also was constantly making things up that weren’t true just to mess up people’s minds. The facts here are well known. Orton wrote a few plays, dark comedies, and was very successful. In 1967 his lover and roommate Kenneth Halliwell killed him with a hammer and then committed suicide. This sounds like it could be a real downer of a movie, but it is actually quite funny and entertaining. Even the occasion of the murder provides a blackly funny line as does the cremation afterwards. The movie portrays the two main characters’ relationship as a marriage and suggests the jealousies that doomed the couple afflict all marriages to some extent. Halliwell’s envy at his former protégé surpassing him is echoed by the wife of the biographer, who is gathering Joe’s life story, as she shares in the work with no credit or glory. This film makes three winners in a row for director Stephen Frears, who also did The Hit with John Hurt and last year’s My Beautiful Launderette.
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