Big Gay Picture Show

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema and more

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema & more

Victim (1961) (Blu-ray Review)

By 1 Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date:

Although Victim wasn’t the first LGBT-themed movie ever made (underground efforts and plenty of films that dealt with it through allegory came first) it still holds a special place in the history of gay cinema. For a start it’s believed to be the first mainstream English-language movie to use the word ‘homosexual’, as well as the first to explicitly make gay men (including the main character) its main subject and to show them in a sympathetic light.

It came at a time in Britain when there was a fair amount of debate over homosexuality (or at least more than there’d ever been before). In 1957 the Wolfenden Report – a commission set up to look at the laws surrounding homosexuality in the wake of a series of prosecutions against high-profile  people purely for having engaged in gay sex – recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”. This wasn’t just because they thought that prosecuting people for what they do in the privacy of their own homes was pointless, but because there was a large problem with gay people being blackmailed over their sexuality. Some estimates say up to 90% of blackmail cases at the time involved homosexuality in one way or another. [Read more…]

Woman In A Dressing Gown (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date:

Although not as famous as the likes of The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, many credit Woman In A Dressing Gown as the place where the British Kitchen Sink Drama began. It was exceedingly unusual on its 1957 release for taking the small, personal crisis of a normal family living in a block of flats as its main subject, setting a precedent for a lot of the gritty, working class life movies of the 1960s.

Yvonne Mitchell plays Amy Preston, a housewife who seems happy (at least on the surface) in her life as mother of Brian (Andrew Ray) and wife of Jim (Anthony Quayle), even if the dinner is rarely on the table on time and the flat is normally a bit of a mess. Jim is less happy though, straining against his less-than-perfect domesticity and a wife he feels has changed since they married. He’s started seeing a young woman from his office, Georgie (Sylvia Syms), who is utterly devoted to him and wishes for him to leave Amy. Although Jim says he doesn’t want to hurt his wife, he eventually decides he must tell Amy he’s stepping out with another woman and wants a divorce. [Read more…]

Booked Out (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Booked Out is a sweet but small-scale movie that was always going to have difficulty finding large-scale distribution, and so it’s going with a rather charming DIY-feeling release strategy, with a DVD & Blu-ray release on Monday, alongside a cinema tour with accompanying Q&As all over the country between now and mid-April (you can find out more about that here).

The film follows artist and bookstore worker Ailidh (Mirren Burke), who’s seen a young man coming and going from another one of the flats in her building and so she manufactures a way of meeting him – by acting as if she’s accidentally dropped all her drawings on him. The man turns out to be Jacob (Rollo Weekes), and soon a friendship develops between the two of them, partly due to Ailidh drawing Jacob into helping her with fellow neighbour Mrs. Nicholls, whose husband died several years before, although she still acts as if he’s alive, well and in the house. [Read more…]