Nighthawks
Ron Peck (1978)
Nighthawks was a landmark in the presentation of gay lives on screen, made and set in London in the half-light between the legalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967 and the arrival of AIDS. (It’s interesting to see this film about largely private worlds so soon after Milk and its depiction of a new kind of gay public identity. Harvey Milk was assassinated in the same year that Nighthawks was completed.) After a while, I started thinking the film was going be remarkable only as a piece of cinematic and social history. The dialogue was fine but the writer-director Ron Peck (assisted in both roles by Paul Hallam) seemed to have got his cast – especially Ken Robertson in the main role of Jim, a geography teacher in a co-ed North London comprehensive – confused between acting naturally and sounding dull. The voices were drained of expression, as if any heightening of emotion would be falsely theatrical. The line readings of the actors, all non-professionals at the time, weren’t just fuzzy but also sometimes stilted and slightly mistimed. Jim, who looks to be in his late twenties, goes to gay bars. Like many others there, he watches people – people drinking or listening or moving to music – to see who he likes the look of. And we watch him watching.
After about half an hour Peck inserts a sequence of dancing in a club without our seeming to see this through Jim’s eyes. We encounter the dancing direct. The camera comes to focus on two boys: one skinny and unremarkable, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt; the other taller, in a sleeveless indigo-coloured vest. This second boy, as he gets more involved in the dance, moves every so often in a strange, galloping rhythm, shaking his head. The movement is fascinating because we can see that the boy is both losing himself in, and expressing himself through, the dance. Peck then cuts to this boy, whose name is Neal, with Jim in his flat, and we realise that Jim was watching him all along. Stuart Craig Turton, who plays Neal, has a pleasant, deep voice but it’s strong not because of the quality of the tone (although that helps too) but because it seems to belong to him both as a performer and as the character he’s playing: the voice is no longer issuing from a non-actor trying to sound like a real person. When Jim suggests that they go through to the bedroom, Neal asks if it’s all right to leave his tea mug in the living room. When they start to undress, he asks if it’s OK for him to put his clothes near the end of the bed. Verbal details like this, which until this point in Nighthawks seemed commonplace for the sake of it, are suddenly expressing personality – the wary good manners are just right for Neal.
These moments are remarkable not just in themselves but in the way that they seem to increase Nighthawks‘s momentum and change its trajectory. It would be interesting to know whether the film was shot in sequence. I think there’s no doubt that Ken Robertson, from Jim’s first scene with Neal onwards, becomes more fully and confidently expressive – master of his own voice – so that his portrait of Jim is eventually a completely persuasive one. The effect is increasingly infectious. As Judy, the supply teacher in Jim’s school who gets friendly with him, Rachel Nicholas James seems excessively dreary in the early stages. Judy is the only major female character in Nighthawks (there’s one other woman on the teaching staff, in addition to the girls that Jim teaches) and the toneless banality of what she says in the first part of the film seems almost misogynist. But James becomes more varied and likeable from this point onwards – and she’s a fine listener (especially in her reaction to Jim telling her he’s gay). There’s a fourth excellent portrait, from Robert Merrick as John, an acquaintance and, at the point at which the film ends, the partner of Jim. John speaks and dresses in a more traditionally camp way than the others here; but, as such, he’s an effective counterbalance to the film’s central concern with transforming conventional screen characterisations of gay men. Merrick’s acting achieves the same nuanced assurance as Turton’s, although in a completely different register.
Occasionally there’s a scene which seems essentially misconceived (or at least misplaced) but which is saved through the quality of the dialogue and the way the actors work together. Judy persuades Jim to go to a dance at the school then on to a party at the home of another member of staff. They’ve both drunk more than they meant to when they get into Jim’s car for him to drive her home. He’s already annoyed that he agreed to go to the dance and abusively angry when she tries to kiss him. There’s then a long sequence inside the car as they drive and Jim talks about his series of boyfriends. These revelations don’t belong in this scene: I didn’t believe that, after he’s shouted at her for the first time in their friendship, Jim and Judy would get back into affable conversation so quickly – and the clarity of Jim’s description of his affairs, and the focused way he directs what he’s saying at Judy, aren’t right for the end of a long and exhausting evening. (Peck might have done better to get Jim talking out of a mixture of trying to make amends and trying not to fall asleep at the wheel – and then finding he was saying more than he intended and enjoying doing so.) But what he says is so compelling that you start to believe the conversation in spite of yourself (and Judy’s question ‘Don’t you get confused?’, when Jim has completed the list of his lovers’ names, is very funny). By the time they stop at a service station and continue to talk over a coffee there, you’re convinced not only by what’s being said but that Jim has reached a new level of intimacy with and trust in Judy in the course of the journey home.
The scene near the end of the film in which one of the boys in Jim’s class asks if it’s true that he’s ‘bent’ is equally crucial but less satisfactory. When the boy asks the question, Ken Robertson reacts convincingly. We can see that it’s the question Jim has dreaded but for which, because he’s long anticipated it, he’s also prepared. In response, Jim not only admits that he’s gay but embarks on a vigorous discussion with the mostly hostile kids. Throughout this exchange, Peck keeps the camera on the class and I think this is a mistake – not only because it deprives us of the opportunity of seeing Jim but because it eventually makes the kids, who’ve been very effective in the hitherto brief exchanges in the classroom, look increasingly as if they’re taking part in a semi-improvised exercise in a school drama session. And, although we can accept that Jim might have got his script ready over the years, the questions he asks the kids still seem to allow Peck to run through the most obvious examples of anti-gay prejudice in a way that’s too neat. Yet even here, the immediate follow-up scenes – between Jim and an unseen headmaster, then with Judy and others talking about the experience in the pub after work – are just about good enough to redeem the defects of what’s gone before.
It’s in the all-night coffee bar in the service station that Jim delivers what amounts to his credo. We’ve seen him start relationships with men he’s picked up in clubs and the relationships fizzle out – often as a result of the other man, who’s usually younger than Jim, giving him the brush-off. (These ruptures aren’t melodramatic; the boys tend to say they’ve something else on or just don’t get back in touch with Jim.) The repetition of this pattern is miserable and Jim’s return to bars to find someone else seems pretty desperate. But when he explains to Judy that he really likes going out on his own like this – feeling that he has a kinship with everyone there because of their shared sexuality, enjoying the prospect of spending the night with someone he doesn’t know at the start of the evening, and well aware that he may have nothing, apart from being gay, in common with the other man – we start to understand Jim’s life as something emotionally more complex. The relationships may tend to be short-lived if their physical aspect isn’t enough on both sides to sustain them but the end of one affair offers the prospect of starting another and Jim is stimulated by the circumstances in which an affair begins. This testament is extraordinarily well-written and Ken Robertson delivers it beautifully He makes it sound like something Jim has known for a long time but never articulated before – so that just expressing his thoughts like this gives him a buzz, and a sense of relief. David Graham Ellis’s score – repetitive, vital and melancholy – is very right and well used by Peck to reflect how Jim’s life is lived and experienced.
Ron Peck suggests the tension between self-assertion and self-effacement in the world that he describes. This is most powerfully expressed in Neal’s dancing but it seems to be part of both the look and the inherent social structure of the gay bars, where anonymity and individuation are two sides of the same coin. I assume the film takes its name from the Edward Hopper painting (Peck subsequently made a documentary about Hopper) – which looks from the street into a late-night diner, through its glass frontage, at the people inside. Nighthawks is shot almost exclusively in interiors, including several sequences inside Jim’s car with the nighttime road ahead or the daylight (but sunless) world outside visible. (The only exterior shots are when Jim, preparing teaching materials, photographs buildings.) Whether or not this decision was initially dictated by economic considerations, the interiors are eloquent about Jim’s existence. He does and doesn’t conceal his sexuality. A few work colleagues know that he’s gay, although his parents don’t, but his life seems essentially constrained and subterranean and the locations are expressive even when they’re not used as places of sexual encounter: the cramped kitchen in Judy’s flat where Jim helps her make tea is as much part of the texture as the bars and the closeted bedsits. (When Jim goes to an exhibition of paintings in a large, sinuous studio overlooking the Thames, he seems lost – as if there’s too much room.) Nighthawks is set a decade after the legalisation of homosexuality but at a time when being gay was obviously much less socially accepted than it’s since become. Ron Peck and Paul Hallam don’t resolve the extent to which anonymity and a life in the shadows were linked to feelings of guilt about being homosexual but it’s hard not to see some kind of connection.
In the first part of the film, Jim seems different from the other men we see and the effect is a little confusing. When the camera first picks out this short, dark-haired man in a club, his physique is distinctive and a bit too salient; a close-up of his brimming eyes intensifies the sense that his situation is particularly unhappy. Sometimes Peck holds a close-up of Jim for what seems too long – after we’ve got the point and nothing different is coming through in Ken Robertson’s expression. But the storyline is developed subtly. In time we see that it’s sometimes Jim, rather than the other half of a one night stand, who decides there’s no future in it. (There’s a good tonal variety in the morning after scenes and an emotional dynamism, a sense of quickly shifting allegiances, in a sequence like the one in the artist’s studio.) We last see Jim and John in a club, getting a drink and disappearing into a crowd to dance together. The camera eventually pulls back and pans across other watchers and seems to hover on a number of them. (These final shots have a particularly strong retrospective resonance in their recording of a pre-AIDS world.) This time, it seems clear, the camera isn’t providing a Jim’s-eyes-view; it’s rather as if Peck himself is wondering whose story to tell next. By the end of Nighthawks, we realise that Jim is both unique and generic – and how skilfully Ron Peck has presented his story as both individual and representative.
10 April 2009