Old Yorker

Fergus O’Brien (2017)

In 2007, Channel 4 ran a series of programmes to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act.  These included A Very British Sex Scandal, an eighty-five-minute documentary drama ‘which chronicles the experiences and actions of Peter Wildeblood which eventually led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Great Britain’ (IMDB).   In July this year, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Act, the BBC will screen Against the Law, an eighty-four-minute documentary drama about ‘Peter Wildeblood’s affair with a handsome serviceman he met in Piccadilly during the time homosexuality was a crime and the devastating consequences of their relationship’ (IMDB).

So what else is new?  I can’t answer that comprehensively:  I know I saw A Very British Sex Scandal but recall little more than the protagonist’s memorable surname.  The rather short, nearly identical running times of the two films and their inclusion of a documentary component might suggest the Wildeblood story is dramatically thin – Against the Law, which opened this year’s ‘Flare’ (LGBT) Festival at BFI, is certainly that.  But there may be another explanation for the docu-drama structure – of Fergus O’Brien’s version, at least.  Although Peter Wildeblood is reasonably commemorated as a gay rights pioneer, his personal views about homosexuality now seem old-fashioned, not to say benighted.  As Matthew Parris wrote, when Wildeblood died in 1999, in a Times piece included in the BFI programme note for the opening gala screening of Against the Law:

‘The modern gay establishment has been no kinder to him than the 1950s, regarding his plea for tolerance for ‘good’ homosexuals as Uncle Tomism.  Like so many human bridges between eras, he is charged with insurrection by the old, dismissed as a compromiser by the new.’

In the early 1950s, Peter Wildeblood (born in 1923) was a Fleet Street journalist, writing for the Daily Mail.  His circle of friends included his near-contemporary Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.  In 1953, the latter was accused of having underage sex with a fourteen-year-old boy scout.  Montagu stood trial, denied the charges and was acquitted.  The verdict did nothing to stop the momentum of what Montagu called a ‘witch hunt’ to convict him for homosexual activities.   He returned to Winchester Assizes the following year, charged with performing ‘gross offences’ at a weekend party on his Beaulieu estate.   Two young RAF men – one of them Eddie McNally, with whom Peter Wildeblood had been having an affair – turned Queen’s evidence to testify against the host, Wildeblood and another party guest, Michael Pitt-Rivers.  The evidence included, as well as oral testimony, a cache of love letters between Wildeblood and McNally.  Each of the three defendants was found guilty and received a twelve-month jail sentence.  The high-profile trial, which caused a backlash among some church leaders and politicians, was widely seen as instrumental in the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee, which convened in late 1954 and reported in 1957.   Whereas Montagu continued to protest his innocence, Wildeblood, following his release from prison, published a memoir, Against the Law, in which he wrote candidly about his sexual orientation and the grim conditions he had experienced in Wormwood Scrubs.  He was the sole openly gay person to give evidence to the Wolfenden Committee.

Scripted by Brian Fillis (The Curse of Steptoe, An Englishman in New York), Fergus O’Brien’s Against the Law moves to and fro between 1952, when Wildeblood (Daniel Mays) first meets ‘handsome serviceman’ McNally (Richard Gadd); the trial with Montagu (Mark Edel-Hunt) and Pitt-Rivers[1] in January 1954; Wildeblood’s subsequent time in prison, release and appearance before Wolfenden in 1955.  The documentary element of the film is interspersed throughout.  This comprises interviews with several gay men:  the youngest is in his mid-sixties; the oldest is ninety-odd; all can well remember life pre-1967.  As well as these gay testimonies, there are contributions from a retired police officer who recalls enforcing the laws of the time and a former psychiatric nurse, himself gay, who administered supposed ‘cures’ to homosexuals.  The emotional variety of these recollections – humour, pain, anger, relief that it’s history now – is hardly unexpected but quite eclipses the meagre drama of Against the Law.

Fergus O’Brien stages the seduction and sex scenes between Wildeblood and McNally in standard love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name fashion:  Johann Perry’s lighting and Roger Goula’s music supply an atmosphere of crepuscular foreboding.  But while the clichéd style of the piece is merely weak, the presentation of its main character is bizarre.  In the trial part, Wildeblood displays a naivete that’s startling for a man who, after wartime service, resumed studies at Oxford and ‘gravitated towards a homosexual circle in the theatre and arts’ (according to his obituary in the Independent), before a career in journalism that took him to Fleet Street while he was still in his twenties.  He says he can’t understand why Eddie McNally is telling lies in court.  (Montagu sharply explains that McNally and the other serviceman are acting to save their own skins.)  Wildeblood tells his co-defendants ‘I didn’t believe this could happen in England’ and you wonder why.  A few screen minutes previously, he was taking an understandable interest in Montagu’s earlier trial.  At the start of the film, Wildeblood is brimful of apprehension in a pub as he asks another man if he can buy him a drink; and obviously anxious when he bumps into McNally for the first time in the street.  Matthew Parris quotes Peter Wildeblood  as writing in Against the Law ‘I did not believe such things could happen in England, until they happened to me’.  By that stage, however, he was obviously reflecting on his recent experiences more largely, including his treatment in prison.

In that opening pub sequence, the protagonist is buttonholed by an effeminate gay, Fanny (Paul Keating), who asks if he’s a ‘queen’; Wildeblood replies, by way of correction, that he’s a ‘homosexual’.  Fanny is baffled by his use of the term – ‘I thought only doctors called us that’ – and, though it’s one used consistently by Wildeblood, this viewer too was sometimes puzzled as to quite what he meant by it, at least until his eventual appearance before the Wolfenden Committee.  While it’s possible that Wildeblood was in the process of clarifying things in his own mind during the period covered in Against the Law, I got the sense rather that the film-makers were cagey about giving too much prominence to the more problematic aspects of  his views and, as a result, confused things.  During his trial, Wildeblood tells the prosecuting counsel (Richard Dillane) that he’s attracted to men and that he was in love with McNally but denies there was anything physical between them.  We know he’s lying about the latter – he’s pleading not guilty, after all – but why then take the risk of a witness-box apologia for platonic love between males?   Is this another instance, like ‘I didn’t believe this could happen’, of taking words from Wildeblood’s memoir and putting them in his mouth, to improbable effect?

It’s clear at least that Wildeblood sees his ‘inversion’ as a disability and is willing to be medically treated for it, until a prison interview with a doctor (Mark Gatiss) whose creepy nastiness is enough to deter him from further exploring this option.  When he finally appears before Lord Wolfenden (David Robb) and his colleagues, Wildeblood distinguishes three types of homosexual:  ‘men who want to be women’, ‘pederasts’ and men like himself, who seek lasting, loving relationships with their own sex.   As in court, Wildeblood makes a plea for understanding and acceptance of the last group without evincing great sympathy for the other two groups, or saying much about the physical component of love.  To underline how unenlightened  the hero’s attitude is, Fergus O’Brien cross-cuts between the committee room and Fanny – the exemplar of a ‘man who wants to be a woman’, in Wildeblood’s terms – getting beaten up by a queer-basher.

Presumably it’s Wildeblood’s narrow-mindedness – as it seems sixty years later! – that causes Daniel Mays to describe the character he’s playing (in a piece about Against the Law on the BBC website) as ‘flawed’, as well as ‘fascinating, complex’.  Mays is a good actor but his Peter Wildeblood isn’t, unfortunately, either fascinating or complex:  awkward, unsophisticated and transparently vulnerable, he seems more a pen-pusher than the diplomatic correspondent for a national daily.  It’s believable that, as interpreted here, he really was unaware of the kind of ‘parties’ taking place in Chelsea and Kensington that the sinister doctor asks him about:  this Wildeblood is not a party animal.  The disappointing performance serves a purpose, though.  Mays makes Wildeblood such a sad sack that he keeps his victimhood in the foreground and – in combination with the power of the real-life memories of contemporary gay experience – his ‘flawed’ views relatively in the background.  The prison scenes are designed to illustrate, very obviously, Wildeblood’s feelings of humiliation and isolation.  When he first arrives at Wormwood Scrubs, we see him, under the scornful gaze of a prison officer, strip naked (as all new prisoners in British prisons are still required to do?)  Fanny is also doing time in the Scrubs while Wildeblood’s there; another of his fellow inmates tells him it’s not too bad being inside because there’s plenty of sex (‘mostly the receiving end’).  There’s a repeated shot of the prisoners at exercise with Wildeblood always standing apart and alone.

Richard Dillane deserves credit for his intelligent, measured playing of the prosecuting counsel at the trial.  The supporting actors are otherwise unsurprisingly unsurprising (especially Charlie Creed-Miles as a police superintendent).  As already indicated, the cast are largely upstaged by the elderly testifiers.  One of them delivers a good punchline with the believe-it-or-not revelation that, at the time the Wolfenden Committee was sitting, he was having an affair with the chair’s son, Jeremy.  Another makes the worthwhile point that the Sexual Offences Act, for all its importance as a legal milestone, wasn’t a big deal for men who felt unable to come out.  It has to be said that Against the Law‘s subject matter is poor excuse for the lack of female roles in the film.  There are a few shots of a woman sitting beside Wildeblood in a car but she doesn’t get to deliver a line.  (Is she ‘Iris’, whom a disparaging prison officer assumes to be a man, and picking Wildeblood up from Wormwood Scrubs when he’s released?)   If Fergus O’Brien wanted a silent woman on the screen, he might have done better to recreate the following, described by Peter Wildeblood in his memoir:

‘She was a respectable looking, middle-aged, tweedy person wearing a sensible felt hat.  She was standing on the pavement as the car went by.  I saw her suck in her cheeks, and the next moment a big blob of spit was running down the windscreen. … She looked thoroughly ordinary to me.  But what I did look like to her?  Evidently, I was a monster.’

16 March 2017

[1] I don’t know the name of the actor playing Michael Pitt-Rivers.  At the time of writing, the credits on IMDB list only six members of the cast of Against the Law.  The BFI programme note lists only seven.