Word: prickings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Almodovar's version of homosexual love is far more adventurous and honest than any of Hollywood's tame, schmaltzy attempts to portray gay relationships such as Making Love and Personal Best. Even the recent British films by Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Launderette and Prick Up Your Ears, which dealt with homosexuality intelligently and forthrightly, shied away from exploring sexual intimacy on a par with straight films. The graphic homosexual sex in Law of Desire may seem irresponsible in light of AIDS, but in Almodovar's world, caution is irrelevant...
While the British movie, Prick Up Your Ears, has done much to introduce Orton to the U.S., it's only been in the last two years that his plays have been produced in America. There was a successful run of Loot off-Broadway this past year, and his acclaimed masterpiece, What the Butler Saw, has enjoyed stage-time in Harvard's own Loeb Ex and in New Hampshire. Now Bostonians can delight in a short one-act Orton gem, The Erpingham Camp, done with great energy and skill by Harvard/Radcliffe Summer Theatre...
...Prick Up Your Ears is as much the story of Halliwell's failure as it is Orton's success. An older, better educated man who picks up the boisterous Orton at a class in London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he infuses the youth with his literary pretentions and dreams of being a novelist. That it is Orton who actually lives out those dreams drives Halliwell mad; Molina gives a surprisingly sympathetic rendering of the murderer, portraying Halliwell's vascillation between pride in his young charge's accomplishments and jealousy of his fame...
While the violence and sex scenes are handled tastefully and form an essential part of the picture, a clunky narrative device serves as Prick Up Your Ears' only major flaw. Based on a 1978 biography of the same title by John Lahr, the tale is told in vignettes as Lahr composes his book...
...twisted activity and its horrible and inevitable conclusion, Prick Up Your Ears is a surprisingly life-affirming film. The terrible deaths Orton and Halliwell meet do not hang over the story, and unlike other arty pictures with similar endings--Betty Blue comes to mind--life is not treated as an unnatural interregnum until death. Prick Up Your Ears joyously proclaims Orton's unbridled exuberance, not his untimely and truly tragic demise...