This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

This is How Movies Should Be Made

A different way of telling a story

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

The adaptation of Joe Orton's play Entertaining Mr Sloane is a misfire. Beryl Reid is the middle aged nymphomaniac Kath who spots the amoral narcissistic drifter Mr Sloane (Peter McEnery) lying half naked sunbathing in the cemetery. Kath herself who lives by the cemetery is dressed seductively, a see thorough dress and we initially see her suggestively licking an ice lolly.Kath invites Mr Sloane to become her lodger and quickly seduces him. Her elderly father, Dada recognizes Mr Sloane as the man who killed his employer and then disappeared.Mr Sloane is having a fine time womanizing, tormenting Dada and being playful with Kath and her brother Ed (Harry Andrews) who drops by every now and then. Ed seems straight-laced but drives a pink Pontiac and makes Mr Sloane the chauffeur with a tight leather uniform.The film is supposed to be a grotesque, sexual black farce but the film reveals its hand too early. McEnery is too old as Mr Sloane, he should had been held back as an innocent charmer than unveiled as a murderer as soon as he met Dada. As for Ed, that pink Pontiac gave him away not matter how much of a country gent he tried to pass off as.The ending was also rather abrupt and disappointing although I suspect a gay marriage ceremony would had been seen as shocking at the time.

The film of Joe Orton's great West End play gathers together an almost perfect cast which it then scuppers by making fundamental mistakes with Orton's material. Beryl Reid is definitive as ageing nymphomaniac Kath, and in the midst of the Gothic over-egging of Orton's pudding she pulls out moments of not just grotesquery and hilarity but also pathos; Harry Andrews is strong as her chicken hawk gay brother Ed; and Alan Webb is a fine old gargoyle as the Dada. Peter McEnery has some good moments as Sloane, occasionally hitting the requisite sense of sociopathic narcissism but really he is too old for the part (Orton wanted an actor who was 17 - "someone you'd like to f**k silly") - and a lot of the time far too obvious; he should be at least trying to convince Ed of his innocence.It is the trappings of Ed's lifestyle which most betray Orton's material. Ed in the play is an outwardly respectable small-town burgher whose appearance of Puritan propriety masks a predatory ruthlessness and desire for kinky, dominating sex. In the film, Ed drives around in a pink car! Orton's character would never do this, as it rather gives the game away and, what's worse, throws away Orton's withering analysis of petty bourgeois hypocrisy.The ending of the film is very cheap, with Orton's subtle trade-off of sexual favours to cover up the father's murder ("it's been a pleasant morning") being turned into an absurd and ugly mock-marriage ceremony over the Dada's corpse, replete with some toe-curlingly on-the-nose dialogue.Orton's humour makes no sense if the characters are not at least attempting a degree of propriety. His Austen-like sense of social satire is here buried under inappropriate Gothic trappings, no doubt influenced by grand guignol turns like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Reid's previous hit film version of The Killing of Sister George. Entertaining Mr. Sloane is a misfire, all in all, although worth catching for the great performances and what's left of Orton's sparkling dialogue. Perhaps the best moment of the film is the one in which his name on the opening credits is super-imposed over a grave-stone, as this film does indeed conspire to bury him.

I first saw EMr.S as a teenager who had just come out of the closet. As a child I was a fan of '60s horror films (Carradine, Cushing, et.al.) and black comedies (e.g., "No Way to Treat a Lady") and suspense/murder ("Eye of the Cat" or "Wylie", "What Happened to Aunt Alice?", "Daddy's Gone a Hunting", "Who Killed Teddy Bear?"). EMr.S, at least as I remember it after 20 years, combined those genres. The title character, handsome and bi-sexual, added the homo-eroticism that made for a very happy young gay movie fan indeed. It also led me to learn that the Brits were years ahead of Hollywood in the treatment of gay characters in movies, and I now count "Who Killed Sister George?" and "The Leather Boys" as other personal favorites.

This adaptation of the brilliant Joe Orton play in an unmitigated disaster. Every joke is overdone to the point of surrealism. The wit is killed dead, and any pretense to psychology is thrown out the window in a late sixties psychedelic mish-mash completely at odds with the stage farce tone of the source material. If people like this movie, it's for the sheer oddness, not because it has any of the qualities evinced by the play. It's like watching a Noel Coward play performed by lunatics in an asylum.