Thirty-four years after John Hurt established himself as one of Britain’s best actors with his memorable portrayal of Quentin Crisp, one of the first openly gay men in popular modern culture, in The Naked Civil Servant, he has returned to the part to play the elderly Crisp relocated to New York and relishing his sudden and unexpected fame in An Englishman in New York.
With his slow, articulate speech, flamboyant dress sense and affected walk, Hurt recaptures the essence of Crisp with miraculous ease and conviction; yet now, with his sad, doleful, haunted eyes which hold a lifetime’s experience, he lends many layers to the part, from urbane public speaker to vulnerable old man.
The film opens with Crisp still in dour England, but the story starts when he moves to New York in the early 1980s and is instantly in love with, and loved by, his new sunny neighbourhood. He contrasts the staid stuffiness of England with the cosmopolitan, anything goes attitude of New York. He is soon signed up by an agent (Swoosie Kurtz) and booked for speaking engagements at various bohemian theatres, and it during these scenes that Crisp delivers his famous bon mots and humorous takes on life, death, and everything in between. Asked for his opinion of AIDS, an over-confident Crisp calls it “a fad”, which showed him out of touch with the sensitivity of the time, and for a while he is ostracised by everybody through his refusal to retract his comment.
It is the relationships he forges with those closest to him that form the spine of the film. His colleague Phillip (always “Mr Steele” to Crisp) later becomes his personal assistant, and finally his friend, but there are testing times along the way. During his exile from the spotlight, An Englishman in New York concentrates on a touching but unlikely friendship that develops between the elderly Crisp and a young New York painter, Patrick Angus, who seeks out Crisp and asks him to sit for a portrait. Tucker’s performance as the shy, sensitive Angus is one of the highlights of the film. The two gay men bond over their mutual exclusion from the gay community: Crisp on account of his quip about AIDS, and Angus because he isn’t a muscled and toned Adonis. Crisp does everything he can to get Angus’s work displayed in a public gallery, and through this he is able to partly win back friends’ affections. Fans of Sex and the City will be delighted to see Cynthia Nixon star as Crisp’s second manager, Penny Arcade. As a lesbian, Arcade is also an observer of the gay world, and during Crisp’s rehabilitation he learns that elements of it are not as accepting as he would like, and every bit as judgemental as the rest of society.
This short but sweet film is sufficiently different to and removed in time from The Naked Civil Servant to warrant a look. John Hurt’s central performance is magnificent, and the other characters, who have journeys of their own, move around the periphery of his vision as, even as an old man, he attempts to understand the world, sees it through child-like eyes, and relishes his sudden and unexpected fame in middle and old age. As a film in its own right, it is engaging and well-structured, even though attitudes have changed a lot since the 1980s and homosexuals are no longer relegated to the status of outcast; but as a study of a Twentieth Century icon it is fitting and affectionate.
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