Nighthawks

This could almost be a documentary, it's depiction of the gay male lifestyle is so realistic. A brilliant film unlike any others in the genre. No fantasies here, just honesty (though obviously made before AIDS was an all-too common fear).

I know this is the wrong credit for kris Watson Cos I am Kris Watson and I can 100% tell you I wasn't in it.

Nighthawks is an interesting study of gay life in London and at the time it was made it was those heady 70s, post liberation and pre-AIDS. This kind of film was not made again so soon either here or across the pond where Nighthawks originated.

This is a study of Kenneth Robertson who is a young geography teacher at one of London's inner city schools by day and by night he's living the life of a gay man whose only venue is the bar scene. We see him picking up a lot of men, but it's only a series of one night stands. Neither Robertson or Diane Keaton is destined to find Mr. Goodbar to spend a life with.

The climax of the film is when his students find out about him and confront him in class. He answers a lot of their questions, their most ignorant questions since these are kids who have not exactly been exposed to positive gay role models. Since then a lot of positive LGBT characters have been on the big screen, the small screen, and a ton of well known people in all walks of life have left the closet behind. And not for a hedonistic existence that Robertson enjoys.

Many films like Nighthawks fall into a category like this. Stonewall has come, liberation has come, we'll get our rights, but let the good times roll. That's the attitude that dates Nighthawks now.

Still it makes an interesting view of the times.

Finding a steady boyfriend proves challenging for a gay geography teacher in prejudiced 1970s London in this British drama starring Ken Robertson. The film was considered daring in its day with its suggestion that something is wrong with a society in which it is so hard for homosexual men to be themselves. Viewed nowadays though, the impact is not the same. There are some admirable techniques at hand, like the absence of audible dialogue for the first six minutes and a shot that gradually zooms into his nervous face at a gay bar, and some of the dialogue resonates (some believe "you're not even human" if you do not "like birds"). For all these positives though, there are many repetitive shots of men dancing for ages on end. A new teacher at Robertson's school also provides a too obvious outlet for him to ramble on about the difficulties of being gay and while a scene in which his prejudiced students grill him about their misconceptions of homosexuality is great, it comes too late in the piece. The film additionally shies over how its protagonist has so much spare time or can turn up to class two hours late without repercussion - but, for all its drawbacks, the film does at least have its heart in the right place.

The main character's life (Jim) is teaching during the day and dancing and picking up partners at the discos. And this process is shown over and over again, ad nauseum, with the discos playing one of literally four very repetitive songs in every scene.

This film desperately needed an editor. It's a 20-minute film that goes on for an hour and 50 minutes. There's literally just 15 minutes of consequential footage in it, and I've never seen so much disco dancing footage in a single film in my life. Even Saturday Night Fever didn't have this much.

There's one shot of Jim scanning the crowd while he drinks his beer, and the shot just goes on for literally 5 minutes of him staring and pretending to drink from an empty glass with his eyeballs zipping around as the camera slowly zooms in. I could almost imagine it being a Python sketch where satirical subtitles appear, saying, "Okay, you can cut now." "No, seriously, cut." "Okay, cut, please." "Will you please stop drinking from an empty glass?" "No, seriously, there's no more beer in there." "You're literally licking the glass clean now." "Okay, CUT!"

Yes, I appreciate the film as a time capsule and for its honesty and cinema verité style, but it's a film that doesn't know when to quit for lack of interesting material. The only consequential moment is the scene in which he answers questions about his homosexuality for his students.