Ron Peck | It's Ugly Head / 1974

to be touched

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Peck (screenwriter and director) It’s Ugly Head / 1974

 

This 13-minute film from 1974 was now famous gay British director Ron Peck’s graduation film at the London Film School, and as critic Mike Kennedy has observed, now “feels like a throwback to the tradition of the British kitchen sink drama, updated by inclusion of elements of sexuality

from the mid-‘70s.”

 

     David (Walter McMonagle) is a closeted school teacher whose wife Franny (Judy Liebert) is a housebound invalid, for what reason we are never advised. Together they have a pre-school-aged son Magnus (Magnus Hastings) who we discover is from a previous marriage since she addresses his father to him as David, and the couple seem to have a quite sexually distant life, she in her own bed, David busy at work as a writer in his small home office.

       Almost as soon as we meet them, the director hurries David off to an art gallery where he encounters his former lover, Steven (Michael Menaugh). Their conversation consists basically of their comments about their not having seen each other in a long while, and David announcing that

he is now married. Nonetheless, Steven appears to recognize the difficulties that relationship must entails, without missing a beat, slipping his current address and telephone number into the catalogue that David has had signed for his wife, suggesting that David “Call around some time.”

 

      Perusing the art catalogue, his wife wonders who Stephen might be, to which David replies, “Just a friend.”

       Later the next night, or perhaps a few days later David is attempting to write. Spotting a picture of him and Stephen, he tears it up, obviously attempting once more to close off that period in his life.

       A few nights later, however, he attempts to telephone Stephen and soon announces that he “might take a stroll,” Franny sees through his seemingly benign intentions, asking “Will you be back tonight?” When he indignantly questions “What she means,” she answers bluntly, “I just thought you might not be.”

       He attempts to qualm her fears by suggesting he’s begun a new chapter on his book, and will probably have it finished by summer. Two books in one year, he ponders, insisting that he has never felt happier. And at that moment he convinces himself to stay in, while she suggests that if he wants to go out, she really doesn’t mind.

       “I don’t want to. Such a waste of time. I used to waste so much time. …No, I’m not going back to that. I never enjoyed it. It’s wasteful, messy, trivial. Compulsory. No, it’s one big disappointment.”

       She seems clearly to know what he’s speaking about, his previous gay life. And she is not at all convinced about his pretense that love-making is unimportant. And she herself is disappointed. While he argues that if you want to do anything in this world you have to give “that” up, meaning sex. But she argues that it is not like that, not at all about “sublimation.” “It wasn’t like that with Alan and [sic] I. We didn’t think about, talk about it. It was normal.”

         He suggests she’s now outgrown it. She’s a writer.

      But Fran argues she hasn’t outgrown it. She just can’t have it. And work does not make her satisfied. “I get so sick of it, of lying in bed all day and all night. I get lonely. I get so lonely. Nobody ever touches me. …Nobody ever really touches me. It’s hell. I want to be touched. I want to be touched.” David sits in a chair at the end of her bed, stone-faced.

       The next morning, we observe David packing up his briefcase, presumably for his teaching. Fran is being washed by her caretaker as they discuss Gone with the Wind. Whether or not the film is a hint of her husband’s soon-to-be actions, is not established. But surely his sublimations can only take him so far before he too will cry out “I want to be touched!”

        Of course, by 1974 there had been a great many British movies and plays that referenced if not openly spoke about homosexuality. A year after Peck’s short film, the ground-breaking film The Naked Civil Servant about the life of Quentin Crisp was released. Yet at the time Peck’s student project, it was very brave for a work of cinema to deal with a married man who lived the life of a closeted gay and even more so to discuss his wife in terms of being physically disabled. Four years later Peck would make Nighthawks, one of the first openly gay films made in Britain.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).