Alan Clarke | Penda's Fen / 1974 [BBC TV movie]

going native

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Rudkin (screenwriter), Alan Clarke (director) Penda's Fen / 1974 [BBC TV movie]

 

There are few characters in LGBTQ movies who begin their films as unpleasant and almost loathsome as Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks) in Alan Clarke’s 1974 TV film Penda’s Fen. The son of the local vicar, is as Patrick Dahl, writing in Screen Slate, avers: 

 

“…a prig from Worcestershire as insufferable and piteous as any precocious adolescent one might encounter in an arthouse theater or free lecture. He clings to a world of philosophical certainties that soothe the burden of youth while the adults around him patiently indulge his pedantry in the hope that a more understanding human will emerge on the other side of puberty. In school and at home, he loudly rejects what he sees as a decline in both English morality and heterodoxy in Christian thought. When a local writer voices support for striking workers against expanding corporations, Stephen claims that he’s happy the writer and his wife are unable to conceive. The young man is a deeply unpleasant figure, with none of the telltale charms or good looks that prepare an audience for a character’s imminent absolution.”

 

    Even his religious parents, the Reverend J. Franklin (John Atkinson) and his wife (Georgine Anderson) had hoped that by 18th birthday, which is approaching, that he might have grown out of his unremitting surety and utter blindness to human frailty. But rather, it seems to have gotten worse as the young smug man argues in debate that “We must stand up for our Aryan and Christian past.” His parents have also agreed to tell him something even more important, that their son is adopted, but they are fearful, given his utter blindness to reality, that it might make the situation even worse and that perhaps he might blame them for their long silence.

    The film begins with a rather lovely scene, however, Stephen listening to Sir Edward Elgar’s masterwork Gerontius, a work central to this film and whose entire composition and history is recited in order to link the numerous different strands of this film’s multitude of concerns. At the moment, however, his father is a work on his Sunday sermon, and when his mother enters his room to ask him to turn the music down, Stephen acts as if she were a demon of sorts, coldly eyeing her as he takes the record off the turntable, puts it way, and mutters: “Don’t worry mother, you’ve absolutely ruined it.”

      But there are far worse demons that have begun to bother Stephen, despite his unshakeable faith. And at night he confronts them, slowly and gradually coming to perceive through his private school confrontations with rugby, from which he is excluded along with the general fraternity of his classmates, that he is attracted to the male body, at one moment imagining stoking the face of a naked classmate who bullies him. He is particularly fond the hunky milkman, Joel (Ron Smerczak) whom he runs to greet each morning, even if Joel generally dismisses the young man for his junior military uniform and his clueless behavior.

     Even the refuge he takes in Gerontius, as revealed in the wonderful 1971 Decca recording by Benjamin Britten, hits jarring notes in its confrontation with the Angel (sung by Yvonne Minton), who in Stephen’s private struggle between what he believes to good and evil, shows up in some of his daily hallucinations.

    Increasingly, the certitude with which Stephen faces his world begins to erode through his long religious dialogues with his wise and fair-minded father, his real-life encounters with the local writer, Arne (Ian Hogg)—whom, as Dahl mentions above, he so vicerferously and rudely dismissed for supporting union strikers—and a roadside accident with Joel and his milk truck in which the rude provincial, worried about the boy’s spill from his bicycle, picks him up and momentarily checks him out as he steadies him with his hands, Stephen slowly moving his own hands down over the man’s body.

     The very landscape—in which strange things often seem to happen such as a severe burning of a young school student on a late-night outing with his friends, and which is filled with place names such as Pinvin, calling up Pendar, names after the pre-Roman king (d. 655)—begins in his mind to call out to him in pagan terms. At one point he witnesses, presumably in a hallucination, a modern dressed group of individuals willingly offering up their hands, and even those of their children to be cut off in full devotion to their mysterious leader.

     As the boy is forced each day to begin to realize his homosexuality, he gradually starts to discover all of his old actions and values as meaningless against the pull of raw desire and love, feelings he can only associate with the devil and the pagan past still alive in the hills near his home. Even playing the organ, as he does in church, seems to spilt open the earth as if pulling him into the pits of hell. Christ begs him to be released from the cross.

     Yet in that very process, Stephen slowly begins to discover a new humanity within, roots to a past over which he has no control. His parents determine to reveal that he is not their birth child, which further sends him into an emotional distress that is relieved only when he meets up in his visions with Elgar himself, an old man now resentful of his own embracement of England’s imperious past and his rude behavior, particularly when a young girl who has long practiced for the special event sings one of his songs, only to have him shout out “Stop, stop, stop! You’ve ruined by birthday!”—the girl rushing off in tears to never sing another note again. Elgar’s memory of a life not so well lived can only remind the young Stephen of his own reaction to his mother that we’ve witnessed earlier in the film.

     Finally, in his busy imagination Stephen is confronted by the visage of his own parents, evidently Jews who died in the concentration camps, who beg him to return with them, presumably his own guilt for not fully embracing his own birth identity. But he rejects them, as well as the present England with which he no longer can fully identify, linking himself instead to the roots of the civilization, its pagan past, Pendar handing over the kingdom to the young, confused Stephen who can no longer believe in all the values he has previously held in such high esteem.    

     If Rudkin’s script (one of the screenwriters, incidentally, of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) reaches for a vision that is far too broad, attempting to embrace aspects of everything from Elgar’s music, mystical encounters between angels and demons, and issues of British imperialism and its continuation if the provincial worlds of its everyday citizens, to a young man’s confrontation with his own queerness, paganism, and social injustice, still Penda’s Fen is a remarkable film just for having so openly dealt with homosexuality at a time when few British films dared to confront the issue except through innuendo (Douglas Hickox’s rendition of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane from 1970 and Ron Peck’s Nighthawks of 1978 being some of the few exceptions), and one of the rarest of LGBTQ pictures in which the hero ends—in this character’s case and even more remarkable event—as a fairly happy and well-adjusted individual. All one can say is that the influence of those ancient Druids and Celts is amazing.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).