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The Leather Boys

The Leather Boys

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Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Black & White
  • Widescreen


Description:

Though Sidney J. Furie's Leather Boys was controversial in its day, its boldness has dissipated with time. Set in the world of the leather-jacket-clad motorcycle clubs of British youth, this product of the British social-realist "kitchen sink" movement is at its best capturing the details of working-class life: the holiday camps, the claustrophobic studio homes, the pubs and cafés that dot neighborhood streets. Schoolgirl Dot (the engaging Rita Tushingham) and mechanic Reg (Colin Campbell) marry too early and quickly discover adulthood is not nearly as much fun as they expected. She's a social gadfly and he's a stick-in-the-mud homebody and they bring out the worst in each other. Mere months after exchanging vows he moves out to care for his widowed grandma, inviting his new mate Pete (Dudley Sutton) to bunk with him, but Pete's interest in Reg, as we learn, is more than just friendly. Tushingham is marvelous as Dot, an immature young woman alternately selfish, sincere, and desperate, and Campbell makes the soft-spoken Reg as blind to her needs as she is to his, but Furie barely hints at what brings them together in the first place--the moment the vows are spoken they seem to be at loggerheads, disagreements turning to vicious bickering. The film's reputation largely rests on its oblique exploration of the gay underground, provocative in its time, but today it's a lesser companion to such classics as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and This Sporting Life. --Sean Axmaker
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