One A Week Reviews #2: An Englishman in New York

After 34 years, John Hurt returns to playing Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York. It's a sequel, the follow-up to The Naked Civil Servant, where Crisp shared his story of becoming "one of the stately queens of England" through strife and the Twentieth Century. Here, we rejoin Crisp as he emigrates to America and we rejoin Hurt as he revisits one of the most marvelous characterizations of his career.

This film opens with a TV interview from the night in 1975 after The Naked Civil Servant aired, making Crisp a national sensation. He rises to the occasion and, when invited to the US on a publicity tour, he falls in love with New York and decides to stay.

Quentin Crisp excelled at the brilliance of honestly being one's true self. He gets an agent, played by Swoozie Kurtz in a why-is-she-here performance, who helps him become the toast of the town. At this point he's in his Seventies, but Hurt makes him seem like he's at the prime of his life. He gets a one-man show and a film review column, but his topic is his view of the world. His life of holding court at every invitation and singing for his supper must've gotten tiring after a while, but he pretty much lived on cocktails and crudites. He drifts into  becoming the toast of the art scene.

One A Week Reviews #45: The Naked Civil Servant

The Naked Civil Servant

I wonder if they didn't include the real Quentin Crisp introducing The Naked Civil Servant so the 1975 audience wouldn't completely dismiss the magnificent queen brilliantly embodied by John Hurt as a caricature. "Quentin Crsip," though was a role created and cultivated by Quentin Crsip, and it was he was an outsized, brilliant marvel. You'd never believe it if you didn't meet the real Crisp up front.

Sometimes, in a world that expects conformity, one must be the biggest, most exaggerated version of themselves that they could be. Crsip's autobiography shared his life, growing up a unique and very gay boy coming of age in England between two world wars. John Hurt is beyond brilliant in the role, not only does he inhabit the part fully, he's also absolutely lovely in drag. As Hurt has pretty much looked ravaged by time since 1977, seeing him so young and delicate is refreshing. Savoring every word of Crisp's bon mots - and he one seriously funny wit- and conveying the strength and dignity required for someone the whole world is against, Hurt's Crisp is like an exotic, hothouse flower in a cold, concrete garden. His armor was his flamboyance and, out and proud before the world knew you could be, he never let any small-minded... bullshit get in his way, and Crisp put up with a lot of it. His struggles and the cruelty of others are a good reminder to those of us, thanks to privilege and, frankly, physical stature don't get menaced by thugs and the judgmental every single time we walk out of the house. Admittedly, part of his survival mechanism is a certain... passivity that can be infuriating, but perhaps detachment was what it took to make it against those odds. He also seems to be the heart of his bohemian circle, and his fondness for those friends seems to be the primary relationships in his life.

(As Crisp himself might say: Don't fear, dear, everything after the break is fabulous)