Popular reviews

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★½ 18

  I can't recall seeing the emotional struggles of a boy in his late teens explored as thoughtfully and sensitively in any film of the 1950s or early 1960s as they are in The Leather Boys. The closest I can think of is Rebel Without a Cause (another teen movie with queer themes) but, though this film's protagonist, a Cockey, teenage biker named Reggie (Colin Campbell) is about the same age as Jim Stark, they're in completely different places in their lives: Jim is a high school kid in a new town, struggling with his family, while Reggie is married, sharing a room with a wife even younger than he is, and wrestling with what it means to be an adult.…

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  Rated X for pensive stares, handsome scarves, sleeveless shirts and some mild rabble rousing

  wild how delicate this feels nearly 60 years later and nothing has ever made me want a leather jacket so badly

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  Review by Stephen M ★★★★½ 3

  Queer Cinema Challenge 2023 (link)

  Week 37: Queer British Cinema

  A British New Wave drama that bring together kitchen sink realism, the youth motorcycle culture, and homosexuality. And the mix actually works very well. Along with Basil Dearden's 1961 Victim, It's often cited as breaking new group in its sympathetic portrayal of gay characters.

  It's about the competitive triangle that develops around Reggie (Colin Campbell), a working-class young man between his newly wed wife Dot (Rita Tushingham) with whom he constantly bickers and a new biker friend (Dudley Sutton) who has a crush on him and seeks a more intimate relationship. Alll three actors bring a tremendous amount of nuance to their roles, showing their vulnerabilities and flaws, thus avoiding…

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  Review by cult_vegetables ★★★★

  Rumbling motorcycles and gleaming chrome set a fetishy backdrop for a young marriage crumbling into apathy, Tushingham's mercurial turn a catalyst for a trio of fine performances. If the gay subtext now feels quaint, it's still universal: That unstable chemical bond between friends and lovers.

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  Review by Chris 🦑 ★★★★½

  “I thought maybe I should go home.”
  “Well... what do you call this place?”

  Fuck everything!!!!!!! This rating is for Pete and Pete alone.

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  Review by Christian Ryan ★★★★½ 2

  You’ve got your campfire scene, your Norton cafe racer, a love triangle, and an epic journey of self-discovery. If there’s a better film to pair with My Own Private Idaho, I’ve certainly never seen it.

  Not only a standout of the kitchen sink movement, but one of the very best films of the 1960’s.

  Kitchen Sink Ranked

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  Review by Elia05 ★★★★ 4

  “Quietly, without intention, without hesitation, without thought, they held each other and then they kissed.”—The Leather Boys by Gillian Freeman

  Some have say that, while the rest of the world was developing their artistic styles during the 1960s, Britain, for whatever reason, lagged behind. It made up for this oversight by producing what they called “kitchen sink” dramas, or films that followed the lives of the lower and middle class with this brutal realism to it. Rita Tushingham, who plays the wife, Dot, here, had already made a name for herself in these sort of (gay) pictures after Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, a film I positively loathed. However, The Leather Boys turned that all around for me.

  Based…

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  Review by Ben Empey ★★★★

  me if i was married to jessie buckley

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  Review by Zoë 🐝

  Spoilers

  What a movie! It's not all that good, but it is a fascinating (and I think unintentional?) portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality and repression.

  The Leather Boys follows Reggie, a young mechanic who rashly rushes into marriage with Dot, a 15 year old who leaves school to become his housewife. Both are teenagers driven to wed by hormones rather than love and long term compatibility. Following the social mores of the day, they both remain chaste until the honeymoon, so for their entire courtship, sex is the exciting and nearly intangible goal, more than establishing trust and understanding and learning about each other as people. After they consummate the marriage, the core problems in their relationship, which have likely been…

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★½

  Written by Gillian Freeman, using the masculine pseudonym of Eliot George, The Leather Boys was something of a scandalous novella its themes of biker gangs, brutal robbery and homosexuality. It was the latter however that made The Leather Boys truly stand out. Envisaged as a 'Romeo and Romeo in the south London suburbs', Freeman's tale concerns an explicitly homosexual relationship between two young men, Reggie and Dick.

  Following its publication, the film rights were quickly snapped up and Freeman was hired to adapt her novel, but advised that the storyline would have to be diluted for cinema audiences. Surprisingly, it was the crime aspects of the novel - rather than the homosexuality - that was excised from the plot. With…

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  Review by mrbalihai ★★½

  Primarily memorable for Rita Tushingham's ridiculous blonde bouffant hairdo and a scene shot inside the Butlins Beachcomber Tiki Bar in Bognor Regis where everyone orders pints instead of umbrella drinks. Considered somewhat shocking in its day for the sympathetic portrayal of a gay biker, but it's pretty tame stuff by today's standards.

  Also puts me in mind of Dave Edmund's Trouble Boys, which is a good thing.

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  Review by Chris Sullivan ★★★½

  The film that asks the question whether a gay guy and a straight guy can be friends. The answer is a firm, “Yes, but…” Pointing Rick Dalton meme when Rita Tushingham cries over an actual kitchen sink.

  Men & Boys, Brotherhood & Friendship
  🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈Stories of Gay/Bi Men (Features) 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈