The Leather Boys
The passing of time has lent extra historical significance to this racy British melodrama, a fascinating early example of queer social-realist cinema. Based on a 1961 novel by Gillian Freeman, who also penned the screenplay, THE LEATHER BOYS stars Colin Campbell as Reggie, a young working-class South Londoner torn between his sexless marriage to Dot (Rita Tushingham) and his deepening attraction to a gay biker friend, Pete (Dudley Sutton). Director Sidney J. Furie’s kitchen-sink love-triangle drama is coy by modern standards, sanitizing the novel’s more explicit same-sex love story, but it still stands up as a revealing cult curio from a more closeted age.
Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell, Dudley Sutton
- Notes From Rachel KushnerThe greatest of the “kitchen sink dramas” and my favorite film of the British New Wave, even if it was made by a Canadian. Really, THE LEATHER BOYS is a perfect movie, a profound and moving (and very funny) drama about working-class life in England in the early 1960s, and about motorcycles and “rocker” subculture at the infamous Ace Cafe, and finally, about men and illicit love.
