Picture it. You’re settling in for Movie Night, and you know exactly what you’re in the mood for: a film about a bisexual demon twink who moves into a family home to seduce & ruin everyone who lives there.  Teorema is sounding a little too challenging that evening, but you’re not quite in the mood for the empty calories of Saltburn either.  What can you do to scratch that specific itch?  Thankfully, there is a perfect middle ground in the 1970 stage-play adaptation Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is a little more sophisticated than an Emerald Fennell music video but not, like, Pasolini sophisticated.  It’s got all of the bisexual lust & thrust you’re looking for but lightened up with a little vintage Benny Hill-era British humor to keep the mood light.  Everything is falling into place . . . except that Entertaining Mr. Sloane isn’t currently available for home video distribution in America.  All you can access from the couch is the trailer on YouTube (which at least helpfully includes the film’s plot-summarizing theme song so you can imagine the rest).

I was lucky to catch this horny, thorny farce at The Broad earlier this month, when it was presented by filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell for the weekly WW Cinema series, with particular attention paid to the original work’s playwright Joe Orton.  Mitchell specifically recommended the 1987 biopic Prick Up Your Ears as background context for Orton’s queer agitator sensibilities, but none of that place setting is really necessary for being entertained by Mr. Sloane.  The tricky part is just finding a copy.  This is a work of broad humor & caustic camp.  Its stage play origins and its early arrival on the queer-cinema timeline afford it a sophisticated air, but it’s played directly to the cheap seats so that everyone gets a laugh.  A precursor to similar broad-appeal outsider art from the likes of John Waters & Paul Bartel, it played well to a raucous crowd of hipster weirdos, but there’s nothing especially exclusionary or esoteric about it that would turn off a broad audience.  It’s like an old TV sitcom with a premise that’s in such bad taste that the network deliberately lost its archival tapes.

Peter McEnery stars as the murderous demon twink of the title: an unscrupulous drifter who’s invited into a middle-class family home after he’s caught sunbathing in a nearby cemetery.  He’s picked up by a lonely middle-aged biddy (Beryl Reid) as a thinly veiled act of charity that both parties winkingly acknowledge as transactional sex work.  It would be out of the question to offer him room & board in exchange for sexual favors, but while he’s there . . . Also, because she’s an upstanding lady, there’s no proper way to express her desire for the younger, eager man, but if he were so overcome with passion that he sexually ravished her . . . Unsurprisingly, the men around the house (a classist snob played by Harry Andrews and Alan Webb as his ancient, ornery father) are just as repressed in their attraction to the smooth-bodied scamp.  No one can state out loud that they want to sleep with Mr. Sloane, but everyone jealously conspires to keep him away from the young girls around town whom he’s actually attracted to, meanwhile finding excuses to touch his body.  No one can state out loud that he’s a wanted murderer either, but they all know it to be true.

As a cultural relic, this pitch-black comedy feels like a response to the moral rot of the Free Love era.  Mr. Sloane’s selfishness & violence might reflect the amorality of that era’s hedonistic youth culture, but he’s not the main target of the satire.  Really, the bulk of the movie’s satire is rooted in the older generation’s response to the moral looseness he represents.  Beryl Reid’s girlish view of sexuality is absurdly repressed for a woman of her age, which gets increasingly uncomfortable once she starts treating him as a baby she’s coddling mid-coitus, like a child playing Mommy to her dolly.  Her closeted brother is no better, framing all of his lust for the houseguest through the misogynist mindset of boarding school bunkmates playing rough house.  He also treats Mr. Sloane as a kind of doll, dressing him head to toe in a tailored, fetishistic leather get-up under the guise of hiring him as a uniformed chauffer.  No one can express what they want from Mr. Sloane or how they intend to compensate him for it, but there’s a constant power struggle for his physical time & attention between the siblings that makes for a vicious tug of war.  And then the doubly-repressed lust expressed by their father makes things even uglier.

There are a few production design and shot composition choices that elevate Entertaining Mr. Sloane above its TV sitcom trappings.  Reid’s frilly lingerie and stuffed-animal-decorated teen girl bedroom are especially gorgeous, along with the continually hilarious prop of Andrews’s gigantic pink Cadillac, which appears to be undulating without shocks to match his clownish persona.  Occasionally, director Douglas Hickox & cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky will also frame out an absurdly over-curated tableau, like disembodied lips wrapping around a phallic popsicle against the grey backdrop of gravestones, or like a makeshift wedding ceremony staged at the altar of a fresh corpse.  Mostly, though, it’s the comedic voice of Orton’s source material that shines through, just as John Cameron Mitchell’s introduction to the film suggested.  Orton’s version of “The Straights Are Not Okay” social commentary manages to feel ahead of its time but also ingratiating enough to not entirely lose his contemporary audience.  Instead, he lost the future audience that’s more accustomed to that line of combative queer humor simply through scarcity in distribution, thanks to the current, dire state of home distro for any film made before 1990.  Catch it when it inevitably hits one of the only two streaming services that matter: Criterion or Tubi, whoever gets there first.

-Brandon Ledet