The Naked Civil Servant

I had the good fortune to meet the late Quentin Crisp several times. This film is a delightful and moving story of his evolution as a human being.

Like Oscar Wilde, he was the brunt of jokes and nasty stories because he dared to be himself -- and, to use his own word, a very "autre" self indeed. John Hurt does a wonderful job showing us the spirit of a man who didn't grovel to the conventions of society and dared to give the world a free spirit.

The ironic conclusion of the film is an observation by Crisp himself that the "autre" which was once his alone became the commonplace of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This is an unusual film worth seeing for the performances as well as for its lessons in living. We are who we let ourselves be. We can be who we desire to be, or we can surrender to the drab molds of the society around us.