Entertaining Mr Sloane

Joe Orton's classic play is bought to the big screen and features just 4 eccentric characters. Young lothario, arch manipulator and potentially murderer. McEnery cons his way into love starved Beryl Reid's house by a graveyard where she lives with her old father, Webb. All is well but McEnery needs his wits about him when Reid's gay businessman brother Harry Andrews arrives.

The script is all in this witty, very dark black comedy, although the performances are spot on with Reid wonderful as the sad, past it sex mad landlady and particularly Andrews in full military swagger preaching morals to McEnery whilst still longing to get into his pants. Hilarious.

The adaptation of Joe Orton's play Entertaining Mr Sloane is a misfire. Beryl Reid is the middle aged nymphomaniac Kath who spots the amoral narcissistic drifter Mr Sloane (Peter McEnery) lying half naked sunbathing in the cemetery. Kath herself who lives by the cemetery is dressed seductively, a see thorough dress and we initially see her suggestively licking an ice lolly.

Kath invites Mr Sloane to become her lodger and quickly seduces him. Her elderly father, Dada recognizes Mr Sloane as the man who killed his employer and then disappeared.

Mr Sloane is having a fine time womanizing, tormenting Dada and being playful with Kath and her brother Ed (Harry Andrews) who drops by every now and then. Ed seems straight-laced but drives a pink Pontiac and makes Mr Sloane the chauffeur with a tight leather uniform.

The film is supposed to be a grotesque, sexual black farce but the film reveals its hand too early. McEnery is too old as Mr Sloane, he should had been held back as an innocent charmer than unveiled as a murderer as soon as he met Dada. As for Ed, that pink Pontiac gave him away not matter how much of a country gent he tried to pass off as.

The ending was also rather abrupt and disappointing although I suspect a gay marriage ceremony would had been seen as shocking at the time.

ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE is certainly an uneven adaptation of the Joe Orton play, but it does create a few sparks with the performances of BERYL REID as Kath, PETER McENERY as Sloane and HARRY ANDREWS as Ed. The trio is involved in a three-way affair with Mr. Sloane who charms them both with his good looks and apparently bi-sexual leanings.

It's certainly not the usual fare one expects to see on screen, even in the '70s when the material was considered quite daring. But the script gives the three principals some rich material to work with and the film now has a cult status with fans of black comedy.

Orton is the gay playwright who was killed by his lover who then committed suicide and was dead before this film version of his hit London play was made. Whether he would have approved of some of the changes is debatable, but it still has the power to shock and cause ripples of laughter despite the darkness of the theme.

Summing up: As oddball as they come.

Have watched this film many times and enjoy it just as much as the first time,a mark of a good film.Joe Orton certainly had a strange sense of humour very evident in this black-comedy.A must see if never seen.Perhaps immoral,so what the blazes its entertaining to say the least.Great performances from the cast.

This adaptation of the brilliant Joe Orton play in an unmitigated disaster. Every joke is overdone to the point of surrealism. The wit is killed dead, and any pretense to psychology is thrown out the window in a late sixties psychedelic mish-mash completely at odds with the stage farce tone of the source material. If people like this movie, it's for the sheer oddness, not because it has any of the qualities evinced by the play. It's like watching a Noel Coward play performed by lunatics in an asylum.