Quentin Crisp
Original Title
'World in Action'- Director: Denis Mitchell
- Producer: Denis Mitchell
CGiii Comment
Once upon a time...Quentin Crisp was a mildly-amusing, harmless ranconteur. This is a film of those times...and, it has got to be said...it borders on the maudlin.
Here, he states that he has reached the end of his personality and is waiting for death in his squalid room...which came 29 years later!
In this film's aftermath, success came a-knockin' and made Mr Crisp into a pompous prig...he may have been England's first stately homosexual...but, he did absolutely nothing for the fight for equality...if anything, he set it back years!
Still, interesting to see the man that was before the man he became!
Watch...here
The(ir) Blurb...
Five years before the TV adaptation of The Naked Civil Servant made him a household name, Quentin Crisp - dandy, raconteur, life model and former prostitute - welcomed celebrated filmmaker Denis Mitchell into his dusty London bedsit. Crisp recalls the violence and fascination his extraordinary appearance once provoked, offers tips on avoiding housework and subsisting on a diet of stout and meal replacement powder, and ruminates on life as a "minority within a minority - an effeminate homosexual".
In a fittingly eccentric touch, the film was broadcast in Granada's current affairs strand World in Action. John Hurt's immortal 1975 portrayal helped place Crisp in the pantheon of English eccentrics, though Crisp's outspoken views put him at odds with the burgeoning gay rights movement. Crisp lived in the flat on Beaufort Street in Chelsea from 1940 to 1981, when he moved to New York City, having taken his successful one-man show there. He died in 1999, aged 90.
Cast & Characters
Quentin Crisp as Himself