Intersections: TWO GENTLEMEN SHARING

Intersections between race, social class and gender were however not the sole preserve of independent filmmakers. As the 1960s drew to a close, these themes were explored in more naturalistic style in the social tragicomedy Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), a film largely lost in the interstices of British film history.

Two Gentlemen Sharing1969

Directed by émigré Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, who had already made a name for himself in British television, Two Gentlemen Sharing is adapted from David Stuart Leslie’s 1963 novel by Jamaican writer Evan Jones, most famous in this period for his regular work with Joseph Losey. The film brings together the established English actors Robin Phillips and Judy Geeson with the emerging talents of African-American Hal Frederick and Jamaican Esther Anderson.

Andrew Mackenzie (Frederick) is a trainee black solicitor from Jamaica working in Brixton. He finds himself sharing a flat in a smart house in Knightsbridge with Roddy Pater (Phillips), a young white Englishman who is a director of TV commercials. The two men differ in confidence about their sexuality: Andrew has a steady girlfriend, Caroline Harcourt (Anderson), while Roddy struggles and fails as he moves from frustrations with Ethne Burrows (Hilary Heath) to a new relationship with Jane Archer (Geeson). The plot follows the ups and downs of the relationship between the two men, their differing connections with women, and their difficult connections to a racially diverse metropolis, before reaching a gloomy conclusion about the doubtful prospects for the integration of troubled masculinity – of any skin-colour – into the fabric of late 1960s British society.

Two Gentlemen Sharing opens with a scene (invented for the film and playing upon the screenwriter’s own British ancestry) centring on a telephone box alongside Westminster Bridge, with the iconography of the Houses of Parliament looming large in the background. Andrew is making a call, in his cut-glass English accent, in search of rented accommodation. He confirms that his surname is Scottish, but when he feels obliged to point out that he is ‘black’, he is asked ‘how black?’ Giving the answer ‘hopelessly’ – the dismissive sarcasm of which also implies less tractable issues to come – he puts the phone down and walks off. Roddy is the child of what he calls ‘sort of decayed gentlefolk . . . a relic left over from the Ice Age’, living in a country house in Oxford shire – or rather in just part of an empty and decaying mansion; a visit with friends in a key episode in the film illustrates the emotional aridity of Roddy’s upper class family background, and a younger generation’s very different sense of social style. Roddy attended ‘a minor public school –homosexuality at reduced prices’, a comment which leads Andrew to question Roddy’s sexual inclinations – ‘Are you . . . Queer?’ – and which heralds a later, negative representation of race and homosexuality in the person of the flamboyantly camp Marcus (Ram John Holder). Tensely confirming their heterosexuality, the two men agree to try out a flat share.

Roddy is initially fascinated by Andrew’s girlfriend Caroline. But this is based on a more fundamental social naïveté about the new intercultural environment. At their first meeting, Roddy promptly asks her ‘Have you been over here long?’, to which her response is ‘Do I look like a dammed immigrant?’ Her claim to come from Beckenham leads Roddy to regard her as the first person of colour he has met to have been born in England, until Andrew reveals that she has only been in the country a couple of years, and is in fact ‘Kingston [i.e. Kingston, Jamaica] middle class’. Caroline’s aspirational duplicity is revealing, and she also embodies an important discourse on race and sexuality, explaining to Roddy that Englishmen make her feel ‘frigid’, where with Andrew she can be ‘a woman’. She also confronts what she sees as limited and negative English stereotypes of black women, claiming that if she were white, Roddy wouldn’t be enquiring into her sex life.

The turning point in the narrative for Roddy comes at a ‘jump-up’ dance, a lengthy scene in which raced and gendered identities crisscross in telling but confused ways. Our unlikely guide into the scene is Roddy’s cynical advertising sidekick Phil Carter (Norman Rossington), dancing over-enthusiastically with a tolerant Caroline, with the camera moving to Ethne and Roddy as they move in a somewhat disengaged manner. The camera follows Phil as he runs into the queenly Marcus and his companion, Amanda (Daisy Mae Williams), a black woman wearing a pink wig. But when Amanda accepts Phil’s invitation to dance, a new and unlikely relationship is set in train, which in its carefree way will complicate the film’s equations between masculinity, femininity and race. The dance scene also confirms Andrew’s sense of difference from fellow black Londoners, and brings Roddy into contact with Jane Archer, her opposition to fascism, and, later, her bi-racial family.

As Britain has become a more complexly hybrid society, questions of identity  are no longer binary but manifold. Blackness – a concept used in a quite  simplified way in this article – is no longer largely an issue to do exclusively  with Afro-Caribbean identities. Given the larger context of British Asian and  Eastern European migration, questions of race and ethnicity now need to be addressed within a broader sense of difference and sameness, and within the  intersectionalities of social class and gender. 

A Britain still beginning to forge a new multicultural identity in the era of globalization currently seeks to create a new version of itself amidst complex articulations between Europe,  the Commonwealth, and a former empire. 

Membership of the European Union has forced Britain to negotiate anew the perennial question of migration and citizenship, with all its national and racial subtexts, while a deeper xenophobia is signalled by the‘little England’ mentality so desperate for Brexit to be delivered. In Britain, as across Europe, deep-seated racism maintains its virulence.