DVD Description
Nighthawks is the story of Jim, a geography teacher at a London comprehensive school. Living alone in a cramped flat, his sexuality a half open secret to everyone but his pupils and his parents, he spends the evenings at gay bars and discos looking vainly for ‘Mr Right’. A succession of relationships peter out after two or three weeks, and the only continuities in his life are his work and his burgeoning friendship with a female supply teacher, Judy. Both are threatened as Jim’s quiet desperation boils up towards the surface...
Hugely controversial on its initial release Nighthawks was one of the first British movies to accurately depict the life of a gay man in London. This is first time it has ever been available on DVD. Extras include a newly commissioned documentary on the making and and impact of Nighthawks presented by Matt Lucas from Little Britain.
Special Features
Nighthawks Reflected ( a newly commissioned documentary on the making and impact of Nighthawks presented by Matt Lucas from Little Britain) An Open Script: Improvisation and working with non professional actors (a short film by Ron Peck) New digital transfer with fully restored image and sound, supervised by the director. Booklet featuring essay on the film. Aspect Ratio: 1:33 Full Frame Audio: Stereo Main Language: English Disc Format: DVD9
The Guardian
" ..very moving. It should be widely seen and discussed"
" the first film to delve with anything resembling realism into London gay life"
From the Director
As early as 1975, Ron Peck conceived of a film that would break with the steroetypical ‘camp’ and/or problematic representation of homosexuals (or ‘inverts’ as they were described in 1961 British film ‘Victim’). Nighthawks would show gay life as it was experienced by gays in an everyday, contemporary context: non-actors would appear in the film, only gays would play gay characters, and their experiences would inform the screenplay. Predictably, funding took years to secure. In 1976 Paul Hallam joined the project and collaborated on the early drafts of the script with Peck. Pre-production and video workshops were only just kept afloat by small contributions from individuals and groups, but the collaborators managed to shoot a short test sequence and this secured an offer of free facilities and equipment and finally a modest but barely sufficient budget of £60,000 that enabled shooting to go ahead in 1978.
On release in 1979 Nighthawks proved commercially successful running for 9 weeks at London’s Gate Cinema and hugely controversial. It polarised opinion within the gay and critical communities winning praise and condemnation in equal amounts.
From the Back Cover
25 years after its first cinema showing the world into which the Nighthawks DVD is being released is a world in which everything has changed and nothing has changed. In 1978 AIDS didn’t exist in Britain. In 2005 gay culture has been mainstreamed into all but the most conservative and reactionary of societies. Would a classroom of schoolchildren raised on the likes ‘Queer As Folk’,‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘Little Britain’ react in the same way to a gay teacher as the group in the film? Hundreds of thousands of people regularly turn out for Pride and Mardi Gras events all around the world but the legalising of same sex marriage exposes prejudice and homophobia all too easily.
Despite all of these changes the questions that Peck and Hallam try to answer in Nighthawks are still being asked - who am I? How can I be true to myself? Will I ever find Mr Right? It is their handling of these themes that underlines Nighthawks universality, authenticity and importance.
