Prick up your ears.

NO ORDINARY JOE

THE PLAYWRIGHT Joe Orton, whowas bludgeoned to death in 1967 by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, after a 16 years' relationship, is the subject of the most explicitly and exultantly homosexual mainstream film in the English language, Prick Up Your Ears. The educated, middle-class Halliwell met the eight-years-younger Orton, a working-class youth of 17 from Leicester, when both were students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. They moved into a small flat paid for by Halliwell, who undertook the education of young John, the disciple subsequently changing his name to Joe, so he woudln't be confused with John Osborne.

Halliwell, who was good-looking butbegan losing his hair by age 23, was an unsuccessful novelist, playwright, and (later) collage-ust, who nevertheless was able to stimulate and help develop his lover's talent. Their attempts at joint writing failed; their campy and obscene defacings of library books landed them in jail for six months. There Orton wrote--alone--what was to be his first produced TV play, which he later reworked for the stage, and so began a spectacular playwriting career that left Halliwell far behind.

Sexually, too, Joe surpassed Kenneth,who wasn't cut out for the life of promiscuous pickups, which Orton wallowed in more and more. This may have been partly owing to Ken's bourgeois upbringing (though neither was Orton's family, with the exception of sister Leonie, sympathetic to Joe's activities), partly to his fading looks and waning sexual powers, partly to his involvement with and investment in Joe, whom he did not want to lose. Above all, however, Halliwell envied his lover's growing success, wealth, and fame, even as he was sexually jealous of him.

Although Ken acted as secretary andhousekeeper to Joe, he was mostly the older wife losing her hold on a younger, more successful husband. Ken made scenes at parties Joe took him to, bored or alienated the show-business and society figures Orton moved among, took profuse sedatives, and sought (as well as avoided) medical and psychiatric help. He was a fiasco and knew it, for all his assistance with Joe's plays and life. In the fear that Joe would drop him--a fear nurtured by the extremely outspoken diary Joe kept leaving around for him to read--Halliwell took a hammer, went up to his sleeping lover, and methodically bashed his head to a pulp. Then he calmly stripped naked, swallowed 22 Nembutals with grapefruit juice, and died easily and much faster than Orton, whose brains and blood bespattered the walls Halliwell had covered with his photo-collages. This homosexual Liebestod was not of the Tristan and Isolde variety.

You get a sense of how the movie--basedon the biography by John Lahr, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett (playwright, scenarist, and Beyond the Fringer), and directed by Stephen Frears (of, rather overratedly, My Beautiful Laundrette fame) errs or cheats from the very way it handles the murder-suicide. In the movie, Halliwell hammers away at his lover's back--not, as in reality, his head: It was Orton's brain, not his body, that he especially envied and desired. And, of course, there is absolutely no evidence for his lovingly muttering, "Joel! . . . John!" after the murder. And, like Lahr's equally mediore biography, the movie begins with that murder, then moves back in time, and works up to--in fuller detail--the murder again. The pretense of explaining the social and psychological causes allows for much sexual and sensational exploitation, and the murder, which we get coming and going, crowns it all.

Just what is the film trying to say? Atfirst, it uses a quasi-documentary structure, ostensibly chronicling how John Lahr (played by Wallace Shawn, who can't act but looks like Lahr, only worse) researches Orton's life to write the biography. Very sporadically, we get glimpses of Lahr dopily questioning people, notably Peggy Ramsay, the scrappy theatrical agent who helped make Orton a success, and members of Orton's family. This spurious and disruptive technique is soon abandoned, but not before it has served two tendentious purposes.

A parallel is implied between theheterosexual marriage of the American John Lahr and Anthea, his wealthy, upper-class English wife, and the homosexual quasi-marriage of Orton and Halliwell. The suggestion is that the same envy and rivalry obtain in both; so we are shown in Lahrs collaborating on the Orton biography (which in fact is credited to John alone, though Anthea doubtless helped), and also how Anthea sulks and carries on because John is getting all the glory. (Lindsay Duncan, who plays her, is much too good for the role.) We are not shown the Lahrs' son, however, lest the balance swing toward heterosexual unions.

The second implication is that bourgeoisrespectability--whether as practiced by Anthea and her stuffy mother on the upper rungs, or, up to a point, by Halliwell on the lower--doesn't have a patch on the unencumbered, freewheeling fun of Orton's life, complete with orgies in public lavatories and Moroccan vacations where one revels with any number of boy prostitutes. The lower classes, as embodied by various lesser Ortons as well as by the couple on the ground floor of the house in Islington where Joe and Ken shared a last, still very modest flat, seem equally frustrated and edgy, as well as nosy and meddlesome; the elder Ortons, in fact, are shown living in a homemade inferno.

Contrariwise, all the casual homosexualrelationships, notwithstanding Ken's jealous inveighing against Joe's promiscuity, are depicted as adventuresome and satisfying despite the odd narrow escape from that tool of hypocrisy and oppression, the police. Even where the scenario more or less follows Orton's diaries--now published, then available in large chunks from Lahr's biography, whose mainstray they were--there are some significant changes. Thus the debauch in "a little pissoir" on the Holloway Road, which involved Orton and eight strangers, took place in darkness because "somebody had taken the bulb away." In the film, there are several bulbs that get unscrewed in an elaborate choreography ("put out the light and then put out the light") involving lifts and going up on pointes--though what goes up must go down--and the whole thing takes on a romantic balletic quality. Similarly, the film invents a scene in which Joe loses his virginity to Ken as they watch on TV the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (very jolly and iconoclastic, that!).

The problem with all this is that itmistakenly turns actual life into a cruel farce in the manner of an Orton play. Certainly that is how Orton perceived life, as his diaries make abundantly clear. A typical episode reported in them has Orton absconding from his mother's funeral with the corpse's dentures, only to hand them later, backstage, to a horrified actor about to go on in Loot in a scene involving comic business with his dead mother's dentures: "Here, I thought you'd like the originals." (This incident is, needless to say, in the film.) Oscar Wilde, from whom Orton learned so much, claimed that nature imitates art; it took Orton, however, to put that precept into action. And Alan Bennett contributes his own tuppennyworth. Thus to the factual scene in which Leonie Orton mixes the dead lovers' ashes, he adds this bit: "LEONIE: I think I am putting in more of Joe than of Ken. PEGGY ramsay: It's a gesture, dear, not a recipe." Which doesn't even make minimal sense: Obviously one transfers the entire content of one urn into the other.

Unfortunately, what works in absurdiststage comedy does not work in a screen biography. The snuffing out of a gifted playwright's life so near the beginning of his dazzling career is humanly and artistically too terrible a loss to be laughingly digested along with irreverent jokes and casual copulations. Moreover, the film makes the life seem too easy, as if Orton had gone from success to success; in fact, he also had osme flops and other setbacks. Most disturbing of all is the inescapable feeling in the viewer of watching a film that would not have been made but for the grisly ending and the excuse for depicting explicit homosexual acts.

Gary Oldman's performance as Orton,whom he physically resembles, is an unqualified triumph; Vanessa Redgrave is fine as Peggy, and there's solid work from the entire supporting cast, save Wallace Shawn. A graver error is the miscating of the talented Alfred Molina as Halliwell--a handsome man portrayed by a hulking cross between Lee J. Cobb and Peter Lorre. Was Molina cast to add a comic element to the film? Or was his goofy appearance meant to justify Orton's infidelities? Or are there some special, private reasons? By making the Orton-Halliwell relationship jokier than it actually was, the film gives up a further chance to be something more than a giggly whine about the heterosexual world's incomprehensoin of homosexuals and its allegedly fatal consequences.