10 Films to Watch Next If You Liked: Prick Up Your Ears

As the 37th edition of the BFI's Flare festival of LGBTQIA+ cinema opens in London, Cinema Paradiso looks back at Prick Up Your Ears (1987), a landmark film that shattered taboos while relating a tragic true-life love story.

Joe Orton would have turned 90 on New Year's Day 2023. Exactly half that span ago, in 1978, John Lahr published Prick Up Your Ears, a biography of the playwright who had taken London's Theatreland by storm in the mid-1960s before being brutally murdered by his longtime partner and sometime collaborator, Kenneth Halliwell.

Based on Orton's racy diaries, the book became a bestseller and Alan Bennett set about adapting it for the screen. Backed by Film on Four, Prick Up Your Ears (1987) was director Stephen Frears's follow up to My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), another queer classic that had forced audiences to address their prejudices and fears at the start of what would become the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Indeed, with its depiction of clandestine activity in a recent past when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, the film doubled as a reminder of the perils of marginalisation at a time when openness, acceptance, and compassion were paramount.

What's the Story?

On 9 August 1967, literary agent Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave) comes to the flat that playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and 'friend' Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) shared at 25 Noel Road in Islington. While police officers take particulars of the couple's corpses, Ramsay slips a suicide note and Orton's diaries into her coat and sidles away.

A few years later, American writer John Lahr (Wallace Shawn) visits Ramsay to ask about the diaries. He is researching a biography of Orton and hopes that the journals will afford him some insights into the playwright's literary inspiration and some clues that might help him rationalise his murder. Ramsay hides the diary on her office shelves, but readily reminisces about Orton and jokes that if Halliwell had been his first wife, she is now his widow.

At the start of 1967, Orton was on a roll. His play, Loot, was scandalising packed houses, while Brian Epstein (David Cardy) had sounded him out about writing a new film for The Beatles. By contrast, Halliwell was becoming increasingly despondent, as Orton no longer needed him intellectually or physically. Ramsay had tried to bolster his confidence by purchasing a collaged screen at a small show of his artwork. But, even though he had no desire to leave him, Orton couldn't resist twisting the knife at every opportunity,

Things hadn't always been this way, however. When they first met at RADA in 1951, Orton had been in awe of the older and more sophisticated Halliwell. Raised on the Wirral, Halliwell had witnessed his mother's death from a wasp sting when he was 11 and had found his father's body after his suicide in 1949. By contrast, Leicester-born Orton had come to resent his disapproving mother, Elsie (Julie Walters), and had openly shared his contempt with his doting sister, Leonie (Frances Barber), who later spoke to Lahr about her sibling's eagerness to escape.

Despite Orton having taken elocution lessons to lose his provincial accent, neither man had been a particularly talented actor. But their friendship blossomed into a romance and they moved into a room with two single beds. Here, they started collaborating on a range of literary pursuits, including some unpublished novels, including The Boy Hairdresser, which they had submitted to Faber & Faber, where poet T.S. Eliot was a director.

During this period, the pair shared the credit for everything and Orton had repaid Halliwell for his cultural mentoring by teaching him cottage etiquette at the public toilets where gay men met for sexual encounters in constant fear of being apprehended by the police. While Orton enjoyed anonymous hook-ups, Halliwell felt self-conscious and fearful.

Having lost his hair to alopecia, Halliwell became increasingly prone to insecurity. Then, in 1962, as they struggled to make progress in tandem, they were jailed for defacing library books and creating salacious covers and jacket notes. Sent to separate prisons (with Orton believing they were being punished as much for their sexuality as their prank), they returned to Noel Road very different people, as Orton had thrived in isolation and started dedicating himself to his writing, while Halliwell had withdrawn into himself and made an attempt on his own life.

Frustrated at being relegated to the role of his flatmate's factotum, Halliwell had resented receiving no credit for his contributions to Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane. He also felt excluded when denied the chance to meet Paul McCartney, even though the screenplay for Up Against It had drawn heavily on a novel they had penned together. His spirits were raised by a sex-and-sun trip to Morocco, which was enlivened by a phone call, in which Orton shocked Epstein by suggesting a scene in which all four Fabs slept with the same girl at once.

On their return to Noel Road, Orton learns that his mother had died and heads home for the funeral. Halliwell consults a doctor in his absence, but he's appalled by Orton's suggestion that they split up and inflicts nine hammer blows on his skull before washing down 22 Nembutal tablets with grapefruit juice. Their bodies are spotted through the letterbox the following morning by their landlady and a chauffeur who had come to take Orton to a function. As we see Leonie mingling their ashes, Ramsay notes that Halliwell's funeral was sparsely attended and Lahr opines that, without his crime, he would be entirely unknown.

Adventures in Bedsitland

Published to glowing notices, John Lahr's biography sparked a chatterati fascination with Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell and no one was surprised when the film rights were sold. However, turning the tome into a coherent screenplay proved a tricky task, as Alan Bennett confided to Monthly Film Bulletin in 1987.

'I wrote several drafts of the screenplay,' he explained, 'but I wasn't happy with any of them. The temptation was to try and write it in a sub-Orton kind of language - that was one of the problems with the first script. Orton's language was very theatrical and it doesn't really work on film.' In one draft, Bennett included himself as a screenwriter collaborating with Lahr on finding a way to make the scenario work. But this was dismissed as 'an impossibly baroque idea.'

Retaining the Lahr angle, Bennett pitched the project to Chrysalis Records, which had expressed an interest in funding the project. However, Bennett recoiled when he discovered that the label envisaged something akin to a Swinging London version of Édouard Molinaro's La Cage aux folles (1978). With no one else willing to bankroll the picture, it gathered dust for four years before Zenith came aboard.

In retrospect, Stephen Frears considered the delay a 'blessing', as it allowed Gary Oldman to grow into the role of Orton. Having just made his screen debut as a naval rating on a night out in Plymouth in Colin Gregg's Remembrance (1982), he had auditioned at an early stage of casting and been overlooked for being too young. Indeed, Keith Allen was in poll position to star. But, by the time Frears got the green light, Oldman had turned heads with his scowling performance as Sex Pistol Sid Vicious in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986), a part that had originally been earmarked for Daniel Day-Lewis.

Ian McKellen had been an early choice for Halliwell. However, he made his excuses and later revealed, 'I needed a holiday - I'd been working so hard - so I just kept saying "no, no, no", but when I saw the film I really regretted not having done it.' Maggie Smith seemingly had no regrets at passing on the part of Peggy Ramsay, as she was keen to avoid distressing sons Christopher Larkin and Toby Stephens by exposing them to homosexual promiscuity and murder. Vanessa Redgrave stepped in, despite bearing little physical resemblance to the Australia-born, South Africa-raised agent, who had been in London since 1929 and was approaching sixty during the Summer of Love.

There's no mention of the Flower Power on Carnaby Street aspect of 1967 in the screenplay, as Orton and Halliwell didn't move in those kind of circles. Moreover, Bennett was keen to show that the social revolution obsessing trendsetters and journalists had actually made little impact on the lives of most ordinary Britons. The same was true of the decade's more relaxed attitudes to sex, which meant that gay men risked prosecution right up to the Sexual Offences Act receiving royal assent on 27 July 1967, just 13 days before Orton and Halliwell died. By a cruel twist of fate, Beatles manager Brian Epstein (who was also gay) succumbed to an overdose a fortnight later.

With McKellen out of the running, Frears extended an invitation to Alfred Molina. He had made his screen debut as Satipo in Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and had landed roles in Richard Donner's Ladyhawke, Peter Yates's Eleni, and Dick Clement's Water after impressing as Soviet sailor Sergei alongside Peter Firth in Frank Clarke's Mersey romcom, Letter to Brezhnev (all 1985). Molina recalled the meeting in The Hollywood Reporter: 'I went to his home and Alan Bennett, the writer, was there, and it was the most relaxed interview I'd ever had for a job, because we barely talked about the job. We spent a good hour just talking about everything but the movie. We talked about other films, London in the '60s. It was just a very nice afternoon over a little chicken salad. I went home and two days later I was told if I wanted it, it was mine. It was a bit dreamlike.'

Molina recalls an awareness on the set that they were making something significant. For Bennett, however, this was a study of marriage. 'In a sense, it's what happens when someone marries early, at a period when they are struggling, and then becomes famous and thinks about jettisoning their first wife. And at that point Halliwell murdered Orton. I could have done it as a gay film but that would have just worked on one level and been of limited interest.'

If Bennett was also keen to explore relationships in general, he was also set on examining the contemporary situation through the prism of the past. 'The recent past is the most remote of all,' he opined. 'The '50s are fairly easy to do; the '60s are much harder. There's the whole question of AIDS now, which complicates things. It has made it even more of a historical film, in a way, because it is about a period that is now closed. In the film, there's a point where John Lahr asks Peggy Ramsay about the Festival of Britain. She says it was "When it all came off the ration." He says, "You mean food?"; she replies, "Oh, food, sex, life, everything." What has happened now, of course, is that it has all gone back on the ration again.'

The shoot seems to have been harmonious, although Bennett and Frears disagreed over the ending. Again, as Bennett recollected: 'We originally shot a scene where Peggy Ramsay and the Lahrs all go back to Orton and Halliwell's old flat. It's all bright and cheerful and the couple living in it are very modern, but you get a sense of unease that this marriage is going to go wrong too. I liked the scene, but I can see that it didn't work in marketing terms.'

The UK reviews were largely positive, although Pauline Kael complained in The New Yorker that the film was too full of 'modern-style psychosexual moralising' to share Orton's delight in misbehaving. Nevertheless, Bennett received a BAFTA nomination for his adapted screenplay, while Oldman and Redgrave were recognised for their performances. The latter would also land a Golden Globe nod, after being chosen as Best Supporting Actress by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Some complained that Halliwell got a raw deal, as his background isn't explored in any detail and his slide into neurosis is overshadowed by Orton's meteoric rise. Simon Bent's short-lived 2009 play, Prick Up Your Ears, went some way to redressing the balance, with Matt Lucas playing Halliwell and Chris New being Orton. But it remains in the shadow of the film, which returned to cinemas in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of Orton's demise. Once again, the critics praised the darkly subversive nature of Bennett's screenplay, the sly suppleness of Frears's direction, and the excellence of the leads. A few months later, Oldman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Joe Wright's Darkest Hour (2017). Now, who would have predicted that three decades earlier?

Orton on Screen

Shortly before his death, Orton wrote in his diary: 'To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature…I hope no doom strikes.' Such irony would not have fitted into Alan Bennett's screenplay. But it is very much in keeping with Orton's own approach to drama.

Mention is made of his 1964 radio play, The Ruffian on the Stair, which took elements of its plot from The Boy Hairdresser. In the original BBC broadcast, Dermot Kelly and Avis Bunnage play Mike and Joyce, an ex-boxer from Donegal and a onetime prostitute. One day, Wilson (Kenneth Cranham) arrives at their London bedsit and proceeds to terrorise Joyce, while hoping to persuade Mike (who is a hitman on the side) to do him a small favour. When ITV presented the play as part of Saturday Night Theatre in 1973, the parts were taken by Michael Bryant, Judy Cornwell, and Billy Hamon.

This version has never been released on disc and the same goes for The Erpingham Camp, which aired as part of ITV's Seven Deadly Sins series in 1966. Riffing on the theme of pride, it was inspired by the same Euripides play, The Bacchae, that Giorgio Ferroni had filmed as The Bacchinites, five year earlier. Reginald Marsh stars as the owner of a holiday camp, whose strict regime prompts his guests to rebel.

Orton would submit The Good and Faithful Servant to the follow-up series, Seven Deadly Virtues (1967). It centres on the disintegration of a man who had devoted five decades to an indifferent employer. Donald Pleasence (who would read the lesson at Orton's funeral) took the lead, which would later be played by Cyril Cusack for the Canadian drama showcase, Performance (1975).

Neither version has been released on disc, while we still await Funeral Games, which was written for the series and wound up on ITV Playhouse in 1968. Michael Denison stars as the leader of a religious cult who hires private eye Ian McShane to spy on his wife, Vivien Merchant. Also buried in the vaults is What the Butler Saw, which Orton had completed shortly before his death. This was transmitted as part of BBC2's Theatre Night series in 1987, with Dinsdale Landen playing a doctor trying to seduce his secretary (Tessa Peake-Jones), while being unaware that his wife (Prunella Scales) is being blackmailed. A frantic farce that had boasted Stanley Baxter, Julia Foster, Coral Browne, and Ralph Richardson in the original stage cast, this has frequently been revived, with the likes of Kate Winslet, David Tennant, Richard Wilson, Samantha Bond, and John Alderton taking the leads.

Given Orton's status, one is left to wonder why no one has gathered the teleplays into a boxed set along the lines of Alan Bennett At the BBC (2009) and Six Plays By Alan Bennett (2017), each of which is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. Such a set could include Orton's guest appearance on Eamonn Andrews's ITV chat show in April 1967 and Chris Shepherd's animated short, Yours Faithfully, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) (2017), in which Alison Steadman voices Orton's letter-writing busybody.

Alan Bennett would create a similar character for Patricia Routledge in Talking Heads (1987-88). In Monthly Film Bulletin, he would confess to having mixed emotions when it came to Orton. 'I had complicated feelings about Orton,' he wrote, 'liking him and disliking him at the same time. I've always admired the writing and I like his cheek, but at the same time his self-assurance and conviction about his talent alienates me. When I read the diaries, I was relieved that my first play came out a year after he died. He slags off every play he goes to see: Peter Nichols, Tom Stoppard, the rest. I'm sure my play would have got the same treatment.'

Alfred Molina has fewer qualms. 'I thought they were brilliantly funny,' he said about the plays. 'He was this voice that hadn't been heard before. This iconoclastic, cheeky, sort of poking fun at institutions and establishments that were almost kind of untouchable in British culture - the police and the church and the medical profession. He threw mud at all of them. The reason he was so successful was that so much of it did stick. He was hitting targets that were ripe for mockery.'

This becomes readily clear while watching Douglas Hickox's Entertaining Mr Sloane and Silvio Narizzano's Loot (both 1970). The former had previously been adapted for the ITV Playhouse series in 1968, with Sheila Hancock, Edward Woodward, and Clive Francis as the principals. Beryl Reid, Harry Andrews, and Peter McEnery took over the big screen, as an amoral drifter discovers he's bitten off more than he can chew when he attempts to fleece a middle-aged nymphomaniac and her gay brother. Echoes could be heard of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem (1968), which was written and directed by another gay provocateur who met a brutal and untimely end.

The latter parodies the stage thriller, while also subverting the kind of guest house ensemble found in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, which had been filmed by Delbert Mann in 1958 and earned Oscars for David Niven and Wendy Hiller. Richard Attenborough plays the flatfoot whose pursuit of a pair of gay bank robbers (Roy Holder and Hywel Bennett) brings him to the seaside hotel where owner Milo O'Shea is grieving the loss of a wife who had been nursed by the flirtatious Lee Remick.

Explaining why the plays were kept in the margins in Prick Up Your Ears, Bennett wrote: 'I had to write it for people who don't know anything about Orton. But equally, you don't want to insult people who do know about him. You have to play it both ways. You have to take the plays on trust. You see the neon signs outside the theatre and get a glimpse of rehearsal, but if you are really interested in the plays you should see a documentary.' Sadly, neither Arena's typically brilliant, A Genius Like Us: A Portrait of Joe Orton (1982), nor the 2017 docudrama, Joe Orton: Laid Bare, is available to rent.

Six Degrees

There are plenty of quirky connections linking the characters in Prick Up Your Ears and those who made the film. For example, John Lahr is the son of Bert Lahr, who is best known for playing the Cowardly Lion in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939). Cinema Paradiso users can also find him alongside Shirley Temple in Irving Cummings's Just Around the Corner (1938) and Norman Wisdom in William Friedkin's The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968). Lahr died before the latter wrapped, just four months after Orton and Halliwell, in December 1967.

A deft joke in Alan Bennett's script shows Lahr's first wife, Andrea Mander (Lindsay Duncan), getting no credit for the work she puts in transcribing Orton's diaries and fathoming his secret shorthand with the help of her mother (Joan Sanderson). Lahr's second wife is better known, as she is Connie Booth, who appeared alongside husband John Cleese in How to Irritate People (1968) and Romance With a Double Bass (1975) before they co-wrote the classic sitcom, Fawlty Towers (1975-79), in which she also played Polly the maid. Booth also teamed with Cleese's former Monty Python colleague, Michael Palin, in Tristram Powell's American Friends (1991), which was based on the life of Palin's great-grandfather.

Like Bennett a keen diarist, Palin is also a Yorkshireman who studied at Oxford after passing the same entrance exam that drives the action in Nicholas Hytner's The History Boys (2006). Palin and Bennett started performing at Oxford, with the latter's stint in Beyond the Fringe (1960) with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore being recalled in Terry Johnson's Not Only But Always (2004), in which Bennett is played by Alan Cox.

Bennett and Palin would join forces in Malcolm Mowbray's A Private Function (1984), in which Palin plays a chiropidist married to the socially ambitious Maggie Smith. They would also unite in Richard Loncraine's The Missionary (1982) before Smith followed playing Susan, the vicar's alchoholic wife in the Talking Heads episode, A Bed Among the Lentils, by essaying Miss Shepherd in The Lady in the Van (2015), which Bennett based on his encounter with a homeless woman who took up residence on his drive.

Pipping Smith with four collaborations with Bennett is Patricia Routlege. Having shown her darker side in A Visit From Miss Prother (1978), she excelled as Peggy Schofield in A Woman of No Importance (1982), which provided the template for Talking Heads. After being nominated for a BAFTA for her performance as Irene Ruddock in A Lady of Letters, Routledge demonstrated her sure comic touch in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet.

The star of Keeping Up Appearances (1990-95) and Hetty Wainthrop Investigates (1996-98) hails from Birkenhead, which is where American actor Bonar Colleano met his death in a car crash at the age of 34 in 1958. Tap his name into the Cinema Paradiso Searchline to see the range of films he made, from Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars (1945) to John Gilling's Pick-up Alley (1957).

Colleano had been returning to his digs after appearing on stage in Liverpool. This, of course, is the birthplace of John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, whose screen careers we explored in The Beatles in Film. During the phone call between Orton and Brian Epstein, the latter objects to the screenplay for Up Against It because one of the boys is happily married. In fact, Lennon, Starr, and Harrison were all hitched at the time, while McCartney was engaged to Jane Asher. She had made her acting debut as a girl in Alexander Mackendrick's Mandy (1952) and Cinema Paradiso has a generous selection of her standout features, including Roger Corman's The Masque of Red Deat (1964), Lewis Gilbert's Alfie (1966), Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1970), and Waris Hussein's Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972).

Asher also played Mrs Liddell in Gavin Millar's Dreamchild (1985), which starred Coral Browne as the widowed Mrs Hargreaves, who, as a child, had inspired Oxford don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) to write Alice in Wonderland. Browne would later play herself in recreating her encounter with Guy Burgess in the Moscow of the mid-1950s in John Schlesinger's An Englishman Abroad (1983). The defector also inspired the character played by Rupert Everett in Marek Kanievska's Another Country (1984) and Bennett would return to the theme of the Cambridge spies in Schlesinger's A Question of Attribution (1991), which paired James Fox as Anthony Blunt and Prunella Scales as Elizabeth II.

Browne would also steal scenes as Mercy Croft in Robert Aldrich's The Killing of Sister George (1968), which was one of the first mainstream films to centre on lesbian relationships. Susannah York co-starred with Beryl Reid, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, en route to making Entertaining Mr Sloane. The same year saw Orton's fellow Leicesterian, Richard Attenborough, star in Loot. He is namechecked in Prick Up Your Ears as an example of a local actor made good. By the time the film was released, however, he had become an Oscar-winning director, thanks to Gandhi (1982), the music for which was co-composed by George Fenton, who would not only score Talking Heads and several of Bennett's teleplays, but also his three features with Nicholas Hytner: The Madness of King George, The History Boys, and The Lady in the Van.

David Attenborough also comes from Leicester, which is apt, as Bennett does a nice line in voicing small animals. In addition to Timmie Willie in 'The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse' in The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends (1994), he also made an adorable Mole in The Wind in the Willows (1995) and The Willows in Winter (1996). Bennett had voiced the Mock Turtle in Dreamchild, having previously played the Mouse in Jonathan Miller's innovative BBC interpretation of Alice in Wonderland (1966), which included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in the stellar cast.

The following year, Cook and Moore would headline Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967), which caught the mood of London when Orton was the toast of the West End. The flipside is superbly captured by Norman Cohen in the documentary, The London Nobody Knows (1967), which accompanies narrator James Mason on a walking tour of the capital's nooks and crannies, including a public lavatory in Holborn.

Mason came from Huddersfield, where his father had been a wool merchant. Bennett's father had been a butcher in Leeds. Among his customers were the Fletchers, whose daughter, Valerie would become the second wife of T.S. Eliot, whose chair Orton sits in during the meeting at Faber. The story of Eliot's first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was recalled by Brian Gibson in Tom & Viv (1994), which co-starred Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson. As his mother had suffered from depression, mental health issues recur throughout Bennett's work, from the Oscar-nominated The Madness of King George (1994) up to the lockdown update of Talking Heads (2020) and Allelujah (2022), which centres on the closure of a geriatric ward in a small Yorkshire town.

The latest feature written by Bennett was directed by Richard Eyre, who had worked with him on The Insurance Man (1986), which can be found on Alan Bennett At the BBC, alongside Udayan Prasad's 102 Boulevard Haussmann (1991), which features fine performances by Alan Bates and Janet McTeer as Marcel Proust and his housekeeper, and Malcolm Mowbray's underrated Our Winnie (1982), which follows a young woman (Sheila Kelley) with learning difficulties on a trip to the cemetery with her mother and aunt.

Another son of Leicester, Stephen Frears has been one of Bennett's most stalwart collaborators. In 1972, he handled his first TV play, A Day Out, which followed a group of Yorkshiremen from across the class divide on a cycling trip in the summer of 1911. Next came Sunset Across the Bay (1975), which was followed by the aforementioned A Visit From Miss Prothero, Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Doris and Doreen (both 1978), Afternoon Off, and One Fine Day (both 1979), with the latter quartet all being available from Cinema Paridiso via Six Plays By Alan Bennett.

As we saw in The Instant Expert's Guide to Stephen Frears, he had started to move into features by the time the first series of Talking Heads came around. Thora Hird and Julie Walters joined Patricia Routledge in featuring in the 1987-88 and 1998 series, with Walters putting in a cameo as Orton's mother in Prick Up Your Ears. On a par with Walters, with one appearance in a Bennett feature, is director Derek Jarman, as he cropped up uncredited as artist Patrick Procktor sketching Orton naked. He took a markedly different approach to queer cinema, of course, and his punkishly provocative oeuvre is available from Cinema Paradiso, from Sebastiane (1976) through to Blue (1993).

A graduate of King's College, London, Jarman shared an interest in history with Bennett, who was a graduate of Exeter College, Oxford. His alma mater had once been home to J.R.R. Tolkien and Dome Karukoski shot much of Tolkien (2019) within its grounds. Tolkien was living in retirement when he expressed his personal opposition to a rumour that The Beatles were considering a screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with Lennon playing Gollum, McCartney Frodo, Harrison Gandalf, and Starr Sam. Stanley Kubrick was approached to direct, while Richard Lester, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lean were on the back-up list. Five years after the retired academic died, Ralph Bakshi released his feature animation, The Lord of the Rings (1978), which continues to enrage Tolkien purists.

When it comes to cinema, however. Middle Earth will always be the preserve of New Zealander Peter Jackson, who made screen history with The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003). He also rewrote the Fabs legend, when, at Paul McCartney's request, he revisited the footage that Michael Lindsay-Hogg had amassed while shooting the Oscar-winning documentary, Let It Be (1970), and wrought digital miracles upon it to present the era-defining combo as they'd never been seen before in The Beatles: Get Back (2021). Funny how things work out, isn't it?