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...

As early as 1975, Ron Peck conceived of a film that would break with the stereotypical ‘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.

Over the long pre-production period, as their central character, Jim, began to take on a life of his own, the film makers scaled down their original rather naive ambition to make ‘the definitive gay movie’. Nevertheless, Peck rejected the strictures of both a closed narrative and the closed morality that goes with it. With its extensive use of long takes, real locations and emphasis on lived experiences, Nighthawks brings an unprecedented emotional and physical authenticity to the subject. In this, it can be said to have laid the foundations for subsequent gay feature films in the United Kingdom. The sharp eyed will spot Derek Jarman (whose Butlers Wharf studio was used as a location in the film) loitering hopefully in the background of one disco scene.

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.

A similar pattern repeated itself throughout Europe and the USA when the film was released there. In certain territories the content seemed less controversial but Peck’s filmmaking style was both lauded and dismissed in equal measure:

“ As for Nighthawks in terms of technique, style, structure and the rest there is no space here to describe it. There is not one redeeming cinematic element in the film. Suffice it to say that if there is no word for negative talent, one should now be invented to talk about Ron Peck and Paul Hallam. Peck is, however, right about one thing: “ We need hundreds of gay films not half a dozen”. As long, of course, as they in no way resemble Nighthawks.” - David Overbey : Paris Metro 11-9-79

“As it turns out Nighthawks is a sensitively acted and broodingly directed meditation on the day-by-day and night-by-night realities of the gay scene in London.... The acting is so fluent, graceful and accomplished that an unbearable intimacy is created... Indeed at times I felt I was intruding on a very private ceremony... Jim tells a woman colleague at the school that he is gay. He does so in an oblique manner, and here Peck and Hallam have been wickedly clever by shooting the entire scene in a steady two-shot. We watch her face change, and then struggle not to show the change. Her voice cracks when she tries to make an innocuous remark and Jim pretends not to notice. It is a beautiful piece of acting on both sides, and I cannot remember another occasion on the screen when a confession of this kind was handled with such histrionic delicacy and yet with such heartbreaking gravity.” - Andrew Sarris - Village Voice 30-7-79

The film was banned in Greece and even 5 years after its release continued to cause controversy when it was broadcast on Channel 4 as part of a series of films programmed by the respected critic David Robinson. The British tabloids, already gunning for Channel 4, had a field day further cementing the films notoriety.

As well as being an important film in both its style and content Nighthawks stands apart as a crucial archival record of 1970’s London. A London of browns, greys, nasty shirts and crappy beer. Not the London of endless ‘I Love The 70’s’ nostalgia fests. It is a London that is pre-Ikea, pre-gastropubs, pre-‘lifestyle’. In their desire to present an authentic story Peck and Hallam also presented an authentic picture of a long gone capital on the cusp of Thatcherism that was about to undergo a seismic change.

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.

--Andy Townsend - Second Run DVD


History of Nighthawks:

November 1975
Applied to British Film Institute Production Board for financing.

April 1976
Application turned down.

May 1976
Immediate fund raising campaign brings support from John Schlesinger, producer/director Don Boyd, producer Elliot Kastner, director Jack Gold, novelist Robin Maugham, film critic Dilys Powell, novelist Angus Wilson and film critic Robin Wood among many others, straight and gay, from all walks of life.

July 1976
Application to the National Film Finance Corporation.

September 1976
Application turned down. Decide to shoot a test sequence in color and try to raise more money.

October 1976
Decide to shoot first sequence of the film.

December 1976
Money runs out completely. One backer raises £960 ($1,900) to finance an uninterrupted rewriting of the screenplay.

August 1977
In Paris, trying to raise money. The response everywhere is that unless the film is overtly pornographic it will not do well.

September 1977
ZDF Television in Germany invest enough money to enable shooting to begin again. December 1977
Impossible to get any School to give permission to shoot classroom sequences, once the fact the teacher is gay is mentioned.

January 1978
Shooting commences. Money has still not come through at the start of shooting.

August 1978
Nighthawks opens at the Edinburgh Film Festival.