From Costume Romps to Queer Milestones: Adaptation, Collaboration, Queerness and Modernism in the ‘Long New Wave’ of Richardson, Schlesinger and Reisz

Abstract

The post-New Wave films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors remain under-analysed terrain, both in terms of their potential relevance for interrogating how we understand the British New Wave itself and for the terms in which we might conceptualise a ‘Long’ New Wave. This article departs from persisting auteurist approaches to consider the post-New Wave oeuvres and careers of these directors collectively, in terms which foreground the importance of collaborations and networks rather than individual authorship and seek to decentre, denaturalise and potentially dislodge their pre-eminent association with specifically Northern, British, social realism and its presumed legacies. I argue for the importance of a cluster of less-analysed areas of intersection and development which emerge across the eclectic film-making careers of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger (and, to a lesser extent, Karel Reisz) in the immediate post-New Wave decade from the 1963 success of Richardson's Tom Jones to the early 1970s. My discussion pivots on two commonalities: during this time, all three directors contributed significantly and plurally to innovations and advances in genre and representation across two areas distinct from British Northern working-class realism: historical/costume film genres, and queer representation. An approach which centres the (broadly defined) queer elements in these directors’ post-New Wave oeuvres – intersecting at times with their equally undervalued contribution to ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema – reveals the ‘Long’ New Wave as substantially a cinema of adaptation, collaboration and queerness which encompassed important, near-forgotten, international projects as well as modernist influences and, in Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, a significant advance in realist queer representation.