This Academy Award-winning Best Picture features Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in standout roles as a con man and a Texas hustler trying to survive on the tough streets of New York.
Contains sexual violence.
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John Schlesinger's centenary is a long-overdue opportunity to reassess the work of a director who, at the time of his death in 2003, was considered one of the all-time greats of British filmmaking. A queer cinema pioneer, Schlesinger was also probably the only openly gay director to make mainstream films featuring explicitly LGBTQ+ characters in every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Although sometimes deprecating his own work as 'feel-bad cinema', Schlesinger's films were often more ambiguous than overtly tragic. Their focus is frequently on naïve characters with modest ambitions - a decent job, a satisfying relationship - who, in fulfilling those dreams, discover them to be closer to nightmares. Growing up gay and Jewish at a time when neither identity was welcomed, Schlesinger's sympathies always lay with society's outsiders, yet he remained clear-eyed enough to know they would rarely find their happy endings.
The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100, a UK-wide retrospective produced by Claire Nicolas and Marc David Jacobs, shines a spotlight on the often overlooked full range of the director's filmography.