STRIP JACK NAKED, subtitled Night hawks II is a film about a film. It is about the making of Nighthawks (released in 1979, but in production from 1974). There is, too, a large element of the Director, Ron Peck’s autobiography in the film.
Towards the end of the film I realised why thiSeand the original film were fundamentally flawed. Ron Peck and, one assumes, his collaborators, are lacking in genuine imagination. They refuse to look beyond their prejudices.
Describing the differences between the Sixties (although, as he says, most of the “liberation” in Gay Liberation took place in the 1970s) and the 80s he zooms in on the Falklands war.It was nasty, hundreds of “Argies” got killed, and Thatcher (and what Rudyard Kipling once described as “jelly-bellied flag waggers”, mostly in Fleet Street), gloried in it.
The Falklands War was a Bad Thing – it was utterly unjustified: any other view is probably wicked, this comes across very clearly in this film. There iSeanother view; Thatcher, the armed forceSeand Fleet Street almost certainly had disreputable reasons for entering into war with Argentina. But the war, once entered into, could be scen to have good effects, starting with the collapse of Argentina’s military r government.
This came about, and dcspitc attcmpts s at putschSeand coups d’etat, the military men have becn tried and imprisoned for “disappcaring” roughly 20,000 of their own citizcns (this is more than tcn times the human population of the Falklands). Argentina is now a democracy, and the rest of Latin America is turning towards representative democracy – these are results of the Falklands War.
And they are results many of which could have been foreseen. But national introspection means that any notion of what goes on in the wider world is incomprehensible to a particular sort of London intellectual.
The other problem with this film is that the leading-motive of a motorway in darkness means that a great deal of the action takes plave in the mirk of night Some rather strange decisions were taken in the making of the film, the scene where the leading character is sexually assaulted was cut out. So, despite the fact that the “image” of the gay scene is deeply glum, they copped out.
On a purely personal basis, I was surprised to realise that I had slept in the bedroom which “stars” in the film (it was in 49, Railton Road, Brixton) on a number of occasions- unfortunately not with the heavenly bodies on view here.