Two Gentlemen Sharing ** (1969, Robin Phillips, Judy Geeson, Hal Frederick, Ester Anderson) – Classic Movie Review 10,334

‘One was Black… One was White… but they had one thing in common!’

Director Ted Kotcheff’s 1969 Two Gentlemen Sharing must have been brave, pioneering and honourably well meaning in its day, but it is a muddled handling of a potentially rich premise about black and white roommates (Hal Frederick as British solicitor of Jamaican descent Andrew McKenzie, and Robin Phillips as insecure upper-class British ad-man Briton Roddy Pater) and their mixed race love entanglements.

This romantic drama is undermined by its need to shock, which it mismanages, rather than tell a good story with rounded characters, and develop its serious themes, but the star acting and the character actor performances are impressive. It is suggested that Roddy Pater may be a repressed homosexual in a film that recalls The Odd Couple but also To Sir, With Love without achieving anything like the success of either of them.

Evan Jones’s screenplay is based on David Stuart Leslie’s novel.

Also in the cast are Judy Geeson, Ester Anderson, Norman Rossington, Rachel Kempson, Ram John Holder, Hilary Dwyer [Hilary Heath}, Daisy Mae Williams, Elspeth March, Philip Stone, Avice Landone, David Markham, Shelagh Frazer, Earl Cameron, Harold Lang, Thomas Baptiste, Linbert Spencer, Tommy Ansah, Norman Mitchell, Anna Wing, John Chandos (in his last film), David Edwards, John Snow, Gary Sobers, Hamilton Dyce, John Humphrey, Willie Payne, George Baizley and Lionel Ngakane.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,334

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