“Director Needs Gays For First ‘Real’ Gay Film.” So ran a headline in Gay News in the mid-1970s. The director in question was Ron Peck, who has died of cancer aged 74, and the film was Nighthawks (1978), which explored with candour and compassion the frustrating life of Jim, a teacher who spends his days among his colleagues and pupils, and his nights scouring London’s clubs and bars in search of sex, love and companionship.
That initial appeal prompted about 250 letters from gay men and lesbians, many of whom Peck met or corresponded with. “My sense of what the gay world was expanded exponentially,” he said.
A core group of about 20 emerged, and collaborated on research, finding locations, fundraising and general support; among them was Paul Hallam, who became the film’s co-writer and co-producer. The BFI turned down Peck’s funding application but that only left him more determined. “We would make the film anyway,” he said. “Fuck the BFI.”
Industry figures donated money, some anonymously. Members of the public sent cash through the post. The Sunday Times critic Dilys Powell mentioned the project in her column. Derek Jarman, who appears briefly in a walk-on part, lent his Butlers Wharf studio for a party scene.
Lindsay Anderson offered encouragement, while Chantal Akerman (whose 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles influenced the film’s use of repetition to express emotional paralysis) tried to help raise financing. The director Michael Powell considered the script ready to shoot but advised Peck to introduce more suspense. “Don’t be above (or below) plot,” he wrote to him. “We are storytellers not scientists.”
In fact, Nighthawks does build impressively to a five-minute climax in which Jim, played by Ken Robertson, comes out to his students in response to their needling homophobic questions.
The scene, cut together from five takes shot over two days, and populated (like the rest of the film) by non-professional performers, explodes with an improvisatory wildness held in check throughout the preceding 90 minutes or so. A subjective camera places the viewer in Jim’s shoes, so that the pupils seem to be taunting and haranguing the viewer directly.
It was with a depressing inevitability that the presence of young cast members led to hysterical tabloid headlines, such as: “Child Porn Row Looms On Gay Film.” Nighthawks was also banned in Greece. But for the most part it was applauded, even if sections of the gay community were less than thrilled by its downbeat tone.
The film’s long gestation also left the dowdy cruising scenes looking dated in the age of glitzy clubs such as Heaven (which opened in London in 1979, the same year the picture was released in the UK), though its themes and concerns have never lost their immediacy.
Peck was born and raised in Merton Park, south-west London. His father, Richard Peck, was an estate agent and later property developer, while his mother, Joan (nee Lindsay), was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the second world war.
Ron was a film buff from a young age. As a teenager, he corresponded with and even met some of his favourite directors, including Nicholas Ray, who brought Peck’s letter with him to an on-stage interview at the National Film theatre in London, and singled him out in the audience. In 1963, he received a detention after skipping a PE lesson to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse at the Tooting Classic.
He excelled academically at Rutlish grammar school, where he gained nine O-levels and three A-levels, before moving on to study English literature at Swansea University and then to complete his master’s in American Studies at Sussex University.
At the London Film School, he made the short film Its Ugly Head (1974) about a closeted gay man in an unhappy marriage. Peck and three LFS classmates –Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece and Wilf Thust – formed Four Corners Films, a workshop collective that aimed to fuse politics with art. The group operated out of an empty shop in Bethnal Green, east London, an area that the director made his home in 1975.
Early Four Corners projects included the quizzical documentary On Allotments (1976). Soon, Nighthawks began to consume the group’s energies. “I remember the pre-production period as a stormy, exciting time,” recalled Davis, who was camera operator on the film. “Investors’ meetings in our grotty kitchen, ‘actors’ with hurt pride storming in and out, and late-night pilot shoots in the tumbledown shops.”
For Peck, life and cinema began to blur as friends were drafted into the cast. “There was a real confusion in my mind about whether people were playing themselves or acting out characters.” But the point of the film was never in doubt: “It was to put up on the screen something of that life which I and others were living.”
His next project was a 1981 documentary about the artist Edward Hopper, whose most famous painting had lent its name to Nighthawks. He was an assistant director to James Ivory, an admirer of Nighthawks, on the Henry James adaptation The Bostonians (1984). Peck’s short film What Can I Do With a Male Nude? (1985) brought wit and simmering anger to the subject of censorship. “Make no mistake, there are new dark ages just around the corner,” says the film’s prescient narrator. Three years later, the Conservative government’s clause 28 outlawed the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools.
Peck’s second feature, Empire State (1987), revolves around a Docklands nightclub that provides a focus for the tensions between working-class neighbourhoods and Thatcherite Yuppies and entrepreneurs. “One of the things that struck me was that the new East End was full of revamped pubs and theme bars which looked just like Hollywood fantasies,” he said. “But if you ever see anything dealing with the area, it’s always presented as grey. We aimed for something far more bright and hard-hitting.”
He revisited Nighthawks and its genesis in the penetrating documentary Strip Jack Naked (1991). Incorporating biographical material and poignant out-takes featuring actors who had been left on the cutting-room floor, the film also takes in the Aids crisis and homophobia. Peck reveals that threats of violence were made against him after UK tabloids objected to the Channel 4 screening of Nighthawks in the mid-80s.
His other films, often rough-and-ready but always heartfelt and beautifully observed, were set largely in the boxing world. These included the documentary Fighters (1991) and the television film Real Money (1996). The latter was a scripted drama cast with real boxers, as was Cross-Channel (2011). These were made by Team Pictures, the company Peck established in 1985 with Mark Ayres to produce Empire State.
It evolved in 1998 into a production and editing facility, as well as a site for acting workshops and film screenings. His last film, Canning Town Voices, a documentary about changes in the Canning Town area of London, is available on YouTube.
As LGBTQ+ issues became part of mainstream life, the reputation of Nighthawks continued to grow. A film that was once criticised for its dourness even began to seem that bit warmer in the era of impersonal dating apps. After a screening in Paris in 2014, one audience member told Peck: “People behaved much more kindly then.”
He is survived by his brother, David.
• Ronald Lindsay Peck, film director, born 15 May 1948; died 2 November 2022
