thought provoking and sad

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Getting these details right must be a minefield.
The street furniture was no doubt wrong but on a low budget film what can you do if you need to film street scenes ?.

Things like light fittings and cars in the street are more complicated I guess,people were a lot poorer in the early 1980s than they are now and fewer people had cars,the cars they had were generally not as new as ones people have now.

I think they use old newspaper and family photos to see what different places used to look like but as someone who was alive in the 1980s I think if they made it as drab as it actually was people would think it was about East Germany.

There was certainly a gay angle to ELVIS but there was also the idea that he wanted someone to control,because ELVIS was under the control of the pack.

I loved the look of ELVIS's flat,how could he afford it since he must have been on the dole?

(Don't believe the hated tv series BREAD people on the dole then and now don't have a great life unless they are working on the side or otherwise criminal types).

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Elvis's 'flat' was more than likely squatted. He'd turned the place into a louche bohemian pad via clever use of images, found junk and his own artistic endevours (e.g. all that daft glitter paint - not that expensive really, even 30 years ago). I didn't have any doubt that he was gay, to be honest, and I think he were less tortured by that very fact than he was by Carty's rejection of him.

Though I think the film was lacking here and there (corny scenes being: Elvis being subsumed in smoke in his last moments; a single tear tracing its way down Carty's face in tandem with blood seeping through his fingers; and Baby 'becoming' Godden after the latter's murder - so obvious a device)but I'd watch it again and loved the period detail (dang it that I wasn't born in 1959!) I was reminded of my then-teenaged cousins in their Harringtons or parkas, chuffing on John Players while trying to look as racked with attitude as possible... although I have to say, having been a little kid in northern working-class England at the time, it wasn't nearly as relentlessly grim as the media now love to suggest. No worse than now, in some parts of the country(and at least there was no bread-and-circuses Big Brother rubbish and relentless drivel TV back then. At least kids questioned everything and there was fresh, brilliant music.)