‘Nighthawks’: the groundbreaking British drama unwittingly tethered to Sylvester Stallone
Movies with identical titles are hardly an extraordinary occurrence, but a groundbreaking British drama was done absolutely no favours by Sylvester Stallone, who headlined a high-octane thriller with the exact same moniker during the period he was comfortably one of the biggest stars on the planet.
Sandwiched between Rocky II, cult favourite Escape to Victory, Rocky III, and classic action flick First Blood in his filmography, Bruce Malmuth’s Nighthawks gained solid reactions from critics and audiences and turned a decent profit at the box office, drawing in the crowds with the promise of seeing Stallone in grizzled detective mode tracking down a terrorist before their next imminent attack.
The downside is that it overshadowed the other, much better, more important, and significantly more seismic Nighthawks, the 1978 British slice of life helmed by Ron Peck. The first film to bear the title was a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ cinema in the United Kingdom, and all because it was realistic.
Ken Robertson’s Jim is a gay man who teaches geography by day and frequents the club scene by night. In an era where gay people were often demonised, vilified, or depicted in stories revolving around blackmail, murder, or other salacious storytelling avenues in cinema, Peck’s Nighthawks took an intimate, moving detour into docudrama.
Considered the first mainstream gay film ever made in the UK, the protagonist ends up having a frank discussion with his students about homosexuality and what it means to be a member of the LGBTQ+ community in late-1970s London, a conversation that wide-released movies simply weren’t having in Britain at the time.
Nighthawks was made as a direct response to the lack of fair representation in the media, with Jim ravaged by the loneliness of existing between two worlds and failing to find a connection in either. “It seemed important to address the fact that there was such an absence of representing an ordinary gay character,” Peck explained to Another. “And we always talked about him as a kind of everyman that most people could find some sort of representation with.”
“And it seemed to work; it seemed to have stood the test of time in quite an amazing way, more than we could have imagined,” the filmmaker continued. “We felt it was important to show a typical character who didn’t live a life of extremes; I didn’t want him to be an artist or anything like that. I wanted him to be integrated into society, and the school seemed like such a strong idea because we had such an issue with sex education in schools.”
Nighthawks blazed a new trail for British cinema as the country’s first movie to tell a story rooted entirely in contemporary gay life. It was created by a cast and crew largely comprised of openly LGBTQ+ creatives and told a resonant story deeply rooted in a lifestyle that so many people identified with but had never seen properly depicted or addressed onscreen. It was a watershed for the industry, and it’s the only Nighthawks worth revisiting.
