If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

A really nice and funny based on good subversive humor. I love it.

The film of Joe Orton's great West End play gathers together an almost perfect cast which it then scuppers by making fundamental mistakes with Orton's material. Beryl Reid is definitive as ageing nymphomaniac Kath, and in the midst of the Gothic over-egging of Orton's pudding she pulls out moments of not just grotesquery and hilarity but also pathos; Harry Andrews is strong as her chicken hawk gay brother Ed; and Alan Webb is a fine old gargoyle as the Dada. Peter McEnery has some good moments as Sloane, occasionally hitting the requisite sense of sociopathic narcissism but really he is too old for the part (Orton wanted an actor who was 17 - "someone you'd like to f**k silly") - and a lot of the time far too obvious; he should be at least trying to convince Ed of his innocence.It is the trappings of Ed's lifestyle which most betray Orton's material. Ed in the play is an outwardly respectable small-town burgher whose appearance of Puritan propriety masks a predatory ruthlessness and desire for kinky, dominating sex. In the film, Ed drives around in a pink car! Orton's character would never do this, as it rather gives the game away and, what's worse, throws away Orton's withering analysis of petty bourgeois hypocrisy.The ending of the film is very cheap, with Orton's subtle trade-off of sexual favours to cover up the father's murder ("it's been a pleasant morning") being turned into an absurd and ugly mock-marriage ceremony over the Dada's corpse, replete with some toe-curlingly on-the-nose dialogue.Orton's humour makes no sense if the characters are not at least attempting a degree of propriety. His Austen-like sense of social satire is here buried under inappropriate Gothic trappings, no doubt influenced by grand guignol turns like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Reid's previous hit film version of The Killing of Sister George. Entertaining Mr. Sloane is a misfire, all in all, although worth catching for the great performances and what's left of Orton's sparkling dialogue. Perhaps the best moment of the film is the one in which his name on the opening credits is super-imposed over a grave-stone, as this film does indeed conspire to bury him.

ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE is certainly an uneven adaptation of the Joe Orton play, but it does create a few sparks with the performances of BERYL REID as Kath, PETER McENERY as Sloane and HARRY ANDREWS as Ed. The trio is involved in a three-way affair with Mr. Sloane who charms them both with his good looks and apparently bi-sexual leanings.It's certainly not the usual fare one expects to see on screen, even in the '70s when the material was considered quite daring. But the script gives the three principals some rich material to work with and the film now has a cult status with fans of black comedy.Orton is the gay playwright who was killed by his lover who then committed suicide and was dead before this film version of his hit London play was made. Whether he would have approved of some of the changes is debatable, but it still has the power to shock and cause ripples of laughter despite the darkness of the theme.Summing up: As oddball as they come.

This adaptation of the brilliant Joe Orton play in an unmitigated disaster. Every joke is overdone to the point of surrealism. The wit is killed dead, and any pretense to psychology is thrown out the window in a late sixties psychedelic mish-mash completely at odds with the stage farce tone of the source material. If people like this movie, it's for the sheer oddness, not because it has any of the qualities evinced by the play. It's like watching a Noel Coward play performed by lunatics in an asylum.