The Crying Game

Set against the backdrop of the Troubles, Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992) focuses on the triangular relationship between an IRA volunteer, Fergus (Stephen Rea), a Black British soldier (Forest Whitaker) and his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson). Jane Giles's compelling study of the film explores how it tackled issues of political conflict and terrorism, race, sexuality and gender. She traces its fraught production history, drawing on exclusive interviews with director Jordan and producer Stephen Woolley, and provides a fascinating account of the very different ways the film was promoted in Britain and America. The film was a huge hit in the United States, where its distributor Miramax's campaign focused on its genre-defying story and surprise plot twist, with the slogan "Nothing is what it seems to be". But The Crying Game's box office success and its nomination for six Academy Awards, winning one for Best Adapted Screenplay, was not enough to save production company Palace Pictures from bankruptcy. Discussing the permutations of sexuality and politics the film unravels, Jane Giles argues that its most obvious surprise is not its crucial feature. In her afterword to this new edition, Jane Giles looks back on The Crying Game from the vantage point of a very different political and cultural landscape, changed irrevocably by the Good Friday Peace Agreement, Brexit, #MeToo, and a radical rethinking of trans identities and representation.

Jane Giles is a writer, programmer, film exhibitor and distributor and director. She has programmed for Scala cinema, the ICA the London Film Festival, and worked for independent film distribution companies including Tartan and the BFI, where she was Head of Distribution for BFI Films from 2008-2016. Her film journalism has been published in Sight and Sound, Time Out and The Guardian. She is the author of several film books, including The Cinema of Jean Genet (BFI Publishing, 1991) and Scala Cinema 1978-1993 (FAB Press, 2018) which won the 2019 Kraszna- Krausz Moving Image Book Award, and was the basis for the feature-length big screen documentary Scala Club Cinema, Jane's first film as director, released in 2023.

Acknowledgements Prologue 1. Origins and Sources, Themes and Motifs 2. 'The Soldier's Wife' and Other Stories 3. 'The Crying Game' 4. United Kingdom and Ireland 5. United States 6. Taking Another Look at the Twist Epilogue Afterword to the 2027 Edition Notes Credits Bibliography