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If there is no room at the top for all the Joe Lamptons and Jimmy Porters, those angry young men from the working class, a black man in Britain can't even get his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. Two Gentlemen Sharing presents a tidy essay on John Bull and Jim Crow by telling the somewhat unlikely tale of a West Indian who desperately wants entry into the Establishment and a young ad man who is struggling to get out.

Mackenzie (Hal Frederick) is an aspiring barrister from Jamaica whose search for a London apartment is complicated by predictable amounts of prejudice and duplicity. "Yes, Madam," he recites patiently over the phone, "it is a Scottish name. But I am from the West Indies. Yes, I am hopelessly black." On a tip, he finds lodgings in the Chelsea flat of Roddy (Robin Phillips), the son of "decayed gentle folk." Roddy's own insecurities lead him to identify more and more with Mackenzie's black friends and to lure him into a dead-end love affair with a white girl (Judy Geeson).

If Scriptwriter Evan Jones is not totally successful in correlating black and white alienation, he does have a decided knack for good, pungent dialogue. "What do you want from us, baby?" shrieks a black homosexual to a desolated Roddy at film's end. "Whatever answers you're lookin' for, we ain't it. No matter what they tell you, baby, we ain't got rhythm." The fault of this modest and diverting enterprise is that, like Roddy himself, it can never resolve the question of black and white identities and, by attempting to combine the two, produces only an uneasy shade of gray.

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