In Snakes and Ladders, he describes his frustration at being artistically shackled by Rank: ‘Despairingly I asked for release from my contract, not out of pique, but from a steadily mounting sense of hopelessness. I was determined to break into a new kind of cinema, they were equally determined not to... My release was refused, but I heard growing rumours that plans were afoot to sell the remainder of my contract elsewhere... I was in a state bordering panic, and bitterly resented the idea that after so many years loyal work I should be offered up like a packet of the Miller’s own flour.’ (204)

In 1961, he began formal negotiations to end his contract. He had been with Rank for 14 years, double the length he had planned. With grudging reluctance, Rank agreed to let him go, and put out a press release that, at his request, they would not exercise the option on his contract. (Snakes and Ladders, 205) His last contract role would be that of Anacleto, a Spanish bandit in the The Singer Not the Song (1961), a film with homoerotic undertones. Bogarde was unhappy with the production, believing he should have worn jeans and driven an old pickup. Nor was he happy with the choice of John Mills as the priest, having envisaged a younger actor rather than Mills, who had played his elder brother in The Gentle Gunman. (McFarlane, 70) Filming did not go well. Given a situation he hated, he played the role with tongue-in-cheek camp wearing the now famous tight black leather trousers and swishing a black leather crop atop a white stallion. (Coldstream, 255) Little wonder that the film quickly achieved cult status. At the completion of Singer, Bogarde was a free agent. Within the year, he found himself reunited on another film with Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, the director-producer team with whom he had made The Blue Lamp eleven years earlier.