THE BOY FRIEND 1971

The decision to use a still from Ken Russell's The Boy Friend as the representative image for this blog was an easy one. From the time I first saw this movie in 1971 at age 14 at the Alhambra theater in San Francisco, it has remained, unchallenged in all these years, the one film which epitomizes all the magic, artistry and creativity that lie at the core of cinema's unique capacity to inspire dreams and fuel the imagination.

Flights of Fancy
Twiggy as the "Spirit of Ecstasy" hood ornament on a vintage Rolls Royce

A surprising, if not shocking, "G"-rated departure for the director who, during this time was making a name for himself (that name being “enfant terrible”) with his exuberantly impassioned, censorship-baiting, historical dramas; The Boy Friend is "based on" a 1954 musical comedy by Sandy Wilson that spoofed '20s theatrical fluff like No, No, Nanette.  I place "based on" in quotations because, as imagined by Ken Russell, this adaptation of The Boy Friend bears but a scant resemblance to its source material. In fact, it's really like no musical I've ever seen.
Refashioning this precious little musical comedy (which afforded Julie Andrews her Broadway debut) into a scathingly trenchant commentary on show biz clichés, theatrical pretensions, thespian vanity, and Hollywood dream-weaving, Russell creates something akin to a cinematic Russian nesting doll: a spoof within a satire within a pastiche within an homage. A droll valentine to Hollywood musicals, it somehow manages to be terribly sweet and sprightly while also  being howlingly bitchy.

Twiggy as Polly Brown

Christopher Gable as Tony Brockhurst

Glenda Jackson as Rita Monroe

Tommy Tune as Tommy

Antonia Ellis as Maisie

Barbara Windsor as Rosie

Max Adrian as Max Mandeville

Vladek Sheybal as Cecil B. De Thrill

The plot, as reworked by Russell is this: A seedy theater company in 1930's Portsmouth, England is putting on a somewhat threadbare production of The Boy Friend when they learn that the great Hollywood director, Cecil B. De Thrill (Sheybal), is in the audience. Onstage, amidst technical disasters large and small, members of the troupe attempt to sabotage and upstage one another for De Thrill's attention. Backstage, rampant egos, rivalries, and romantic intrigues compound the drama presented by the inexperienced stage manager (Twiggy) having to go on in place of the show's ailing star (Glenda Jackson!) who is laid up with a fractured ankle. Throughout (in large-scale set pieces), De Thrill imagines what his film version will look like, while, in turn, the cast members project their personal wish-fulfillment fantasies onto the material they're performing. Whew!

The striking of archly theatrical poses serves as a device to distinguish the stage acting from all the insincere play-acting going on backstage

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Boy Friend just may be the first deconstructionist / auteurist musical. Ken Russell rather brilliantly takes an innocuous, sweet-natured musical — with nothing more on its mind than idealized nostalgia — and uses it as a vehicle through which to explore the themes of the demythologizing of popular art, the artifice of romanticism, and the passion of creativity. The very themes he returns to in film after film. The way in which Russell turns his lens on the glamour images of '30s Hollywood (as popularized in its musicals and the promise held forth in their romantic clichés) - and contrasts these with the  shabby dreams and unglamorous realities of a tatty theater troupe, makes The Boy Friend a cheerier, but no less piercing , thematic companion-piece to those other Depression-era masterpieces of deconstructed Hollywood myth: The Day of The Locust & They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

In this musical sequence, Maisie (Antonia Ellis) attempts to convince movie director C.B. De Thrill that taking her to Hollywood with him would be no gamble...if you get my cruder meaning.

All in Fun? - The elaborate recreations of Busby Berkeley-style production numbers evoke the escapist entertainments of the past. When fantasy was king and Hollywood was known as the Dream Machine

The more humdrum reality

The Boy Friend is such a fun movie that it is easy to overlook the fact that Russell rather ingeniously uses Hollywood musical  clichés to comment on the way in which these Depression-era escapist fantasies fed (and mislead?) the penny-ante dreams and illusions of the populace. This is years before Dennis Potter would cover similar territory in the BBC TV drama, Pennies from Heaven.

PERFORMANCES
A true ensemble piece, The Boy Friend is one of those rare films (like Young Frankenstein) where everyone is so perfect in their roles that you can't single out an individual favorite performance. Like many directors in the '70s, Russell often worked with the same actors, creating a kind of film-to-film repertory company. The Boy Friend was my first exposure to Ken Russell so the pleasure of seeing gloomily dramatic actors from The Devils or Women in Love exhibiting such gleeful dexterity in singing, dancing, and comedy, was  a pleasure I had to experience in reverse. Quite deservedly, Twiggy received above-the-title billing and was promoted heavily on the film's release, but the movie is full of sensational actors and keenly delineated performances.

There's No Business Like Show Business: The entire cast of The Boy Friend

Standouts: Max Adrian as the beleaguered company manager; the wonderful Murray Melvin...looking as if he hadn't aged a day since 1961's A Taste of Honey; my personal fave, the beautiful Georgina Hale; that pint-sized, scene-stealer Barbara Windsor; and of course, the dynamo that is Antonia Ellis, who almost walks away with the film. Providing the film's splendid choreography and plenty of dreamboat appeal is former ballet dancer, Christopher Gable. He and Twiggy display a genuine likeability and chemistry together, which is welcome since their scenes are the anchors of sincerity necessary to stabilize all the cutthroat boat-rocking of the other characters.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Ken Russell's films rarely cease to dazzle the eye. In The Boy Friend the meticulous period detail of Shirley Russell's ingenious costumes and Tony Walton's witty and breathtaking set designs make for one eye-popping experience.

Sur Le Plage
Jellyfish perform a sand-dance while starfish sway in rhythm!
I'm sorry, but this is just brilliant. I don't know what kind of mind would think of such a thing, but I wish I had one just like it

Perfect Young Ladies- An example of Shirley Russell's keen eye for period costuming

Another peerless Tony Walton set design

 The late Shirley Russell (Ken's first wife) designed the costumes for every Ken Russell film from Women in Love to Valentino

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What played a significant factor in my early fascination with The Boy Friend was that I was unfamiliar with the work of Busby Berkeley at the time. Sure, I watched a lot of old movies on TV, but I had an elder sister who tended to monopolize the channel selector - she hated musicals and had a penchant for "black & white-shoe" pictures (her name for 50s teenage-delinquent movies. The "black & white shoe" sobriquet, a reference to the compulsory 50s accessory of saddle shoes). Consequently, I grew up with a vast awareness of the entire Mamie Van Doren oeuvre, but little knowledge of cinema choreography. I've since seen almost everything Busby Berkeley has had a hand in, and though I wouldn't have thought it possible... not after seeing Carmen Miranda cavorting amongst a sea of oversized bananas in The Gang's All Here... but in The Boy Friend Ken Russell, as some critic must have certainly noted, really manages to out-Berkeley, Berkeley.

My lasting favorite and the most beautiful sequence in the film is the number that takes place atop a giant gramophone turntable. It's a homage to a sequence in 42nd Street and it's an absolutely smashing piece of filmmaking. I've never forgotten it.

The Boy Friend ranks top among my "comfort movies": those films I return to time and time again for that feeling of familiar pleasure they always guarantee. Like a child who giggles anew at the same “knock-knock” joke endlessly repeated, there is something so delightfully soothing about revisiting a beloved film that has the power to always cheer you up. Every known line of dialog, each dependable laugh, all the recognized pleasures…they reignite my sense of nostalgia (which has really increased now that I’ve reached the age of having something to actually be nostalgic about) and invite me to surrender to the long-ago-discovered charms of an old acquaintance and friend.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 1977, The Boy Friend's scene-stealing Maisie (Antonia Ellis) danced and sang in this spectacular TV commercial for Sugar Free Dr. Pepper. In this ad choreographed by Arlene Phillips of Can't Stop the Music and Annie, Ellis plays the waitress at a diner and adopts a pretty nifty American accent. The oversized pinball machine set featured in the commercial wouldn't have been out of place in Ken Russell's own pinball opera, Tommy (1975).

Copyright © Ken Anderson

HEDDA 1975

When I think of Brut men's cologne, I think of the 70s. When I think of Brut cologne and the 70s, I always think of Burt Reynolds. 70s-era Burt Reynolds: porn-stache, tight pants, and swaggering, smirkily hirsute machismo - always looked to me as if he smelled of Brut.

Whether or not Reynolds actually wore Brut I have no way of knowing, but somebody in the 70s must have liked it an awful lot, because for a brief time during that decade the Faberge cosmetics company (the makers of Brut) got into the business of making movies. It makes me smile to think that such a foul-smelling after-shave was responsible for one of my all-time favorite Glenda Jackson films: Hedda.

This film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 play, Hedda Gabler, is based on the 1975 Royal Shakespeare Company stage production which featured virtually the entire cast of the motion picture under the direction of Trevor Nunn, who also directs the film version.

Being a fellow of a somewhat dreamy nature myself, I find I'm drawn to narratives with protagonists whose lives are motivated (and ultimately undone) by their dreams. Hedda Gabler, like Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, is an individual who believes in romantic ideals (although Hedda, who fancies herself a realist & pragmatist, would balk at the description). What they all share is a whole-hearted belief in and acceptance of unrealistic ideals and lofty aspirations. Romantic myths of happiness and fulfillment which are supposed to be satisfied by marriage, wealth, position or achievement. What makes Hedda Gabler and the others such fascinating individuals is not only that they suffer from a failure to have their lives live up to their dreams, but that their suffering is directly attributable to a grievous flaw in their character. A flaw which provides the defining obstacle preventing them from being successful in converting their idealistic fantasies into a realistic way of living in (and relating to) the world.

Glenda Jackson as Hedda Gabler

Peter Eyre as Hedda's ineffectual scholar husband, Goerge Tesman

Patrick Stewart (with LOTS of hair) as mystery man, Ejlert Lovborg

Jennie Linden (Jackson's Women in Love co-star) as rival, Thea Elvsted

Timothy West as the sinister and lascivious Judge Brack

The tragedy of Hedda Gabler is that Hedda's "romantic idealism" is not romantic at all, at least not in the traditional sense ascribed to women. Hedda's ideals are almost masculine in nature, in that they are a longing for freedom and control and romantic license; all things Hedda is rather terrified of flouting convention to pursue. As the film opens, Hedda, by all outward appearances, has already attained the romantic ideal appropriate to women of her time: she has beauty, social standing, a loving husband, an opulent home, and possibly a child on the way. The tragedy of Hedda's life is that all of this bores her to madness.

Hedda - desperately bored...again

Hedda's fruitless romantic longing is for independence and power (two things accessible only to males in 1890s Norway) and to live in a world in which perfect, heroic acts are rewarded by the wearing of vine leaf crowns. She has a temperament and restless curiosity for the world beyond the limiting confines of her sex and station, but, bristling at the constraints of her preconscribed life, she is simply too cowardly and bourgeois to break from it. In frustrated response, Hedda strikes out through the insidious and poisonous manipulation of the lives of those around her.

Hedda attempts to wedge herself between and rival and a former suitor

"For once in my life I want to have power over somebody's fate."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Who among us hasn't, at one time or another, felt the frustration of living a life we perceive as growing increasingly short of options as we age? It's easy to feel trapped and imprisoned by the choices one's made if the propensity is to look outside of oneself, failing to recognize that change is possible only through introspection and a level of direct action (courage) necessary to enact change. Hedda dramatizes the fact that it is not usually external limitations that torment us, but rather the bars and prison walls we construct in our minds born of fear and selfishness.
Hedda is forever going on about how bored she is and how limited are her life's prospects; yet, by way of contrast, we observe that her friend & rival, the meek Thea Elvsted is, in turning her back on social convention and abandoning her concern for what others think of her (terrifyingly unimaginable to Hedda), infinitely braver (and freer) than Hedda could ever hope to be.

General Gabler's Pistols
Hedda's masculine longing for independence is phallically represented
by the firearms she must keep under lock and key

PERFORMANCES
I have always been crazy about Glenda Jackson. Several years ago I had the opportunity to see Jackson in a Los Angeles theatrical production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. To my great shock and dismay, I thought she was rather awful in it. Admirably, I suppose, she took the character of Martha to a place less traditionally bellicose, and for me, it just seemed flat. Quite a shock given that, onscreen, in my opinion, few actresses are as electrifying. As Hedda Gabler, Jackson commands the screen like a champ and never relinquishes it for a second. Like the stars of yesterday (Davis, Hepburn, Crawford), Jackson makes you watch her and rewards your attention with a layered characterization that makes this oft-performed role seem wholly new and revelatory. Hers is a cunning performance of wit and subtlety that makes the deeply neurotic heroine both frightening and touching (and rather funny).
Jackson, already a two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress, received her fourth (and final) Oscar nomination for Hedda.  But of course, as Maggie Smith so hilariously pointed out in the 1977 comedy, California Suite, "...she's nominated every goddamned year!"

Hedda: "I think I'll burn your hair off after all!"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I love how the film is shot in sumptuous gold-brown tones which emphasize Hedda's image of herself as a creature trapped in a gilded cage. This theme is further promoted in the elaborate & constrictive women's clothing of the time, and in the overtly ornate trappings of her smotheringly cluttered home. Scene after scene ends with Hedda clenching her fists or fairly trembling with rage as she fails to find any avenue of escape from a world intent on closing in around her.

Trapped

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
In the 1955 film, The Seven-Year Itch, there's a scene in which Marilyn Monroe, after having seen the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon, remarks that she felt sorry for the monster because, underneath it all, it just wanted to be loved. Well, I have a similar feeling about Hedda Gabler. There's no denying that in many ways, Gabler is very much a monster. Yet you can't help feeling a little sorry for her when, despite all of her schemes, she's unable to prevent her world from crumbling in around her, and, worst of all, having her worst fear - someone having power over her - realized.

Grotesque Charade

It's difficult not to feel the pain that lies behind Hedda's monstrous behavior because most of us know that there are few things more soul-killing than harboring a desire for something you're too afraid to pursue.

Past adaptations of Ibsen's classic have portrayed Hedda as a victim of her time. This Women's Lib-era adaptation was somewhat controversial in translating some of the dialog in a more comedic vein as well as depicting Hedda as a more active agent of her own destruction. This non-victim point of view has the benefit of bringing to the forefront the irony behind Hedda's endless machinations, as it emphasizes Hedda indeed possessing the power to be the catalyst for many events, most of them proving only to be tragic and at cross purpose with her objectives.

"I will be silent in future."

In addition to Hedda, a very fine film I wish more people were able to see, there appears to be an entire catalog of Glenda Jackson films that have yet to be released on DVD. Among them: The Incredible Sarah (1976), The Nelson Affair (1973), Robert Altman's H.E.A.L.T.H. (1980), The Triple Echo (1972), Stevie (1978)...oh, the list goes on. Talk about your tragedies!

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011