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 Loveexhibiting 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).
In 1975, a full six years before the existence of MTV and two years before Saturday Night Fever propelled disco to the forefront of pop culture, director Ken Russell (who had previously trained his by-then trademark grandiloquent eye almost exclusively on the lives of classical composers), created what was essentially a 2-hour music video. Part Scopitone cheese-fest, part surrealist fever-dream, part theater of the absurd, and part post-'60s drug-addled freak-out; Ken Russell's 100% assault on the senses is the self-proclaimed rock-opera, Tommy.
One of the most phenomenal cinema experiences of this or any other time.
Ann-Margret as Nora Walker
Oliver Reed as Frank Hobbs
Roger Daltrey as Tommy Walker
Not since Roman Polanski, that atheist genius of contemporary nihilism, was assigned to the darkly cynical Rosemary's Baby, has there ever been a more perfect match of director and subject. Ken Russell's theatrically baroque, visuals-as-narrative style is ideally suited to a tale of such broad-strokes bombast as Tommy. Marketed as an experience as much as a movie, Tommy boasted rock-concert-decibel-level sound (the five-speaker Quintaphonic sound system that rattled movie theater rafters every bit as much as Earthquake's Sensurround), a story told entirely in song and music; and a mind-blowing, only-in-the-'70s cast of pop/rock musicians and movie stars. But best of all, Tommy had at its helm one of the UK's most artistically fearless directors.
In his TV biographies of classical composers for the BBC, and in the films The Music Lovers (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), and Mahler (1974), Ken Russell proved himself to be an undisputed visionary when it came to unearthing daringly evocative ways of melding music and imagery. A director for whom too much was never enough, I can't think of a soul better suited to transfer a rock opera to the big screen with all the genre-requisite exaggeration and excess.
The release of Tommy was poised as a '70s happening...and it didn't disappoint.
Certainly not when it came to its eye-popping cast of pop-cuture icons.
Jack Nicholson as The Doctor
Tina Turner as The Acid Queen
Elton John as The Pinball Wizard
Significantly retooled from the 1969 double album by The Who, Tommy is a quasi-spiritual parable about a boy (Barry Winch) rendered hysterically deaf, blind, and non-verbal after witnessing the murder of his father (Robert Powell) at the hands of his mother's lover (Oliver Reed).
Witness to the Murder
Seriously, who wouldn't be traumatized by Oliver Reed screaming in your face?
While shared guilt tears at the fibers of the marriage of Nora (Ann-Margret) and Frank (Reed) --Nora, in particular, grapples with remorse over what she has done-- the now-grown Tommy (Daltrey) retreats further and further into himself, inhabiting a vivid inner world that serves to shield him from the paradoxical trauma of well-intentioned attempts to cure him backed up by thoughtless instances of parental neglect and familial abuse. As a result of his experiences, Tommy develops a near-supernatural talent for pinball and is hailed as a pop culture prodigy.
For Nora, instant wealth and fame only superficially cushion the pain of the responsibility she feels for Tommy's afflictions. But when her hysterics bring about his "accidental" fall through a plate-glass mirror, the miraculous restoration of his senses changes the course of all of their lives. Tommy instantly becomes a worldwide spiritual messiah, but discovers that this mock religion, which offers spiritual redemption through material acquisition, is yet but another existential dead end.
I Am The Light
For a treatise on fame addiction, pop-spirituality, drugs, child abuse, and family dysfunction, five seasons of "Oprah" couldn't accomplish what Ken Russell does in these crammed-to-overflowing two hours. In song, yet! Classical music devotee Russell seems creatively invigorated by his first foray into the world of Rock & Roll, and his inspired translation of the Who's opera to the screen is nothing short of dazzling. Always a director able to capture memorably vivid tableaux, Russell fills Tommy with striking and, in some instances, downright bizarre images and setpieces that 1975 audiences weren't quite prepared for.
Nora & Captain Walker Tommy is credited to three cinematographers. Their work is often breathtaking.
Tommy is chock full of spheres, globe motifs, religious iconography, inside jokes, and Freudian symbolism. All this heavy-handed pretension was like manna for a high school film geek like me.
Robert Powell as Captain Walker
Looking at the film now, it's hard for me to take it as seriously as I did way back when. But what does persist and becomes more apparent with each viewing is the obvious artistry on display and how much sheer outrageous fun it is to watch. So many movies today are all spectacle, with nary an idea in their heads. Ken Russell movies are so crammed full of ideas and subthemes that it frequently takes repeat viewings to even catch them all. Oh, and there's plenty of spectacle to spare, too.
Modern Family
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
If Tommy were a Western, it would be a Western with covered wagons, the cavalry, and stagecoaches; were it a war film, it would have air strikes, tanks, battalions, and explosions every fifteen minutes. In short, Tommy is so much fun because it has too much of everything. The music is exhilarating (and loud), and the visuals are, in turn, brash, vulgar, and ingenious. Most movies have at least one setpiece scene; Tommy is ALL setpiece scenes. Under any other circumstances, this would be a recipe for a somewhat overwhelming viewing experience. But Ken Russell's operatic ambition and vastness of scope are so gleefully grandiose and overreaching that I find Tommy to be just irresistible cinema.
Show Biz
The "Pinball Wizard" sequence, featuring The Who and Elton John is combat as rock concert
Satire
Organized religion and fame culture are skewered in a jaw-dropping sequence set in a church worshiping Marilyn Monroe
Surrealism
Tommy in a landscape of giant pinballs and flaming pinball machines
PERFORMANCES
The title role may belong to Roger Daltrey, but the film belongs to Ann-Margret. As Tommy's troubled mother (understatement), Ann-Margret seems to sense that this is the role of a lifetime and attacks it with a commitment and ferocity that comes from a place very real. Her performance is so compelling that she pulls off the Herculean feat of anchoring the entire film (which could have easily slid into campiness) in a kind of emotional truth.
Tommy was Ann-Margret's first Best Actress Oscar nomination. In 1971 she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Carnal Knowledge, a film in which she played opposite Tommy's romantically smitten physician, Jack Nicholson
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The pairing of the director of The Devils with the actress who stole an entire film from under Elvis Presley's nose was bound to produce a few sparks, but no one was prepared for the cinematic conflagration that was the "Champagne" musical number; popularly known as "The beans sequence." A song written expressly for the film, it communicates Nora's profound guilt, compounded by the riches and comfort that has come to her through Tommy's pinball success. In an attempt to blot out Tommy's image from both her mind and the television screen, which alternates close-ups of Tommy's staring, blameless eyes, with insipid commercials for baked beans, soap suds, and chocolate, Nora gets plastered. Everything comes to an emotional and visual head when Nora hallucinates the television set vomiting its material goods into her pristine white bedroom.
If you really want to see an actor going all out, nerves exposed and raw, you need look no further than Ann-Margret's Technicolor nervous breakdown in Tommy. Audacious isn't even the word. Understandably, this scene was all critics could talk about when the film was released, and even today I think it can't help but astonish. A primo example of truly inspired, virtuoso looniness.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It's fascinating to me that a film propelled by wall-to-wall rock music is also so visually stimulating; I can imagine someone could watch it without sound and still find it to be an exciting and compelling motion picture. Ken Russell has a silent filmmaker's grasp of the visual rhythms of dramatic storytelling. He's always been a director known for letting images do the talking, and with Tommy, he comes the closest he's ever been to achieving pure cinema.
Tommy's Primary Color Triad of Trauma
(The Acid Queen, Uncle Ernie, and Cousin Kevin)
As a teen, the only records I owned were movie soundtrack albums (the film-geek thing), so, rather remarkably, Tommy was my introduction to rock music. Purists, of course, would say that Tommy is to Rock what Dreamgirls is to R&B. But independent of questions on whether The Who's concept album conceit is the real thing or not, my love for this score eventually led to my expanding my record collection to include real-life, non-movie music of all stripes. How fitting then to be indoctrinated into the musical world of soaring theatrics, broad emotionalism, and specious spirituality by a film director whose entire career was built on those very things.
AUTOGRAPH FILES
Ann-Margret (or her publicist) sent this photo and this accompanying note in 1976 following a letter I wrote gushing about her performance in Tommy. I always assumed messages and pictures from celebrities were PR products until I worked for actor Walter Matthau in the 1990s and saw that he personally answered his fan mail and autographed photos. Do stars even do this now, or are fans immediately placed on a "stalker" list?
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