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).
The label of "misogynist" has followed the late director Robert Altman around since audiences were first invited to laugh at and identify with the anti-female, frat-boy antics of that annoyingly smug '70s geek duo of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (hands down my least favorite Altman film).
Despite being responsible for some of the more cringe-worthy scenes of cruelty to women ever attributed to a single director (the coke-bottle-to-the-face scene in The Long Goodbye is the worst), in interviews, Altman has always asserted, rather persuasively, that he was, in fact, very sympathetic and respectful of women and that his films merely reflected...as a form of critique, one assumes...a reality for many women in a sexist culture. Of course, this argument would hold a good deal more weight were the women in his films not so frequently the sexualized objects of the male gaze, or depicted so unsympathetically in comparison to the male oppressors in the scene. (As reliable as a Hitchcock cameo, an Altman film almost always features a scene of a woman in some state of blunt nudity [usually in the presence of some form of humiliation] while male characters remain chastely clothed.)
But while Robert Altman may get it wrong a good deal of the time when it comes to depicting women onscreen, he's also one of the few directors, who, when he gets it right, does so spectacularly. Putting M*A*S*H aside, a film I consider to be sophomoric, boys' club dreck in spite of its reputation, Altman has an otherwise impressive track record of providing terrific roles for women in his films. The women may not be pillars of feminist ideology (in fact, almost all are neurotic or downright insane, as are most of the people in Altman films, anyway), but they are dimensional, recognizably human, and always compelling.
In his "plus" column I place That Cold Day in the Park (Altman's 2nd film), an off-beat, forgotten masterpiece of loneliness and sexual obsession.
Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen
Michael Burns as The Boy
Academy-Award-winning actress Sandy Dennis, on the downside of an unsustainable fire-hot popularity that began with 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stars as Frances Austen, a wealthy, 32-year-old woman living alone in a spacious apartment in Vancouver, Canada. Prim and cripplingly repressed, Frances lives a life of formal ritual, surrounded by friends who are at least 20 years her senior (they, like her staid apartment, appear to have been inherited from her dead mother).
One rainy afternoon she spies a young man sitting alone on a park bench and invites him in to get dry. The blankly cherubic 19-year-old (Michael Burns) speaks not a word, but allows the solicitous woman to bathe, feed, and eventually house him. The boy's silent passivity (he's never named) and apparent lack of friends or family enable Frances to project a great deal of her own loneliness onto his situation, awakening in her an acute awareness of her long-repressed desires. Before long, Frances' initial maternal concern gives way to darker obsessions as the boy comes to symbolize a last-chance grasp at life.
One of Frances' many joyless, ritualized social commitments
Something about the boy sitting alone in the rain touches Frances. A repressed woman who, up until this point, has given the impression of being rather icy and removed.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Movies about older women and kept men date back at least as far as 1950s Sunset Blvd. Movies about old coots chasing after young women date back even further and are often presented as joyous romps (There's a Girl in My Soup - 1970) or timeless romances (think of pretty much every early Audrey Hepburn movie), but rarely is the creep factor explored because these movies are written by, for, and intended to flatter the ego of men. But in a world where women are seen as girls, girlfriends, or wives, older single women tend to be depicted as the stuff of horror.
Another thing I've noticed is that, whether due to gender-role preconceptions which ignore the fairly common strong-woman / weak-male dynamic (seen in non-stop parade on reality TV court shows), or these narrative's close association with homosexual authors - Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth,The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - films on the subject have always seemed to court a gay sensibility. Which is to say, the female characters in these stories could be replaced by a male without significantly altering the substance or themes of the narrative.
Sex Object A rarity in most American films - Robert Altman asks us to share the feminine gaze.
Due to the predominance of male directors, writers, and cinematographers, movie audiences have grown quite used to the fact that films almost always represent the subjective male gaze. When on those rare occasions that gaze turns feminine and it's the male torso upon whom the leering close-ups are trained, audiences (particularly American males) are often made uncomfortable and don't quite know what to do with themselves. Film critics traditionally channel such discomfort into dismissing these films as being homoerotic or gay in their sensibility (the tact taken by critics reviewing the inarguably lousy but essentially harmless Sex and the City movies). Otherwise, they invoke a curious double-standard and label the male nudity as "gratuitous" or humiliating for the actor. At no time is the thought ever entertained that, for once, a film's gaze is intended to reflect the point of view of a female.
One of the strengths of That Cold Day in the Park is how it commits to reinforcing the gaze of its female protagonist and uses any ensuing audience discomfort to its atmospheric advantage. In a refreshing change of pace for an Altman film, a male (Michael Burns) spends most of the movie in various states of fetishized undress; the camera lingering over his bareness in a way usually reserved for comely starlets. From a narrative standpoint, all this suggested nudity underscores the character's vulnerability; but psychologically speaking, I like the way something so simple has the power to mess with so many minds. Men in movies are traditionally heroes and propel the plot. A great many, I'm afraid, are made uncomfortable when a male character is presented as not only passive, but subject to the whims of a woman.
Michael Burns, giving Joe Dallesandro a run for his money in the "passive, objectified male" sweepstakes
PERFORMANCES
Few actresses are as appealingly quirky as the late Sandy Dennis. Her performances are full of nervous mannerisms, eccentric tics, and vocal hiccups that you either love her for or else she annoys the hell out of you. I fall into the former category. In That Cold Day in the Park, Dennis has a role in which her trademark idiosyncrasies work toward defining an emotionally needy character stunted by a disturbing social awkwardness. I can't say her character is exactly likable (creepy is more the word) but Dennis's performance is touching and moves one to empathy.
Frances: "I remember my mother never stopped saying how lonely she was after my father died. She kept talking on and on, always reminding me how little company I was for her."
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I love it when directors do more than just use the camera to record the action. Altman makes great use of the concealment/distortion value of shadows, glass, mirrors, and reflective surfaces. A good deal of the sense of unease this film elicits is due to the way Altman bisects and divides the screen, keeping the characters in their own separate worlds even when they share the same space.
Isolated Worlds Although lonely herself, Frances is unable to return the affection an equally lonely suitor (Edward Greenhalgh) extends to her.
Barriers An attempt to reach out.
Separated Frances holds one-sided conversations with the boy who cannot (will not?) speak.
Window Blinds or Iron Bars? The characters in That Cold Day in the Park live in various self-imposed prisons.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I first saw That Cold Day in the Park back in the early 70s on a now-defunct San Francisco TV channel: KEMO-TV Channel 20 - which had this great late-night program called "The Adults Only Movie." The movies were mostly foreign or art films (I must have been the only kid in my class who knew who Catherine Spaak was), but what 13-year-old could resist a program with a title like that? The version of That Cold Day In The Park I saw was heavily edited and viewed on a tiny black and white TV set in my bedroom, but it nevertheless blew me away and I sought it out many years later at revival theaters. Then, the film mostly impressed me as a kinky suspense thriller with a very powerful final act (and the male nudity didn't hurt, either). But over the years I have come to grow fonder of it as a labyrinthine character piece and dark treatise on loneliness. The shift of tone from somber drama to something unanticipatedly perverse is like a slow descent into madness.
Despite some cinematic evidence to the contrary, I really don't believe Robert Altman was a misogynist. His films with male leads have an off-putting thread of misanthropy and cruelty running through them, yet his films with female leads (The Company, 3 Women, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) are infinitely gentler and markedly more humane. That Cold Day in the Park is almost delicate in the way it handles the Sandy Dennis character when it could have easily made her into some kind of a gynophobia-inspired monster.
OK, so the "grasping female" imagery doesn't support my argument, but is this a cool ad, or what?
I think in his own twisted way, Altman liked women a good deal more than men.
For sheer baroque audacity, few films not directed by Ken Russell can hold a candle (or toe shoe) to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. It takes a certain kind of impassioned genius to attempt a psycho-sexual horror fable centered in the mystique-laden world of classical ballet, yet Aronofsky succeeds beyond all reason. By turns disturbing, transgressive, sensual, absurdist, and achingly beautiful, Black Swan is almost swoon-inducing in its willingness to go straight over the top in an effort to alight on something as keen as a pinhead.
Ostensively a grim fairy tale excursion into madness wherein a repressed ballerina's obsessive desire to dance the lead in Tchaikovsky'sSwan Lake takes a startlingly anamorphic turn, the real themes of Black Swan are infinitely broader in scope and defy any single, unqualified interpretation.
Natalie Portman as ballerina Nina Sayers
Vincent Cassell (does he have the sexiest nose, or what?) as ballet company manager Thomas Leroy
Mila Kunis as rival ballerina Lily
Barbara Hershey as stage-mother-from-hell Erica Sayers
Winona Ryder as soon-to-be-disposed-of prima ballerina Beth Macintyre
Taken at face value alone, Black Swan is an astonishingly effective psychological thriller blessed with a consistently creepy vibe born of Aronofsky's almost intrusively subjective shooting style. In its ability to (sometimes literally) peel back and expose the layers of compulsion: artistic, sexual, & otherwise, Black Swan is a worthy contemporary companion piece to Roman Polanski's 1965 thriller, Repulsion.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Far and beyond the surface enjoyment I derived from Black Swan's stylishly novel take on the horror/ thriller, was my delight in discovering that the film resonated so deeply with me.
I've been a professional dancer for over a quarter of a century (an eternity in the dance world), and while I love seeing any kind of dance in film, it's disheartening to contemplate that, by its nature, one's experience of dance in film is limited exclusively to the "display" aspect of the art. The finished product that is the result of the blood, sweat, and tears that is the creative process. In its ability to render visible the sublime and chimerical, dance has the power to make the illusion of perfection seem possible. That is its magic.
The flaw of dance is that, devoid of a glimpse into the human imperfection that creates such an illusion, too many people (most notably young girls lured by the romantic-fantasy, "little princess" fetishism side of classical ballet) find it all too easy to believe that perfection is actually an attainable goal. The striving for perfection in ballet is reflected in the constant dieting (did you check out that "ballerina breakfast" Portman has?) and damaged body image (Portman's character has a history of compulsive scratching) of so many dancers.
Shattered illusion: Broken music box dancer
I've seen many films that showed me what dance looks like, but Black Swan is the first and only film that reflected back to me my own experience of what it "feels" like to dance. How you can't expect to create anything meaningful unless you are brave enough to dig deep within yourself to unearth what lies beneath. Aronofsky has fashioned a film that is a visual representation of that transportive internal maelstrom (with all its soul-searching, anguish, and conflict) that defines the creative process. A visible answer, if you will, to the question "Where does one have to go internally to create great art?"
As is frequently the case with people in the performing arts, I am, at my core, a painfully shy person. I was a retiring bookworm who spent his high-school years undesirous of attention and terrified of being called on in class, I chewed my fingernails nervously and rarely looked people in the eye. Yet, in choosing a profession, I was drawn to something as emotionally revealing as dance. In it, I have had to regularly access and reveal parts of my inner self that were antithetical to who I am and how I was raised (VERY Catholic). Though the results occasionally surprise me to this day, no one seeing me dance would ever believe that I wasn't a born exhibitionist, lifelong extrovert, and passionate sensualist.
How is it possible? Take look at Black Swan for the answer.
Though highly-dramatized, the internal transformation necessary to turn a reserved personage like me into that passionate, expressive creature that is a dancer, can feel every bit as terrifying as the events in this film. That's why the events that unfold in Black Swan don't strike me as being intended for literal interpretation. The images and story feel like an operatically allegorical representation of the state of creative transformation and transcendence of self that is necessary to create the illusion of perfection that is dance.
Ballet as fetish: Dance de-romanticized
PERFORMANCES
Much like the mentally disturbed character of Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Polanski's Repulsion, Black Swan's Nina (Natalie Portman) is already a little off the barre before the film even begins. With no specifics given as to why she scratches herself or why she lives in a state of adolescent arrested development with her mother, we are left to pick out the clues of her past as the events of the present conspire to send her over the edge. Of course, the kicker is that we see the entire film from Nina's perspective, and, as a troubled young woman going through a paranoid identity crisis, she is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Since she has little grasp of what is real or imagined, neither do we. Welcome to the roller coaster ride.
Natalie Portman gives a truly fearless performance in Black Swan, totally deserving of all the awards heaped on her for her work. I thought she was amazing in Mike Nichols' Closer but she completely blew me away with her intensity here. She takes a very complex character in more-than-fantastic circumstances and makes you believe in (and even care about) what is happening to her.
The ballerina haunted by her obsession with perfection: One of my favorite images from the film
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I don't know why, but I'm a sucker for movies about identity and duality. Like Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek in 3 Women, there is something compelling about separate characters that embody an idealized whole. I love how Black Swan makes literal and stylistic use of reflections, doubles, and the distortions therein.
Mirrors are intriguing objects. They do nothing but reflect that which is before them, but at the same time, they seem to lie. They have the power to reflect back at us the gaze of another (without mirrors we have no idea how we look to someone else) but provocatively, that gaze must first be filtered through our own psyche. If we are self-enchanted, we are happy no matter what we see in the mirror. If we suffer insecurities, mirrors don't contradict us.
“They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?”
Truman Capote - Other Voices, Other Rooms
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
You can't make a movie about passion without displaying some yourself, and on that score, Black Swan is a seriously sexy success. The obvious physical beauty of Portman and her sensual doppelganger/rival Mila Kunis aside, there is some major heat generated by these women that is refreshing in its removal from the male gaze. Indeed, as the perspective of the film is exclusively that of the repressed Nina, the male gaze is frequently portrayed as repellent or predatory. What erotic underpinnings there are emanate from Nina's awakening to herself and exploring her own sexuality as exemplified by the comfortable carnality of her "Swan" double.
Sensual self-exploration: A dance with Rothbart?
Although several of my dancer friends didn't care for Black Swan (I suspect because it didn't uphold the romanticized ideal of dance like say, The Turning Point, but almost anybody who knows my tastes in film and attitude toward dance could guess that it would wind up being one of my favorites. It crosses the identity theft themes of Robert Altman's 3 Women with Polanski's penchant for P.O.V. insanity, adds Martin Scorsese's fluid cinematography, and tops it all off with Ken Russell's taste for visual grandiosity.
I admire the film for the chances it takes in refusing to adhere to specific genre constructs and for not falling into the trap of over-explaining everything. I like that in this age of formulaic rom-coms and by-the-numbers action films, Black Swan is a movie that allows itself to be misunderstood. Everyone involved is so obviously invested in what they're doing that it makes it easy to put your trust in the film and allow it to take you wherever it takes you. Seeing it for the first time was a thrill that stayed with me long after. Seeing it several times again...I find the experience gets richer and more layered with each viewing.
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