𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙤𝙮 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙 1971

Christopher Gable & Rudolf Nureyev in "Images of Love" at the Royal Opera House, 1964

Some of my old The Devil’s Crown (1978) fanarts, of Henry II through the Ages

The Boy Friend (1971)

THE MUSIC LOVERS (1971) dir. Ken Russell Composer, conductor and teacher Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky is a closeted homosexual who would do anything, selfish or not, to disguise that fact during a time when his sexual preference would have cost him the one thing that he truly loved: his music. Tchaikovsky's solution is to marry, but unfortunately he chooses Antonina Miliukova, a (allegedly) nymphomaniac girl whom he cannot satisfy. His marriage is plagued by both his struggles to retain his newfound career and his lustful desire for Count Anton Chiluvsky. (link in title)

The Boy Friend (1971) 💀🪰

Nothing succeeds like excess. That seems to have been Ken Russell’s motto, well displayed in The Boy Friend. As I watched it, I thought the first parody of Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic production numbers for Warner Bros. musicals was brilliant. The second was entertaining. The third was … well, maybe the law of diminishing returns had set in. The original stage musical was a campy sendup of the kind of musical comedies that P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern used to create for the Princess Theatre: tuneful light romances with silly plots. But for the movie, Russell superadds a campy sendup of the backstage movie musicals of the 1930s, borrowing plot and even dialogue from 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), hence the Berkeley parodies. I first saw The Boy Friend around the time of its first release, and enjoyed it. But watching it again now, I found myself looking at the clock after the first hour and a half passed. The version I had seen in the theater was the one MGM had cut by 25 minutes; the restored version runs an exhausting two hours and 17 minutes. That said, there is much to enjoy about Russell’s movie, especially the vividly colored production design by Tony Walton and costumes by Shirley Russell (the director’s wife). The presence of the great Tommy Tune in the cast is also a plus. The Sandy Wilson songs are pleasantly hummable, and the interpolation of two songs by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed that were featured in Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) is nice. But a little camp goes a long way, and piling camp on camp can be tiresome, especially if the camp is done the way Russell does it: with a smirk rather than a wink.