The Boy Friend

THE BOY FRIEND   ***

Ken Russell

1971

IDEA:  In 1920s London, an assistant stagehand reluctantly steps into the lead role of a musical called "The Boy Friend" after the leading lady breaks her ankle.

BLURB:  The musical has often been noted as the one classical Hollywood genre in which narrative concerns can be subordinated to spectacle. Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend takes this logic to its extreme, tipping the scales so emphatically in favor of the spectacle that the narrative is close to a non-entity. Like the last act of a Busby Berkeley musical or the dream ballet sequence of a Freed-era MGM musical engorged to (long) feature length, The Boy Friend proceeds as a series of lavish production numbers, each one more decadently realized than the last. There’s a mythological Grecian bacchanal in a verdant wood; dancing figures atop supersized turntables; people dressed as glittery playing card suits climbing a golden lattice; and, in a number that must have resonated in an era of psychedelia, a frolicsome/feverish jaunt through a mushroom village. The implication in the Berkeley musicals - that these allegedly stage-bound spectacles could only ever be executed, and appreciated, through the medium of film - is made explicit by Russell through the meta-textual device of a Hollywood director viewing the stage show within the movie, intending to adapt it for the screen. Whether or not Russell’s film faithfully depicts (is adapt even the right word?) Sandy Wilson’s "The Boy Friend" is beside the point in this deeply irreverent pastiche, which seems to want nothing more than to fill our eyes and ears with only the borrowed, sugary excesses of movie-musical tropes until we're stuffed silly. One’s viewing ratio of pleasure-to-pain will vary, but the chutzpah of the endeavor is undeniable.