The double-trip Maxie Ford with the knickerbocker break
I watched Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, and I’ll never be the same
I’ve known the films of Ken Russell more by reputation than experience. Until last Friday, I’d only seen two. The first was The Lair of the White Worm (1988), a phallocentric fantasia based on a Bram Stoker story, led by Amanda Donohoe as a reptilian cult villainess (also making good use of a pubescent Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi). The second was The Devils (1971), a much more jagged and disturbing film, about accusations of witchcraft that roil a 17th-century convent. It’s a luridly violent depiction of a community’s breakdown into chaos, anchored by trembling performances from Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave. This is one of a long list of incredible films that I never need to see again.
But last week I was flipping through a collection of novelty textile designs published by the V&A Museum (like you do), when I saw a note that a John Held, Jr. fabric design was used as an inspiration for Russell’s 1971 adaptation of the frothy musical comedy The Boy Friend. If I’d known at one point that he had made this, I’d completely forgotten. It turns out that he started filming it almost immediately after wrapping The Devils. How the hell was this going to work? I had to see it at once.
Let me just say, god bless the Brooklyn Public Library system, because my local branch had a copy of the DVD right there on the shelf. Hope and I looked at the running time as I popped it in the player - almost two-and-a-half hours??? I needed to be up early the next morning - maybe we’d pause it in the middle and finish it next week.
Not a chance. As a person whose love of musicals is matched only by his loathing for them, I could not have wished for a more perfect picture.
The first five minutes introduce us to a few dozen players in a provincial English theater troupe ca. 1933 as they prepare for a sparsely attended matinee show. It’s fast and frothy exposition, with an edge of stylization - so far so pleasant. But then the first musical number begins, and it’s clear right away that something is terribly wrong. Melodic zombies march onstage to trill the title song: “We plead to have / We need to have / In fact our poor hearts bleed to have…” The singers’ eyes are way too wide and shiny, like they’ve been injected with acrylic. The camera gets unnervingly close, and in their hunger for your attention you’re afraid they’ll eat your face off. In terms of grisly spectacle, maybe this wasn’t as far from The Devils as we thought.
Of course, we were hooked.
The film is a three-layer cake. The bottom layer is a backstage melodrama, with plot points and dialogue ripped unashamedly from 42nd Street (which I performed in during high school, so I know of what I speak). The star of this backwater production is incapacitated in a car crash, and the assistant stage manager (played by Twiggy, who is quite charming) is forced to go on in her place. This sets in motion jealousies, rivalries, romantic aspirations - all the usual stuff that goes on in the wings.
The second layer is the onstage musical itself - “The Boy Friend” - which is a real show written in 1954 by Sandy Wilson as a gentle spoof of bubbly ‘20s stage confections. (The original production was the debut of Julie Andrews, who turned down the opportunity to star in the film 15 years later.) The plot, about a bunch of rich people falling in love while planning a party, is a framework for sweet-silly songs like “Sur la Plage” and “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” The ostensibly ramshackle stagings are actually gorgeous art deco setpieces that would do a Broadway theater proud, albeit with just a pinch of tongue-in-cheek seediness around the edges.
The third layer is Hollywood fantasy gone haywire. A big-time movie director mysteriously shows up in the audience, and everyone involved reimagines themselves in a big-budget extravaganza. This is the springboard for Russell’s most psychedelic set-pieces - a Busby Berkeley homage set on a rotating turntable, showgirls tapping on biplane wings, a frankly terrifying number where everyone transforms into gnomes who hop around on three-story mushrooms. By 1971, LSD had leaked back through 40 years of show-biz history.
All three of these layers mingle increasingly as the film goes on, until it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends - backstage character relations bleed into the Hollywood numbers, while characters suddenly burst into song in their dressing rooms. Each member of this ensemble of strivers - from the surly old character actor to the gawky young American hoofer (played by all 8’7” of Tommy Tune) gets a moment in the sun. Everything ends the way a musical is supposed to, but it feels like the world has blown up along the way.
If it seems like A Lot, you’re wrong. It’s more than A Lot - it’s Too Much. This is by design (it’s Ken Russell, after all), and it speaks to our relentless need to entertain and be entertained, to see and be seen. Having been one of the Show People for most of my life, I recognized myself on the screen - the straining, the dreaming, the grandiosity, the small stakes elevated to Shakespearean status. Russell can obviously relate to it too, but he’s not the sort of artist who can let that identification go unquestioned. The whole thing tries so hard that it feels desperate, until that desperation becomes the subject - and once you’re keyed into that vibe, the whole thing comes to life again. There’s not a single frame that lets up in its demented mission to amuse, until you feel yourself being held prisoner to your own delight. But if you have to be in prison, what better jailer can you have?
I’ve spent the past few months going down a Brian DePalma rabbit hole, and now I can see myself digging a Ken Russell burrow right next to it. (Part of me would love to see a double bill of The Boyfriend and Phantom of the Paradise, but I’m not sure I’d survive.) I love these directors who refuse to submit to the naturalistic mandate that film should be approached literally - by using the tools of filmmaking against itself, they blow holes through our expectations that somehow open up into wider explorations of what we watch and why. By freeing their productions from the need to be believable, their work becomes part satire, part sensation, part myth.
For me, this is one of the most exciting experiences to have as a viewer - falling through one layer into the next, grasping at handholds for a moment before slipping into the next vortex. It’s cathartic in the same way a horror film can be, but instead of being chased by a killer it’s the specter of your own assumptions and illusions. And the more fabulously it’s dressed, the better!
The Boy Friend delivers uncertainty to spare - its relationship to seriousness is muddled beyond all recognition. This brings it an added poignance for me. No matter how much time passes since I was last on stage, I will always harbor these fever dreams - and I will always judge myself for having them. How gratifying to see these contradictions scooped out of my head and dashed across a screen.
Maybe now I’m finally ready for Lisztomania?
Spent,
Jeff