I rarely start “gosh, I love that movie” threads, as there are so many movies I love that I would grind the Board to a halt. But I just rewatched a tape of this Ken Russell musical today and was swept up by it all over again–sure, it completely fudged the period (it took place c1926, but parodied early 1930s musical numbers)–but who cares, it was so silly and brilliant. The cinematography alone on the “Poor Little Pierette” number! I could watch it a dozen times.
And the cast! Not a clinker in the bunch (though Tommy Tune’s acting might have been a bit, umm, overly enthusiastic).
Does anyone know the name of the actress who played the bitchy chorine in the “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” number? I thought she stole the whole movie, but I could never catch her character’s name, to look her up on imdb. Round face, strong chin, catlike eyes, Louise Brooks bob–that one. She was like a laser beam through the whole movie, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything else.
Crap, she’s hardly done anything, at leart on film or TV—maybe she’s laboring away onstage? I hate to think an actress that talented would just fade away after seven films.
Googled her and found that she is indeed very busy and successful, as befits a lady of her skills:
“Antonia created the role of Roxie Hart in England, first at the Sheffield Crucible, and then later at the Cambridge Theatre, London, 1979. Antonia spent a year and a half prior to Chicago in Pippin on Broadway, and went on to star in the US National Tour. Her other credits include Ring Round The Moon, Once In A Lifetime, Please Of Hyde Park, Up Victoria!, At The Music Hall, Sweet Charity, Company, Irma La Douce, Lie Down, I Think I Love You, The National Health and Kingdom Coming. Her film work includes Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, Mahler Lives, Percy, Good-bye Gemini, The Pirate and It’s A Two Foot Six Inches Above The Ground World. Her TV work includes Sunshine and The Users. Antonia has also worked as a choreographer on Jesus Christ Superstar. At one time, she had her own jazz ballet touring Canada and Europe. At the moment, Antonia is in the production team for the popular US Comedy Sex In The City.”
My oldest friend has a very, very strange father. The only think that he watches on TV is PBS and the History Channel and on old video tape of The Boy Friend. For some crazy reason he love that movie. I’ve never seen it but I’ve always been curious. I don’t care for musicals but I will Tivo’ing it.
Yes. The Boyfriend is the only musical–no, wait, he did Tommy–by a director whose hallucinatory style would seem, I think, to lend itself especially well to musicals. In a Ken Russell film, you generally have a plot that kind of parallels reality; skims it without ever quite touching down. This narrative is interrupted at critical points by explovise excursions into the land of “WTF?”. Pretty close to the structure of a musical, no? Russell punctuates his movies with non-musical, but very Musical-ish, moments of non-reality.
Case in point: Altered States. The Lair of the White Worm. All of his classical composer biopics: in The Music Lovers, we have a sequence in which Tchaikovsky, played by Richard Chamberlin, imagines his wife’s death to the tune of his 1812 Overture, and we see Glenda Jackson’s head explode, in Tchaikovsky’s mind’s eye, with every cannon blast.
He’s definitely not for everybody, but he’s one of my favorites. His movies are such unapologetic freakouts–please, everybody, see The Devils–that it’s hard for me not to like them, though I have often tried to do so. He’s kind of like Greenaway in that sense, although where Greenaway is drily intellectual–a puzzlemaker–Russell is driven more, I think, by emotion; almost like an outsider artist giving free reign to emotional expression without worrying about the “proper rules” of his medium.
In any case, and back to the topic, The Boyfriend is, I think, Russell’s most successful marriage of style to material: his bizarre, visionary style lends itself perfectly to the staging of musical numbers in a 1971 film about an earlier era.
