Boyfriend (Ihr Liebhaber)

Wonderful music and terrific English performers make this spoof of 30s musicals a must. Twiggy is wonderful as the understudy who must fill in for the injured star (Glenda Jackson in a funny cameo). And a Hollywood big shot is in the audience.... Hmmmm. Superb turns by Antonia Ellis as Maisie, Christopher Gable as Tony, and the rest: Max Adrian, Georgina Hale, Moyra Fraser, Barbara Windsor, Bryan Pringle, Catherine Willmer, Tommy Tune, and Murray Melvin. Great sets and costumes and all those musical numbers. Twiggy (yes, she can sing and dance) and Tune teamed up on Broadway years later in Me and My Girl. And this is the show that made a star of Julie Andrews on Broadway in 1954. Great Sandy Wilson show made into a glorious film by Ken Russell. His gentle spoof of 30s musicals, including the famous Busby Berkley dance routines and many inside jokes and lines from 30s musicals make this a total treat for fans of the genre. Jackson's "now go out there and be so great.... you'll make me hate you," is a direct quote from 42nd St, where Bebe Daniels says the line to Ruby Keeler. Also with Graham Armitage, Caryl Little, Sally Bryant, Brian Murphy, Vladel Shaybal as DeThrill, and Peter Greenwell as the pianist (who won an Oscar nomination for his orchestration). What fun! And one of Russell's best films.

Ken Russell takes a straightforward show and adds layers by having characters imagine bigtime Hollywood versions of the small touring company's musical numbers. This opens up the movie and makes for a dazzling spectacle of music, dance, and color. But without terrific performances, this would all be for nothing. Twiggy is really good as the shy Polly the stand-in. She and Christopher Gable make a nice dance team in several numbers. Max Adrian and Catherine Willmer are hilarious as the troop manager and his wife Hilda, as are Moyra Fraser and Bryan Pringle as the haughty star and his wife. My favorites are Antonia Ellis as the ferocious Maisie, Georgina Hale as the fog-horn voiced Fay, and Barbara Windsor as busty Hortense.

The music is great. Twiggy gets to sing "You Are My Lucky Star" and "All I Do the Whole Day Through." Hale and Adrian are memorable in "Never Too Old to Fall in Love." Fraser and Pringle are fun in "You Don't Want to Play with Me Blues," and the closing "Doing the Riviera" is a fond homage to Berkley with the famous chorus girls on winged plane number. Also love "The Boy Friend," "We're Perfect Young Ladies," "Nicer in Niece," "A Room in Bloomsbury," "Fancy Your Forgetting," and "Sur La Plage."

THE BOY FRIEND is a fond and loving spoof of old-time musicals and beautifully done. A must-see for all fans of classic musicals. Amazingly, Shirley Russell didn't get an Oscar nomination for the fabulous costumes.

2011 UPDATE: Warners has issued a remastered DVD and the color is spectacular!

Russell's homage to the twenties has aged better than most of his films because the tone is so right. The orchestration is period-perfect, and the costumes (by Russell's then-wife, Shirley) are astounding. Likewise the amazing sets echo the designs of Clarice Cliff, Lucy Atwell and a host of others. Twiggy is that rare star, a model who made a great transition to film, and she's supported by a Who's Who cast of English performers, especially bad girl Antonia Ellis, who went on to star in the British stage version of 'Chicago'. To cap it all, the film works on three distinct levels, the backstage musical, the onstage drama and the fantasy version. Some lines have even become catchphrases. Sandy Wilson, the original show's author, wrote a sequel called 'Divorce Me, Darling', which parodied the thirties. Some prints are shown without the 'Woodland Pastoral' dance sequence.

Despite whatever intoxicated tangents Ken Russell has embarked on in some of his other works, 'The Boy Friend' is a particularly enchanting anomaly for this director. Working loosely from Sandy Wilson's Broadway musical 'The Boyfriend,' Russell's screenplay relegates Wilson's original work to a mere production-within-a-production -- 'Noises Off'-style, as it were. Set in1920's London, the owner of a decaying theater company in the East End realizes that a big-shot Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeThrill, has dropped in to watch a performance, and he instantly regrets thrusting the young Assistant Stage Manager, Polly (played by Twiggy), onto the stage to fill the shoes of the show's star (Glenda Jackson, in an uncredited cameo), who's laid up in the hospital after getting her foot stuck in a tramline while en route to the performance. As with 'Noises Off,' the movie is a farce dealing with a potentially disastrous stage performance, although the backstage drama is more interwoven with the onstage production itself, so that the play dominates the duration of the film while serving as a window onto the backstage chaos.

The members of the theatre company are vain and starved to impress DeThrill, bitterly upstaging one another and overreaching for the Hollywood bigwig's attention. Amidst them, of course, is Twiggy's Polly, humble, nervous and in love with leading man Tony, who may or may not be carrying on an affair with one of the company's coquettish young actresses. Her feelings, at any given moment -- ranging from adoration to heartbreak, based upon what she half-observes -- dictate the course of her onstage performance and her ad-libs.

Wilson's play deals trivially with class divide, and it's interesting to note how the company's performers, all unrefined East Enders, play on their slanted notion of the upper-class. The actresses Russell has cast have a particular big-eyed, blinking appeal, the wider their shark-like onstage smiles, the greater the underhandedness being masked. The farcical elements are well-played, and Russell's signature brand of calculated bawdiness is appropriate for this context.

The brightest element of the movie, however, is Twiggy. Here, she is endearing and delicate, charmingly unsophisticated in an Eliza Doolittle fashion. Her performance in 'The Boy Friend' is unusually pure and sympathetic for something found in a Ken Russell film, and in a way, her character's predicament can be seen as a metaphor for Twiggy's appearance in this film. She is commanding through her gentle submissiveness, standing radiantly apart from the gloss of what surrounds her. Russell's strategy in establishing Twiggy's Polly as a most sympathetic protagonist seems to be directing her to perform, onstage, in the most naturalistic way possible, while every other member of the company performs in alternately forced, unnatural, and ham-fisted manners (pandering to DeThrill, of course, but at times reaching bizarre extremes of unnaturalness).

Unfortunately, for much of the film, Twiggy is completely swallowed by Ken Russell's extravaganza, in which he either pays homage to or simply satirizes Busby Berkeley with quite glorious (but characteristically excessive) widescreen tableaux. He has his entire library of tricks on hand, expressed in 'fantasy' sequences, in which an American flag backdrop dominates the entire frame in one instance, and a black & white movie projected onto a screen, positioned squarely in the center of the frame, itself turns into a Berkeley-style number. Another fantasy sequence, shot in a rustic outdoor environment, is ugly and dated, and does not fit with the rest of the film. It should have been excised.

Like most of Russell's films, 'The Boy Friend' looks and sounds great. The movie is often a joy to watch, particularly in its first hour. As much as I admired its visuals and the tight rhythms of its wit, I found myself longing, after it ended, for more of Twiggy's warmth and less of Russell's technical virtuosity. Still, a most enjoyable movie.

9 out of 10

Excellent musical that should be the basis for all other musicals. Seamless, flawless, and visually stunning. A wide variety of backdrops and settings are used. There is everything from the conventional dance line to a fairy tale setting where the performers are dressed like ladybugs and living in giant mushrooms. There is also a fun take off on Greek mythology done in a scenic forest setting.

By far the two best segments take place with them dancing on a giant record player and another with them made to look like characters on a giant playing card. The giant record player one as got to be the most impressive because they show them on not one, but two giant record players, side by side and from overhead. The dancers than dance on top of the giant turntables and , as a group, make unique symmetrical designs with their bodies. It's like a old Busby Berkley number and yet almost out does even him.

This is a rare film that can carry itself on visual level alone. The story is at best just a standard musical plot. It involves a group of underpaid actors who put on a tacky low budget musical for a small group of people. The film than interweaves between the low budget numbers, which are all still really good, and their visual fantasies of what things would look like if they had a big budget. Twiggy plays the shy awkward crew hand that comes on as the star when the leading lady breaks her leg.

Sure it is, at times, predictable, corny, and lightweight yet it also has a really good sense of humor. The songs ALL have a good score and the dances are certainly fun to watch. Twiggy may never score as a great actress, but she hits the mark here. She has a cute bob haircut and a constantly perplexed expression that is really amusing. All the other characters have amusing idiosyncracies also. Jackson is fun, of course, as the injured leading lady who comes back and is none too happy to see how successful her replacement is.

Some of director Russell's films have been considered excessive and nonsensical. Yet that is not the case here. His visual flair and indulgence really work. This guy has talent. He use of primary colors in every shot is nice.

This is truly a visual delight that is impressive even by todays standards. This is a really fun to watch.

Interesting how the user reviews have shifted from the first entries which mostly HATE this film through to the current ones which mostly seem to LOVE it. That's some kind of cultural progress and sophistication at least.... Personally it's one of my favorite Russell films and I especially love the brilliant orchestrations by Peter Maxwell Davies. BOYFRIEND will reportedly be screened in Sept. by the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. Russell has been in LA over the past month and I recently saw him at a screening of WOMEN IN LOVE and THE MUSIC LOVERS at the Aero in Santa Monica. Richard Chamberlain was also at the MUSIC LOVERS screening. So can't wait to see THE BOYFRIEND on the big WIDE screen again at last. I seem to remember that at the original first-run screening in NYC the fantasy sequences were all in stereo. Hope they manage to get that print at the Cinematheque.