Cynical Cinema

The Boys In The Band is a classic more for it’s importance in film history than because it is a truly excellent film.  Frankly, although it remains funny and quick and well-paced, for today’s audience it will feel incredibly, overwhelmingly dated and perhaps even crushingly boring.  The set design, the fact that the camera occasionally sits perfectly still for a long time, and the occasional over-acting performer make it quite clear that this movie was taken directly from off-Broadway where it was a successful stage play.  And while the whole film does move along fast and crisply, with a terrific amount of dark and dry humour, the ending seems more to be a product of the times (by “times”, I mean 1970) in that it is incongruously depressing and really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the movie at all.  This self-loathing finale seems more suitable  for a Richard Kelly picture than for this one.

Mart Crowley wrote the stage play The Boys In The Band, about a bunch of gay men getting together for a friend’s birthday party, and turned it into an off-Broadway play.  When William Friedkin agreed to direct the movie adaptation in 1970, he had few directing credits to his name.  One of those directing credits was ironically a movie that had a rather similar overall structure to this one, 1968’s The Birthday Party.  Of course, Friedkin would go on to direct more famous fare in the next couple of years, including The French Connection and of course The Exorcist.  Since I’m on the topic of William Friedkin’s filmography, I should also point out that in 1995 he directed Jade, that horrible femme-fatale movie with Linda Fiorentino and David Caruso.  No real reason for pointing that out, except to give an overall picture of his legacy.  Where The French Connection and The Boys In The Band give Friedkin some Hollywood bona-fide credibility, Jade taints his legacy.  If he were, say, Barry Bonds, Jade would be the positive steroid test that might keep him out of the Hall of Fame.  Just saying.

When The Boys In The Band hit theatres in 1970, it was one of the first major Hollywood productions of a gay-themed film.  The entire cast from the off-Broadway play was reunited on screen, reprising the roles they had been playing on the stage.  Mart Crowley’s script is clearly meant for the stage, with it’s witty banter and repartee it is reminiscent of something Oscar Wilde might have cooked up.  But it’s Wilde on a really bad day, and that’s one of the reasons it feels so dated.  A lot of the lines that appear clever are actually obvious and snarky.  And although there are some truly great lines and some really funny banter between these men, the language they use is 1970s Gay.  By that I mean, it shouts “Gay”, and positively shrieks “1970s”. 

Think about Brian’s gay cousin on Family Guy.  You know, the earring, the high voice, the lisp, the silly pop-culture references, and the phrases like “oh God, I’m such a bitch!”  You know what I’m talking about now?  Well, think about six or seven of those characters talking to each other for two hours.  It’s like a two-hour Sex And The City, where all kinds of pseudo-clever dialogue gets piled on top of a whole bunch of actually clever dialogue to the point where after a little while you can’t tell one from the other.  It can become irritating, pretty quickly.

The main thrust of the plot is that Michael, the host of the party, has a straight friend named Alan come to the party.  Michael is a recovering alcoholic, and once he has a drink, he becomes obnoxious and far more caustic than usual, occasionally bordering on cruel.  And occasionally crossing the line and becoming actually cruel.  As the night goes on, the party becomes more and more mean-spirited, with Michael becoming convinced that Alan is a latent homosexual.  Michael comes apart quickly over the course of the evening, and eventually the film devolves into a fair amount of gay self-loathing and a rather depressing conclusion.  The way these men feel about themselves and talk about themselves, by the time the movie is done you really don’t like a single one of the characters in it. 

I would like to think that in the 28 years since the release of The Boys In The Band the attitudes of gay men toward their own lifestyles and their own community have changed somewhat.  The only character in the film that appears to truly embrace the gay lifestyle is Harold, who is also at times the most cruel of them all.  Whereas the first three quarters of the film is amusing and charming while a little tedious, the last half-hour is a little brutal, and one can easily become uncomfortable watching it.

This DVD release, November 11th by Paramount Home Entertainment, is the first time The Boys In The Band has ever been properly put on DVD.  (There was a DVD out there before, but it was recorded directly from the original VHS release, and was not official.)  This single-disc release features a feature-length commentary from William Friedkin, and that really is a great reason to pick it up.  Friedkin puts the movie into context, talks fondly of the actors in the movie, and talks about the times and the circumstances surrounding the filming of The Boys In The Band.  He also talks a little about directing, saying that the worst thing a director can say to an actor is “be yourself”.  It is a terrific commentary track, and it’s the best special feature on the disc.  There are also three featurettes that work in sequential order - Act One:  The Play, Act Two:  The Film, and Act Three:  40 Years of ‘Boys In The Band’.  It has been 40 years, and watching this film now it really feels like 40 years.  But it does remain an important film in terms of historical context, and the special features make it worthwhile.

I enjoyed Season Four of Mission: Impossible, certainly more than I did those three crappy Tom Cruise movies. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Season Five on DVD Tuesday, October 7th, and it’s even better. The main reason it’s better is because they have added a hot chick. Now, normally that wouldn’t change the quality of a show, except to make it worse. The addition of a hot chick normally (these days anyway) means that the writers and producers feel the show has jumped the shark, but they can hang on for a few more years simply by providing their weirdo viewers with some eye candy.

But when it came to Season Five of Mission: Impossible, this was actually a good move. The addition of Lesley Ann Warren as Dana Lambert was terrific. She provided the team with something it had been lacking - instead of simply using a bunch of gadgets to set up their targets, they began using actual people and deception a lot more. Dana was able to seduce the people who needed seducing, and get close to the men who were the targets of the team. In a bizarre way, this was actually more realistic spy stuff.

Also great in Season Five is Sam Elliott, one of the great gravelly-voiced, made-for-westerns actors in the world. He comes and goes, and isn’t in every episode, but his role just adds a little more oomph to a series that already has plenty. The fourth season was good, the fifth is great.