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The Boys in the Band [1970] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
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| 10 New |
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Currently Unavailable |
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| Great Film. Deceptive tapebox cover | |
|  | This is one of my favorite films and I wish it would be released on DVD. It was based on the stage play of the same name by Mart Crowley, with many of the same cast. All the action takes place in a New York City townhouse in 1968, where a group of gay friends holds a birthday party. Most of it consists of extremely clever and often hilarious dialog, until the last segment when they're all quite drunk and become morose - similar to the structure of another of my favorite plays/films "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" by Edward Albee. br /br /A warning about the photo on the tape box pictured here: it's not the original - see amazon.com for the USA release, which is the photo on the one I own. The guy pictured here probably wasn't even the actor in the film, and the character did NOT take his shirt off for one second! This film is all cerebral, and except for one very brief scene at the beginning, in which one of them takes a quick shower and another changes his shirt in preparation for the party, all the actors remain fully clothed throughout. They don't need to take their clothes off when they all have so many highly entertaining things to say.
| | | To me, for me, "The Boys in the Band" encapsulates almost everything about gay life and the reactions and interactions to it and within it. While it was originally produced on stage in 1968 (and in London 1969 - to an uproar) and then made into a superb movie by William Friedkin in 1970, it is still as fresh and as crisp now as it was then - apart from the AIDS dimension which happened later - but that does not make any the less pertinent its portrayal of gay relationships, in my opinion. It is not a happy movie, although there is some scintillating dialogue which brings laughter bubbling up, but it is not maudlin either. The dialogue contains, deliberately I imagine, reference to every aspect of male gay existence. Witty, sharp, cruel, acid, raw - but true and without exaggeration, other than the fact that it has to be a bit larger than life for stage/screen. The story, set in New York, about a group of gay "friends" and one "straight" guy who crashes the party, who meet to celebrate Harold's 30th birthday in the great Summer of 1968 taught me a lot about what it meant AND what it means, still, to be gay. It's not cosy but it is true to life - then and now. It helped me to cope with being gay. I hope that it will come out on DVD soon as it's a classic and the writer, Mart Crowley, deserved an Oscar.
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