An Infinite Maze Backstage

Say it’s 1971, and you’re a veteran director who’s just finished making a movie that’s provoked the wrath of censors around the world. What do you do for a follow-up? For Ken Russell, after finishing The Devils, the answer was to turn to something more relaxing: an old-fashioned musical.

But Russell’s next film, The Boy Friend, was more difficult than expected. It debuted in New York in December of 1971, but Russell didn't have final cut, and the edit MGM produced tanked commercially and drew mixed reviews. Today, Russell’s original version of the movie is available. It’s not a masterpiece. But there are breathlessly inventive moments scattered throughout its two-hour running time.

A period piece set in the 1920s, the film takes place in a vast old suburban London theater, where a company of fading stars and former child phenoms are preparing the premiere of a new musical, The Boy Friend. News comes that the leading lady has broken her ankle, and the show’s assistant director, Polly Browne (Twiggy), has to fill in. Also, a major American director, Mister De Thrill (Vladek Sheybal), will be taking in the play. Which means a chance to turn a career around—for whoever shines brightest.

Add to that set-up an assortment of romantic subplots and backstage intrigue. And a considerable amount of screen time given to the action onstage, especially song-and-dance fantasias that develop into classic-musical set-pieces Busby Berkeley would envy. Unsurprisingly, the ostensible story often gets lost. But visual bravura carries the movie. It’s not narratively gripping, and not particularly funny, but it’s often stunning to look at.

The film’s based on a 1953 musical by Sandy Wilson, which was a straightforward parody of 1920s musical comedy. That musical is the play the characters in the movie are mounting; Russell, scriptwriter as well as director, adapted Wilson’s musical by imagining it as an actual 1920s play, and then creating all the backstage business around its premiere. The overall effect’s not unlike Noises Off, though that play’s about a production falling apart while Russell’s movie is about muddling through.

There’s considerable cleverness here, a deliberate blurring of theatricality and reality at every level. Polly’s playing out a star-is-born arc, but for much of the film doesn’t have any gift for acting. If that changes by the end, it’s a conscious artifice that the audience is invited to acknowledge without breaking the mood of the tale. It’s a tricky balance, but Russell makes it work.

In fact, while Russell’s often been accused of a lack of self-control, The Boy Friend is a poised and precise film. Even beyond the musical numbers the blocking and choreography are striking, as actors navigate the cramped backstage and slightly-too-small dressing rooms. The faces of the actresses, especially Antonia Ellis as bitchy chorus girl Maisie, become live-action cartoons: every line doing something. The film’s serious and self-mocking; it strains to take itself lightly.

It lives in its frequent moments of beauty. Most of those are during the musical numbers. Russell’s visual power is given free rein, and the result has a startling purity. Russell moves from stage-reality to screen-reality to reality-beyond-reality and back, and at every step color, light and editing rhythm build worlds. Editor Michael Bradsell and cinematographer David Watkin must be mentioned here, but you can see shades of Russell’s earlier and later work: his tendency to create sequences based on music, and to isolate those sequences within a film’s narrative structure so that the whole takes on the feel of an anthology.

At the midpoint of the movie Russell departs from the visual tone of the rest of the film, giving a dream-sequence of the cast in a forest, playing at being Greek gods. It’s a fascinating break in the action. You can read a lot of symbolism into the sequence, however separable it feels from the rest of the film (and it was one of the scenes cut by MGM), but the absence of the theater building is significant.

That massive theater, so unlikely a home for a troupe as down-at-heels as the one in this film, is an amazing location. An apparently infinite maze of dressing rooms and backstage areas, it’s shot with as much precision and almost as much visual interest as the musical sequences. If Russell as director has an analog inside the film, it’s not the director of the troupe or any of the cast, but the theater itself. Rich and expansive, it contains all the action of the story, ands pace the movie across its succession of fascinating spaces.

Which is good, as the film needs something to hold it together. All those plots and subplots don’t really cohere, and the build to a conclusion is undermined by the sense of bouncing from set-piece to set-piece throughout the movie. The virtuosity and beauty completely overwhelm the slim storyline, which comes to seem an excuse on which to hang moments and sequences. You could say that makes the film an exercise in empty formalism, a narrative sketch for visual ideas, but then perhaps the formalism is the point; it’s an artificial story about artificial stories.

It’s camp, then; but at its best, as in all of Russell’s movies, there’s a weird humanism, a love for his characters and their commitment to their art. Maybe the point is that theatricality is humanity. Or theater is all that humanity is. Near the end a character shouts, “It’s all a game!” Maybe that’s true; but, the film wonders, is that really so bad?