The Boy Friend (Ken Russell, 1971)

Christopher Gable and Twiggy in The Boy Friend

Cast: Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Max Adrian, Bryan Pringle, Murray Melvin, Moyra Fraser, Georgina Hale, Sally Bryant, Vladek Sheybal, Tommy Tune, Brian Murphy, Graham Armitage, Antonia Ellis, Caryl Little, Glenda Jackson. Screenplay: Ken Russell, based on a musical play by Sandy Wilson. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Tony Walton. Costume design: Shirley Russell. Music: Peter Maxwell Davies; songs: Sandy Wilson, Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed. 

Nothing succeeds like excess. That seems to have been Ken Russell's motto, well displayed in The Boy Friend. As I watched it, I thought the first parody of Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopic production numbers for Warner Bros. musicals was brilliant. The second was entertaining. The third was ... well, maybe the law of diminishing returns had set in. The original stage musical was a campy sendup of the kind of musical comedies that P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern used to create for the Princess Theatre and later in the 1920s: tuneful light romances with silly plots. But for the movie, Russell superadds a campy sendup of the backstage movie musicals of the 1930s, borrowing plot and even dialogue from 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), hence the Berkeley parodies. I first saw The Boy Friend around the time of its first release, and enjoyed it. But watching it again now, I found myself looking at the clock after the first hour and a half passed. The version I had seen in the theater was the one MGM had cut by 25 minutes; the restored version runs an exhausting two hours and 17 minutes. That said, there is much to enjoy about Russell's movie, especially the vividly colored production design by Tony Walton and costumes by Shirley Russell (the director's wife). The presence of the great Tommy Tune in the cast is also a plus. The Sandy Wilson songs are pleasantly hummable, and the interpolation of two songs by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed that were featured in Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) is nice. But a little camp goes a long way, and piling camp on camp can be tiresome, especially if the camp is done the way Russell does it: with a smirk rather than a wink.