Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

The Boy Friend Blu-ray Movie Review

Eye Candy

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 22, 2017

The Boy Friend was director Ken Russell's follow-up to The Devils, a film so condemned for sacrilegious indecency that even today it remains securely locked in Warner's vaults. Presumably seeking a change of both pace and image, Russell decided to adapt a frothy musical comedy from the Fifties, which had been a smash hit in London and provided a young Julie Andrews with her first starring role on Broadway. But Russell was too singular a talent to content himself with merely adapting writer Sandy Wilson's light-hearted romp for the screen. Refashioning Wilson's story as a play within a play (and then some), Russell created a meta-valentine to movie musicals that, depending on one's inclination, can be either transporting or soporific.

The Boy Friend was heavily marketed as the film debut of Sixties fashion icon Twiggy, who was a supermodel before the term was coined. The novelty of seeing a famously alluring face and figure in the unlikely role of a mousy wallflower may have attracted audiences in 1971, but today the film has to stand on its own terms. For those to whom Russell's elaborate visuals are sufficient to carry the day, the Warner Archive Collection offers The Boy Friend on Blu-ray in a new transfer that reproduces the director's singular creation with stunning vibrancy.

Sandy Wilson's musical was set in the 1920s in a girls' boarding school on the French Riviera, and it utilized classic devices of romantic farce such as mistaken identity and sudden reversals of fortune. (Surprise! The girl you thought was poor turns out to be rich!) Russell's film incorporates the original Boy Friend 's plot, but only enough to accommodate the musical score. Instead, he focuses on a troupe of actors giving a matinee performance of The Boy Friend before a nearly empty house at London's Theatre Royal. Director Max Mandeville (Max Adrian) moans about how great his production would be if he had only more money, but today he is jolted to attention by the arrival of a famous Hollywood director with the ludicrous name of "De Thrill" (Vladek Sheybal). Everyone assumes De Thrill has come to scout talent for his next film, inspiring preening and fawning in some members of the company and jitters in others.

De Thrill's presence feeds into the film's alternative plot, which is the backstage drama of rivalry and bickering among the actors—and also of the big break handed to assistant stage manager Polly Browne (Twiggy), when she is suddenly told that she must go on in place of star performer Rita, who has broken her foot. (Rita is played, in an uncredited cameo, by Glenda Jackson, an Oscar winner two years earlier for Russell's Women in Love.) Between panicked stage fright and her (apparently) unrequited love for the show's male star, Tony (Christopher Gable), poor Polly has a lot more to manage than just the stage.

Not content with juggling the interplay between stories on opposite sides of the curtain, Russell adds an imaginary world in which the show's already colorful musical numbers are freed from both the laws of physics and (arguably) the constraints of good taste. Sometimes it's Max imagining how the number would play with a bigger budget; sometimes it's De Thrill envisioning a filmed version of the play; sometimes it's a member of the cast indulging in flights of fancy. A country scene is shifted into an actual forest, complete with pagan rituals that randomly combine Greek and Celtic themes. A gramophone accompanying two dancers is transformed into an immense dance floor on which the dancers spin and are spun. The orchestra pit fills with players; lavish costumes and props miraculously appear and disappear; and the camera routinely swoops overhead to capture groups of dancers in Busby Berkeley-style formations.

Unfortunately, Russell gets so caught up in staging these grand numbers that he shortchanges the film's multi-stranded plot, reducing both Sandy Wilson's original story and his own backstage drama to abbreviated sketches and gestures. By the end, both Polly's "big break" and De Thrill's propitious visit have been casually tossed aside. It doesn't help that the star at the film's center is a cinematic dead zone, a classic example of the perils of stunt casting. Twiggy's image may have launched a thousand products, but a talent for posing memorably doesn't make someone an actor, and she lacks both the skill to project her character and the charisma to seize an audience's attention and hold it. Without a credible lead to anchor Russell's elaborate staging in an emotional reality, The Boy Friend becomes a series of random tableaus, forgotten the moment they're through. Meanwhile, Polly is upstaged by everyone and everything around her, whether it's the calculated androgyny of her love interest, the perpetual posturing of the chorus girls, or the long and graceful legs of Tommy, the company's token American. He's played by the incomparable Tommy Tune, whose easy elegance is the closest thing The Boy Friend has to genuine star power.

(A note on the running time: WAC's Blu-ray provides The Boy Friend at its original length of 138 minutes, including intermission/entr'acte (see screenshot 26). The film was shortened by about 25 minutes for its initial U.S. release in 1971, but prints of the uncut international version have been circulating here since 1987. The DVD was uncut, and so is the Blu-ray.)

The Boy Friend Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Boy Friend was shot by British cinematographer David Watkin, an architect of sumptuous imagery whose work includes Out of Africa (for which he won an Oscar), Chariots of Fire and Moonstruck. The Warner Archive Collection released the film on DVD in 2011, based on a new scan from an interpositive struck for that purpose, but upon review WAC determined that the scan, though only five years old, was inadequate by the standards of current technology. Accordingly, for this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, WAC commissioned a new 2K scan by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging facility, followed by extensive color-correction and cleanup. The result continues WAC's 2017 winning streak of superb Blu-ray releases, with an image that vividly renders director Russell's visual conceits. Every scene in the film is highly stylized, even the supposedly realistic sequences, where the theater's worn surroundings are bathed in a nostalgic warmth that casts a romantic sheen over even the petty backstage backstabbing. The palette of the musical numbers, both real and imaginary, covers the entire spectrum, as richly saturated primaries alternate with pastels, metallic shine and fantastical shades of purple, orange and gold. Sharpness and detail are exceptional for a film source shot anamorphically; scenes with opticals are somewhat less sharp, but even these are reproduced with impressive clarity. The film's grain pattern has been finely and naturally rendered. WAC has mastered The Boy Friend at its usual high bitrate (here, 34.98 Mbps), with a superior encode.

The Boy Friend Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Boy Friend was originally released to theaters in four-track stereo, with a six-track variation accompanying a 70mm blowup—but not in America. The same penny-pinching regime at MGM that decided to shorten the film's running time also cut corners on the soundtrack, which is why the film's entry at IMDb mistakenly lists "mono" as the original audio format.

WAC's DVD featured a 2.0 soundtrack folded down from the original four-track mix, but for Blu-ray WAC has returned to the source to create a new 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. The mix lends punch, authority and presence to the instrumental accompaniment, which shifts fluidly between the actual handful of musicians in the Theatre Royal and the massive orchestra that appears in fantasy sequences (see screenshot 9). The very contrast serves as a comic underscore whenever Max bemoans his inability to afford a full orchestra. The new soundtrack has excellent fidelity and dynamic range, but it's mixed somewhat "hot", and you may find yourself lowering your usual volume settings. The dialogue is clearly reproduced, although ears unaccustomed to Cockney pronunciations may require some adjustment (there are optional English SDH subtitles, if needed). Sandy Wilson's songs from the stage musical have been artfully arranged by Peter Maxwell Davies (reuniting with Russell from The Devils) to shift between lush orchestration and music hall minimalism.

The Boy Friend Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Vintage Featurette: All Talking . . . All Singing . . . All Dancing (480i; 1.33:1; 8:40): Promotional in nature, this featurette includes interviews with Russell and Twiggy, along with footage on the set and behind the scenes.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:47): "Introducing a young lady who needs no introduction."

The Boy Friend Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Russell's attempt to meld nostalgia with psychedelia has always struck me as incongruous, especially since, by 1971, the musical had evolved into such a different art form on both stage and screen. The year following The Boy Friend would see the release of Bob Fosse's Cabaret, in which the song-and-dance sequences were every bit as surreal as Russell's while at the same time servicing a serious drama with genuine emotional stakes. Self-reflexive musical fluff reached its height with Singin' in the Rain, and it's no accident that The Boy Friend concludes by invoking that earlier MGM classic. Still, The Boy Friend retains a devoted following, for which WAC has provided a definitive rendition on Blu-ray. Highly recommended for fans.