Monday, Dec. 20, 1971
Russell: Spoofing the Spoof
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
--William Blake
Director Ken Russell is a true child of Blake. His two most recent films, The Music Lovers and The Devils, were so full of tortures, perversions and sexual hysteria that they could have been rated X for X-cess if for nothing else. The Boy Friend reveals Russell's other side--the campy, lyrical side that has been seen so far only in some memorable British TV documentaries. But on this side as well, Russell does not know when enough is enough. Having made too much of a bad thing in his earlier films, he now makes too much of a basically good thing.
Far from simply transcribing Sandy Wilson's 1954 Broadway pastiche of 1920s musicals, Russell's screenplay frames it within several other stories. The main one deals with a seedy repertory troupe that is performing The Boy Friend somewhere in the English provinces. This device enables Russell not only to show the troupe onstage doing scenes from the show but at the same time affectionately to mock the whole genre of backstage musicals.
The troupe's leading lady breaks her ankle, and the mousy, bespectacled assistant stage manager (Twiggy) is dragooned into taking over her role. The director (Max Adrian) even tells her: "You're going out there as a youngster, but you've got to come back a star." Sure enough, she does, for in the audience that day is the great Hollywood director De Thrill (Vladek Sheybal). While he watches the performance, he fantasizes how he would shoot the production numbers, enabling Russell to imitate the old Busby Berkeley style movie musicals.
This film represents Twiggy's acting debut and, except for a brief turn in a TV commercial a few years back, her first professional singing and dancing. With plans for further film musicals already under way, it seems she is fully embarked on a second career at the ripe age of 22. As the stage manager, she does not yet consistently manage the stage, except for some fancy tap dancing. She is most effective when she has to portray awkwardness, shyness, winsome young love. How much of this is performance and how much mere exploitation of her rather endearing presence? Twiggy would not be the first performer to build a movie career on presence alone.
Otherwise, the Ken Russell stock company gets a good workout. Christopher Gable, Tchaikovsky's decadent homosexual friend in The Music Lovers, is all chorus-boy charm as Twiggy's costar. Adrian is preposterously hammy as the preposterous ham of a repertory director. And who is that actress who turns in a fetching, funny cameo performance as the leading lady with the broken ankle? Why, it's--it's Glenda Jackson!
The Boy Friend exudes vo-do-de-o-do period flavor, and visually it is aswirl with flamboyant color and movement. Its frequent fantasy sequences, however, are too frequent and sometimes not fantastic enough (a Grecian episode disastrously resembles a small town Hellenic Society on its spring outing). The best numbers are the homages to Berkeley, with their overhead shots of chorines in kaleidoscope patterns. Aficionados of old movie musicals will love these scenes--but not as much as Russell, who can hardly bring himself to end them. A spoof of a spoof, this two-hour-plus film sometimes seems to reprise every reprise.
Ken Russell is generally regarded as something between a genius and a maniac--or perhaps a little of both.
"He is pigheaded, self-indulgent, arrogant, masochistic," says Imogen Claire, who has played in four of Russell's films. "But I like working with him more than anyone else." Oliver Reed, who played leads in Women in Love and The Devils, says it takes months to recuperate from an exposure to Russell. "One begins to forgive him only when one has divorced oneself from him. People say they will never do another Russell film, but they all go back."
The inspirer of such love-hate feelings has long gray locks, chubby pink cheeks and an apple shaped figure. A onetime sailor, onetime ballet dancer, Russell now looks, at 44, rather like an amiable monk. On a set, though, the monk turns into Rasputin, roaring, stamping his feet, cracking a riding whip on the floor. Whole scenes, including choreography, are often invented after the cameras begin turning. "Instant creation," Russell calls it, beaming.
Says Actress Glenda Jackson, who won an Oscar for Women in Love: "There are no grays about him. He does have explosions, but he tends to leave the actors alone. He's not arrogant because he is too open to suggestions." Richard Chamberlain's assessment: "He directs actors through a kind of osmosis which is seldom verbal. He just pushes and nudges and grunts. After three days you get the hang of what he wants."
What he wants is the dramatization of a vision, and it is not easy to explain. "I make a happening on the screen between music and images," he says. "I am very conscious of movement, the way the actor moves, the way the camera moves, choreography. Sometimes I fight against it, sometimes I don't.
"My characteristic as a director is to let the subject take over the film. If the subject is romantic and redblooded, I believe in handling it in a romantic, red blooded way. But working on The Boy Friend was more traumatic. No one knows how to make those musicals now, and the resources are inadequate." Russell himself not only wrote the treatment and screenplay for The Boy Friend and negotiated the $2.4 million financing, but also knew every bar of the music, checked every detail of props, makeup, costumes, even hair styles. He escorted Twiggy to her hairdresser to check her haircut for The Boy Friend, later embarked on a feud with her and her bearded mentor and manager Justin de Villeneuve. Twiggy at first called the whole experience "a nightmare." but now that the "cooling off" period is about over, she speaks more cheerfully of those days: "He believed in me. Sure, he shouted at me a couple of times. But he was usually quite up."
Russell has always been quite up. He fell in love with film at age three, and at six was sometimes watching three movies a day. In nautical college he dismayed the commander by having the cadets do drag imitations of Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda. After a hitch in the R.A.F., he danced with the Norwegian ballet, finally took up still photography before making his name with BBC television biographies of artists.
Facing the prospect of directing his first American superstar, Barbra Streisand, in a film biography of Sarah Bernhardt, Russell says he finds all his movies equally nerve racking: "There is really no difference between nuns with no clothes on and tap dancers in goggles. It is all material."
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