The Boys in the Band is a 1970 American drama film directed by William Friedkin from a screenplay by Mart Crowley, based on Crowley's 1968 Off-Broadway play of the same name. It is among the early major American motion pictures to revolve around gay characters, often cited as a milestone in the history of gay cinema, and thought to be the first mainstream American film to use the swear word "cunt".
In an Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan in 1968, Michael, a Roman Catholic, recovering alcoholic and sporadically employed actor, hosts a birthday party for his friend, Harold. Michael's best friend, Donald arrives early because of a cancelled psychotherapy session, and helps Michael prepare. Donald observes that Michael has not been drinking the past five weeks, and Michael says he quit drinking and smoking because his bad habits leave him in a vicious cycle. Alan, Michael's former college roommate, calls with an urgent need to see Michael. Michael reluctantly agrees and invites him to come over.
One by one, the guests arrive. Emory is an interior designer. Hank, a soon-to-be-divorced schoolteacher, and Larry, a fashion photographer, are a couple whose relationship is on the rocks, struggling with monogamy. Bernard is a bookstore clerk. "Cowboy", a hustler and Emory's birthday "gift" to Harold, arrives. Michael warns his guests that Alan is an uptight, straightconservative, who Michael has never come out to. He asks his guests to be discreet in their behavior around him.
Alan calls again to inform Michael that he will not be coming after all, and the party continues. However, Alan arrives unexpectedly, finds Michael and his friends doing a line dance to Heat Wave, and throws the gathering into turmoil. Alan bonds with Hank, whom he mistakes as being straight, and shows discomfort towards Emory's flamboyant behavior. Michael takes Alan to his bedroom to discuss Alan's urgent conversation, but Alan dodges his questions.
As tensions mount, Alan descends from the upstairs bathroom and announces he is leaving. Emory chides him for being attracted to Hank, which results in Alan punching Emory and calling him a "faggot". During the ensuing chaos, Harold makes his appearance. In the middle of the turmoil, Michael begins drinking and smoking again and then becomes abusive. As the guests become more and more intoxicated, hidden resentments begin to surface.
As Hank helps a vomiting Alan in the bathroom, Michael and Harold trade insults over Harold's obsessive insecurity about his appearance and Michael's financial irresponsibility. Emory then brings out Harold's birthday cake and presents, one of them being an evening with Cowboy, the prostitute. From Michael, he receives a photo of himself, with an inscription that Harold chooses to keep private when asked what it says. Touched, he thanks Michael for the gift.
Alan tries to leave again but is stopped by Michael, who mentions that he would have already left if he really wanted to. Michael informs everyone that they are playing a party game with the objective for each guest to call the one person he truly believes he has loved. Bernard reluctantly attempts to call the son of his mother's employer, with whom he had had a sexual encounter as a teenager. Emory calls a dentist on whom he had had a crush while in high school. Both regret the phone calls. After bickering over Hank's doubt that serially unfaithful Larry will choose him, Hank and Larry call each other via two phone lines in the apartment. Harold and Donald refuse to play.
Michael believes Alan is a closetedhomosexual, but his plan to "out" Alan with the game appears to backfire when Alan calls his wife, not his male college friend, whom Michael had presumed to be Alan's love.
Harold informs Michael that no matter what he does, he will always be a self-loathing homosexual. Harold departs, taking Cowboy and his presents, but pauses to tell Michael "I'll call you tomorrow." Emory leaves with a distraught Bernard, promising to sober him up on the way home.
Michael collapses and sobs in Donald's arms, wishing "if we could just not hate ourselves so much." Donald comforts Michael, saying that his present despair is a sign of awareness that he might work on to improve his life. Donald asks if he ever learned what Alan wanted to confide in him, but Michael responds that Alan never said why he had left his wife. Michael leaves to attend midnight Mass with the assurance that he will be seeing Donald next Saturday.
Mart Crowley and Dominick Dunne set up the film version of the play with Cinema Center Films, owned by CBS Television. Crowley was paid $250,000 plus a percentage of the profits for the film rights; in addition to this, he received a fee for writing the script.[2]
Crowley and Dunne originally wanted the play's director, Robert Moore, to direct the film but Gordon Stulberg, head of Cinema Center, was reluctant to entrust the job to someone who had never made a movie before. They decided on William Friedkin, who had just made a film of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter that impressed them.[3]
Friedkin rehearsed for two weeks with the cast. He shot a scene that was offstage in the play where Hank and Larry kiss passionately. The actors who played them were reluctant to perform this on film, but eventually they did. However, Friedkin cut the scene during editing, feeling it was over-sensationalistic; nevertheless, he later admitted regretting that decision.[3]
The bar scene in the opening was filmed at Julius in Greenwich Village.[4] Studio shots were at the Chelsea Studios in New York City.[5] According to the commentary by Friedkin on the 2008 DVD release, Michael's apartment was inspired by the real-life Upper East Side apartment of actress Tammy Grimes. (Grimes was a personal friend of Mart Crowley.) Most of the patio scenes were filmed at Grimes' home. The actual apartm-nd stage, and that is where the interior scenes were filmed.
As per the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 7.20 out of 10.[6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[7]
Contemporary critical reaction was, for the most part, cautiously favorable. Variety wrote that it "drags" but thought it had "perverse interest". Time described it as a "humane, moving picture". The Los Angeles Times praised it as "unquestionably a milestone" but refused to run its ads. Among the major critics, Pauline Kael, who disliked Friedkin, was alone in finding absolutely nothing redeeming about it.[8]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times observed "Except for an inevitable monotony that comes from the use of so many close-ups in a confined space, Friedkin's direction is clean and direct, and, under the circumstances, effective. All of the performances are good, and that of Leonard Frey, as Harold, is much better than good. He's excellent without disturbing the ensemble...Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense. There is something basically unpleasant, however, about a play that seems to have been created in an inspiration of love-hate and that finally does nothing more than exploit its (I assume) sincerely conceived stereotypes."[9]
In a San Francisco Chronicle review of a 1999 revival of the film, Edward Guthmann recalled "By the time Boys was released in 1970...it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism." He called it "a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it's aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing."[10]
Bill Weber from Slant wrote in 2015: "The partygoers are caught in the tragedy of the pre-liberation closet, a more crippling and unforgiving one than the closets that remain."[11]
The film was perceived in different ways throughout the gay community. There were those who agreed with most critics and believed The Boys in the Band was making great strides while others thought it portrayed a group of gay men wallowing in self-pity.[12] There were even those who felt discouraged by some of the honesty in the production. One spectator wrote in 2018: "I was horrified by the depiction of the life that might befall me. I have very strong feelings about that play. It's done a lot of harm to gay people."[13][14]
While not as acclaimed or commercially successful as director Friedkin's subsequent films, Friedkin considers this film to be one of his favorites. He remarked in an interview on the 2008 DVD for the movie: "It's one of the few films I've made that I can still watch."[3]
The Boys in the Band was released by MGM/CBS Home Video on VHS videocassette in October 1980, and was later re-released on CBS/Fox Video. It was later released on laserdisc.
The DVD, overseen by Friedkin, was released by Paramount Home Entertainment on November 11, 2008. Additional material includes an audio commentary; interviews with director Friedkin, playwright/screenwriter Crowley, executive producer Dominick Dunne, writer Tony Kushner, and two of the surviving cast members, Peter White and Laurence Luckinbill; and a retrospective look at both the off Broadway 1968 play and 1970 film.
On June 16, 2015, it was released on Blu-ray.
The 2011 documentary Making the Boys explores the production of the play and film in the context of its era.
Ryan Murphy produced a new film version of The Boys in the Band for Netflix in 2020. Joe Mantello, director of the play's 2018 Broadway revival, served as director of the new film version, which featured the entire Broadway revival cast, including Jim Parsons as Michael, Zachary Quinto as Harold, Matt Bomer as Donald, and Charlie Carver as Cowboy.[15] The film was released by Netflix on September 30, 2020.
The Music Man is a musical with book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson, based on a story by Willson and Franklin Lacey. The plot concerns con man Harold Hill, who poses as a boys' band organizer and leader and sells band instruments and uniforms to naïve Midwestern townsfolk, promising to train the members of the new band. Harold is no musician, however, and plans to skip town without giving any music lessons. Prim librarian and piano teacher Marian sees through him, but when Harold helps her younger brother overcome his lisp and social awkwardness, Marian begins to fall in love with him. He risks being caught to win her heart.
Sir Alan Arthur Bates was an English actor who came to prominence in the 1960s, when he appeared in films ranging from Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving.
William David Friedkin was an American film, television and opera director, producer, and screenwriter who was closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s. Beginning his career in documentaries in the early 1960s, he is best known for his crime thriller film The French Connection (1971), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the horror film The Exorcist (1973), which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
"Master Harold"...and the boys is a play by Athol Fugard. Set in 1950, it was first produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in March 1982 and made its premiere on Broadway on 4 May at the Lyceum Theatre, where it ran for 344 performances. The play takes place in South Africa during apartheid era, and depicts how institutionalized racism, bigotry or hatred can become absorbed by those who live under it. It is said to be a semi-autobiographical play, as Athol Fugard's birth name was Harold and his boyhood was very similar to Hally's, including his father being disabled, and his mother running a tea shop to support the family. His relationship with his family's servants was similar to Hally's as he sometimes considered them his friends, but other times treated them like subservient help, insisting that he be called "Master Harold", and once spitting in the face of one he had been close to. Additionally the play was remade for a suitable audience in 2005.
Laurence George Luckinbill is an American actor, playwright and director. He has worked in television, film, and theatre, doing triple duty in the theatre by writing, directing, and starring in stage productions. He is known for penning and starring in one-man shows based upon the lives of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, author Ernest Hemingway, and famous American defense attorney Clarence Darrow; starring in a one-man show based upon the life of US President Lyndon Baines Johnson; and for his portrayal of Spock's half-brother Sybok in the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Torch Song Trilogy is a collection of three plays by Harvey Fierstein rendered in three acts: International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First! The story centers on Arnold Beckoff, a Jewish homosexual, drag queen, and torch singer who lives in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The four-hour play begins with a soliloquy in which he explains his cynical disillusionment with love.
Charles Curtis "Tuc" Watkins III is an American actor, known for his roles as David Vickers on One Life to Live, Mr. Burns in The Mummy, Bob Hunter on Desperate Housewives, Congressman Roger Harris on Black Monday, Hank in The Boys in the Band, Troy on The Other Two, and Colin McKenna on Uncoupled.
Leonard Frey was an American actor. Frey received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1971 musical film Fiddler on the Roof. He made his stage debut in an Off-Broadway production of Little Mary Sunshine and received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for The National Health.
Cruising is a 1980 crime thriller film written and directed by William Friedkin, and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino and Karen Allen. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name by The New York Times reporter Gerald Walker about a serial killer targeting gay men, particularly those men associated with the leather scene in the late 1970s. The title is a double entendre, because "cruising" can describe both police officers on patrol and men who are cruising for sex.
The Boys in the Band is a 1968 American play by Mart Crowley. The play premiered Off-Broadway, and was revived on Broadway for its 50th anniversary in 2018. The play revolves around a group of gay men who gather for a birthday party in New York City, and was groundbreaking for its portrayal of gay life. It was adapted into two feature films in 1970 and 2020.
Keith Prentice was an American TV, film and stage actor, whose most famous role was the part of Larry in both the original stage and film versions of The Boys in the Band. He also appeared on the TV soap Dark Shadows during the series' final months in 1971. For a number of years, his picture was displayed on the Taster's Choice coffee label.
Andrew Scott Rannells is an American actor. He is best known for originating the role of Elder Kevin Price in the 2011 Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical and won the 2012 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. He received his second Tony nomination in 2017 for his performance as Whizzer in the 2016 Broadway revival of Falsettos. Other Broadway credits include Hairspray (2005), Jersey Boys (2009), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2014), Hamilton (2015), The Boys in the Band (2018), and Gutenberg! The Musical! (2023). For his performance in the Off West End production of Tammy Faye, he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award.
Edward Martino Crowley was an American playwright best known for his 1968 play The Boys in the Band.
Kenneth Nelson was an American actor.
Robin de Jesús is an American film and theater actor of Puerto Rican descent. He has received Tony Award nominations for his roles in In the Heights, La Cage aux Folles, and The Boys in the Band. He's also known for portraying Michael in tick, tick... BOOM!.
Robert La Tourneaux was an American actor best known for his role of Cowboy, the good-natured but dim hustler hired as a birthday present for a gay man, in the original Off-Broadway production and 1970 film version of The Boys in the Band.
Peter White was an American actor.
The Men From The Boys is a 2002 play by Mart Crowley, a sequel to his notable 1968 play The Boys in the Band. Set in a New York City apartment, the plot features friends gathering after a friend's memorial service.
Charles Carver Martensen is an American actor. His better known roles include Porter Scavo on the ABC television series Desperate Housewives, Ethan on the MTV television series Teen Wolf, Scott Frost on the first season of the HBO television series The Leftovers, and as Cowboy in both The Boys in the Band on Broadway and the subsequent 2020 film of the same name. His identical twin brother Max Carver has frequently portrayed the twin of his characters.
The Boys in the Band is a 2020 American drama film directed by Joe Mantello, based on the 1968 play of the same name by Mart Crowley, who also wrote the screenplay alongside Ned Martel. Crowley had previously adapted The Boys in the Band for a 1970 film version directed by William Friedkin and starring the original 1968 Off-Broadway cast. The film stars the full roster of players from the play's 2018 Broadway revival, comprising a cast of exclusively openly-gay actors.
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