Fresh off of The Devils, sometime enfant terrible of British cinema (a reputation pretty much cemented by the aforementioned film) Ken Russell went completely in the opposite direction with The Boy Friend, an adaptation of a frothy ‘50s musical that pastiches even frothier interbellum musicals. The sublime to the ridiculous, or would the other way around be better?

By the time The Boy Friend was underway, The Devils hadn’t hit cinemas (the latter was released in July 1971 according to IMDB, while the former had started shooting in the spring) and presumably prep was well underway before even The Music Lovers saw release (that premiered that January; ’71 was a busy year for Russell), so the incongruity perhaps wasn’t quite as obvious as it may have been nor were the right holders quite as reticent as they may have been with Russell still riding high on the success of Women in Love (1969). Supposedly, Twiggy suggested a film of Sandy Wilson's musical after seeing an amdram production (a previous project between her and Russell having fallen through), Russell joked about doing it during an interview, and then MGM just offered it up as a result; the studio having had the film rights for over a decade but apparently couldn’t get it to work. It seems like kind of an odd project for the studio to get into though. The era of big musical films is generally viewed to have drawn to an ignoble end when Hello, Dolly landed with a thud in 1969 (though obviously, as discussed by Lindsay Ellis, one can’t really blame Hello, Dolly outright, as the warning signs of that crash were there leading up to it) and MGM were in the process of scaling back. This was evident in the British division; as part of general belt tightening, they entered into a big co-production agreement with EMI's sort-of-not-exactly-nascent film division (the music giant having recently taken over British film industry mainstay ABPC) which resulted in them selling off their Borehamwood based lot and moving to EMI’s Elstree one (also technically in Borehamwood, natch), and by ‘moving’ I of course mean firing a lot of people as any projects still under MGM-British’s watch were moved under the new fangled EMI-MGM Productions. This is all a roundabout way of saying that The Boy Friend was part of the slate for the ill-fated EMI-MGM pairing. Despite apparent intent to make a big deal of it, with a seven year contract and plans for a good half dozen co-productions a year, only four films were in the initial slate, with no further slates forthcoming, and even then not all of those four exactly feel like they count (the others in case you were wondering were Get Carter (1971) and The Go-Between (1971), both of which were already pretty far along at MGM and EMI respectively by the time of the deal, along with The Last Run (1971) which ended up being made without EMI’s involvement at all), with MGM evidently being thoroughly unimpressed with the lot of them judging by their response (TBF had nearly half an hour cut out for the US release and they passed on releasing Carter and Go-Between in America themselves (and actually sold their stake in the latter entirely)).

All this to say, with the Hollywood musical’s apparent death and the studio's desire to run a tight ship, The Boy Friend probably couldn’t rely on the formula that had served so well in the ‘50s and at least some of the ‘60s. And, hell, if they couldn’t get it to work in the standard mould then, what chance did it have in the ‘70s? Seems like it’d run the risk of being the terrible retro throwback musical from the first episode of Rock Follies. Instead the film of The Boy Friend gets meta. In a manner that was evidently controversial at the time, the whole affair is drenched in a layer of metafiction and irony that seems to have proved disconcerting to people expecting a more straightforward adaptation of the show; a show which I should add had enjoyed considerable popularity (it was briefly the third longest running musical in the West End) and had had recent revivals on both Broadway and the West End shortly prior to the film entering production, as well as being known for its role in catapulting Julie Andrews to stardom (on stage, that is; she’d have to wait the better part of a decade before Hollywood decided it was high time to inflict her on the world). In lieu of making any effort to create a ‘real world’ in which the characters inhabit (or at least the characters of the source material), instead The Boy Friend is a stage show. The film follows a minor theatre troupe in off-season Portsmouth staging a production of the eponymous musical. The plot of the musical itself is quite basic; the heroine has lied to her friends at finishing school about having a boyfriend (you wouldn’t know him, he totes lives in Paris) and the big dance is tonight! She hooks up with the delivery boy, some vague misunderstandings happen and it all looks like it’ll go badly for her, then it doesn’t, quite the opposite in fact, and everyone’s blissfully happy. At least until the sequel; the original stage production was followed up in the ‘60s with the gloriously titled Divorce Me, Darling!, not referred to in this film. Anyway beyond that in stuff-actually-in-the-film, the star of the play (Russell regular Glenda Jackson) busts her leg the director (Russell regular Max Adrian) is informed after the first number has already started, requiring that the assistant stage manager fill in (vaguely echoing the original stage production in which something not dissimilar happened). Said stage manager, played by Twiggy, is a mousy (to the extent one could call Twiggy such) Cockney at odds with the part as written, but she is smitten with the male lead (Russell regular Christopher Gable). Meanwhile, word’s gotten around the dressing rooms that a holidaying film producer (Russell regular Vladek Sheybal) is in the audience sparking an array of backstabbing and competition amongst the cast in a bid for notice, a mysterious woman is stalking the backstage, and the director is rewriting on the fly to try and paper over the cracks gradually spreading throughout the production. So, yeah, just complicating the source material a bit.

Despite it being her first acting role of any note (and a reasonably demanding one at that), Twiggy acquits herself pretty well. And, yes, this film has basically ALL of Russell’s regular cast. I think Oliver Reed’s the only one missing, for our sins. 

It’s a delicate balancing act, maintaining a level of wry detachment from the source material without actually treating said material itself as eminently mockable and a joke unto itself. It again runs the risk of turning into the aforementioned terrible retro throwback musical from the first episode of Rock Follies (the show has it both ways!). A lot of care and attention is put in to homage the old time musical without being too precious about them. The metafictional framing does a lot to counter the largely inconsequential nature of the plot, allowing the microcosm in which the characters exist to feel alive without fundamentally changing too much of the play itself.

So with that out of the way, how does it actually pull this off? Largely by creating clear lines between the play, the framing and the fantasy sections while at the same time allowing them to intersect. The play obviously takes place on the stage amongst paper backdrops and plywood trees, while the frame in the more solid ‘real’ location of the theatre itself and the Busby Berkeley-esque fantasies exist more in abstract, each extrapolating from the world depicted on stage; the mundanity in the ‘real’ world and the artifice in the ‘dream’ world, with the play itself being where these two scenarios meet. The action of the play comments on stuff that’s happening in the frame, stuff going on backstage influences how the characters are playing their roles on stage, and the fantasies are the characters’ idealised versions of what’s happening giving further insight into their own motives and desires.

Does it work? Well… more or less. There are a handful of songs that take place backstage where the conceit starts to get muddied (most added for the film from MGM’s back catalogue of tunes, though one oddly is an actual song from the original show that has been recontextualised). There are sufficient clues that Twiggy’s paean in the mirror is intended to be a daydream, between the lighting and how people just snap into existence as soon as it ends, but the diegesis of the others are somewhat harder to determine. Beyond that, some of the fantasy segments go a bit off the rails and not exactly in a good way. People are quick to bring up the drag that is the bacchanalia sequence; a lengthy sequence that feels like something done as a combination of having leftover time for location shooting and having the former principal of the Royal Ballet as the male lead; but really a bigger offender to me is whatever the hell is going on with the staging of ‘A Room in Bloomsbury’. The section where Twiggy and Gable are in essentially a dollhouse is fine, but then in takes a turn into the baffling with an extended dance sequence where the whole cast are done up as gnomes in a large set covered in giant toadstools, and the whole thing just doesn’t really work. They clash terribly with the more stagey and abstract nature of the other fantasy sequences and the latter doesn’t even keep the imagery consistent within itself, let alone with the accompanying song.

Still those are ultimately a fairly small part of the film. As a whole, the film manages to balance these elements well, remaining charming and engaging, and often decently funny, while grappling with the conundrum of how to do a movie musical in a post-Hello Dolly world.