Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...BOYS IN THE BAND...is not a musical." says the ad for the film version of Mart Crowley's 1967 off Broadway play about homosexuals. That, of course is true right now, but I wouldn't be surprised it a musical Boys did turn up a few years hence. Crowley's work as a play has already done more to legitimize homosexuality as a topic for popular culture than anything else before it. As a movie, it will help open up such remaining bastions of heterosexual chauvinism as pop music and the musical theatre to candid expression by homosexual artists...
...Band is about (in the words of one character) "six tired screaming fairy queens and one anxious queer" at a birthday party. Michael, the party's huts, is 30-ish, charming and witty. In the early moments of the film, we find him talking to his friend Donald about their respective analysts, over-loving mothers and financial blues. Gradually they reveal the defense mechanisms that help them survive in a world where "failure is the only thing with which [they] feel at home." For Donald, the only escape is to read book after book. Michael, worried about getting old, stays...
...that misery is all he will ever know ("Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse.") He places his final hopes on the possibility that even seemingly straight Alan is in reality a "closet queer," unhappy like himself. In the game and in the film, it is Alan's phone call that provides the final shock in a series of shattering revelations...
...difference between theatre and film: "Film is the medium with which you really identify, because it's up there on the screen and you can't do anything else about it. In effect, in the theatre you are daring the actor to make the performance stick, and he is daring you not to believe it. You are fighting each other...
...since every new acquaintance would listen patiently to my attempted phrases, trying to guess what I was trying to say if I wasn't able to put it in intelligible language. In Havana all the kids we met had seen our brigade in newsreels in movie theatres, and in film clips on TV. They loved to talk about how the Cuban national baseball team had beaten the American team for the world amateur championship this past fall in Santo Domingo (a sports team not widely reported in the U.S. media) and broke out in big smiles when we told them...