Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

grimalkin-2 This Ken Russell exercise in excess actually works in this extreme version of Sandy Wilson's 1920s-style musical with its delightful pastiche songs and the addition of several standards. The most important thing about the DVD is that the original 136-minute length has been restored. The 1971 release in the States ran only 109 minutes, so if you remember the original, you're in for a special treat in seeing all the cut numbers and scenes as if they were new.The movie is a show within a show, with a plot taken from "Forty-Second Street" and married to the stylized Sandy Wilson show, with some fantasy Busby Berkeley-style numbers thrown in for good measure. The ensemble cast is delightful, especially Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Tommy Tune, and the incomparable Glenda Jackson. Ken Russell also makes use of some of his regular stable of actors, including Gable and Jackson, already mentioned, as well Murray Melvin and Georgina Hale. The sets are wonderfully creative, as are the 1920s costumes designed by Ken Russell's wife Shirley.

fung0 The Boyfriend is not just the last great movie musical, but one of the greatest of all movie musicals. And a truly Great film, regardless of genre.Taking a tuneful but forgettable neo-1930s stage musical as a starting point, Russell created a multi-layered, kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of a film. It's a movie about movies, about the theater, about creativity and imagination. It's about human nature. It's a love story (of course!). It's trivial, it's deep, it's shocking. It's gloriously excessive, in the best Russell manner. But this is excess with a purpose. Every image, ever musical set-piece works in multiple ways. I've seen it probably a dozen times, and I've never seen the same film twice.This is definitely a film that needs to be seen in wide-screen. (Until we get a proper Blu-ray, Turner Classic Movies shows a somewhat blurry but complete British print.) Russell out-does Busby Berkeley, with split-screen sequences no other director would dare to attempt. But by making the film as a play-within-a-play, he cleverly adds human drama missing from the original lightweight theatrical script. And creates a deliciously ironic counterpoint between the emotions of the actors and those of the stereotyped characters they portray.Remarkably, the performances hold up to all this. Twiggy is barely remembered as a 1960s footnote, but here she proves she was not just a remarkably pretty face. (Her fresh and innocent performance sparkles in a way that the polished and rather precious Julie Andrews recording does not.) Tommy Tune does credit to the long-legged Buddy Ebsen specialty numbers. And Russell's perennial favorite Vladek Sheybal is perfect as CB DeThrille, the mildly Mephistophelian embodiment of Russell himself.Ken Russell was always impressive for his technique, but in The Boyfriend he brought all his abilities to focus in a celebration of film entertainment. It's easily the best movie musical since the days of Singing in the Rain and The Bandwagon, and though it lacks the star power of a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, it adds a depth and vision that no other musical approaches.They just don't make 'em like this any more. In fact, aside from Ken Russell, no one ever did.

wes-connors In late 1920s London, unsteady "A.S.M." (that's "assistant stage manager") Twiggy (as Polly Browne) takes over the leading role in a sparsely attended stage musical called "The Boyfriend" after star Glenda Jackson (as Rita) breaks a leg. Literally. Twiggy performs badly on stage and fantasizes the production is more elaborate. She has a crush on handsome leading dancer Christopher Gable (as Tony Brockhurst), who notices Twiggy is beautiful when she removes her glasses. An observer named like filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille (Mr. De Thrill) watches the play, apparently looking for Hollywood talent...There are four or more movies here - the original stage musical, which is drowned out by producer/director Ken Russell, and replaced by your amateur musical, where some appealing people and songs test some sit-through-it endurance, then we have the backstage character stories, headed by the love story between Twiggy and Mr. Gable, all mixed like oil and vinegar into extravagant "Busby Berkeley" production numbers, of which the latter "I Could Be Happy with You" is a highlight, but in the version just before the intermission; like much of the film, it reappears until finally wearing out the welcome...**** The Boy Friend (12/16/71) Ken Russell ~ Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Tommy Tune, Antonia Ellis

steven-222 Back in my college daze, we always got totally stoned to go see Ken Russell movies...I mean, so stoned that once you found your seat, you didn't dare get up, because you might never find your way back. And those Ken Russell movies always delivered quite a trip.Rewatching The Boyfriend on TCM (a much longer print that I had seen before) induced quite a flashback. The various levels of reality (from backstage melodrama to Busby Berkeley fantasias) act rather like a powerful hallucinogen...first you're giddy, then bored, then it's way too intense and you just want it to end, but you know there are hours and hours to go, then it gets groovy again, then tedious, and on and on and on.Surely the strangest sequence is the "Room in Bloomsbury" farrago where we're suddenly on the mushroom planet...and how the heck did we get here, and will we ever find our way back? It's sorta cool, but mostly creepy. More shrooms, dude?And rather like a bumpy drug trip, after it's finally over and you come down, you're not sure you'll want to do that again anytime soon.But...hey...anyone up for rewatching "The Devils"?