# The Boys in the Band (1970 film)

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".
The ensemble cast, all of whom also played the roles in the play's initial stage run in New York City, includes Kenneth Nelson, Peter White, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman, Frederick Combs, Laurence Luckinbill, Keith Prentice, Robert La Tourneaux, and Reuben Greene. Model/actress Maud Adams has a brief cameo appearance in the opening montage, as does restaurateur Elaine Kaufman.

## Plot

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, straight conservative, 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 closeted homosexual, 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.

## Cast

* Kenneth Nelson as Michael
* Leonard Frey as Harold
* Cliff Gorman as Emory
* Laurence Luckinbill as Hank
* Frederick Combs as Donald
* Keith Prentice as Larry
* Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy Tex
* Reuben Greene as Bernard
* Peter White as Alan McCarthy
* Maud Adams as photo model (uncredited)
* Elaine Kaufman as extra/pedestrian (uncredited)

## Production

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.
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.
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.
The bar scene in the opening was filmed at Julius in Greenwich Village. Studio shots were at the Chelsea Studios in New York City. 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.
Songs featured in the film include "Anything Goes" performed by Harpers Bizarre during the opening credits, "Good Lovin' Ain't Easy to Come By" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, "Funky Broadway" by Wilson Pickett, "(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and an instrumental version of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love".

## Reception

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. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
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. Kael wrote: "A gathering of homosexuals at a birthday party; it's like the gathering of bitchy ladies in The Women, but with a 40s-movie bomber-crew cast: a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, a hustler, one who is butch, and one who is nellie, and so on. They crack jokes while their hearts are breaking." Vito Russo, activist and film historian, examined the film in The Celluloid Closet: "The film presents a perfunctory compendium of easily acceptable stereotypes who gather at a Manhattan birthday party and spend an evening savaging each other and their way of life…Yet in spite of itself, Crowley’s passion play was part catharsis and part catalyst. His characters were losers or borderline survivors at best, but they paved the way for winners…The film was not positive, but it was fair...If nothing else, The Boys in the Band illuminated the fear and ignorance that surrounded homosexuality in America. And while it was considered the pinnacle of Hollywood’s commitment to the exploration of such “adult” themes, it was in fact a freak show." Film historian Richard Barrios explored its complexity: "Here are collected all the imposing paradoxes history can offer. By being unnervingly real at the same time that it is rackingly phony, The Boys in the Band makes of itself both a rapturous high and a dirty shame. It exalts with its affection and intimate truths and stunning insights and crashes and burns with pessimism and blame and falsehood. Where homosexuals and homosexuality on film is concerned, this is The Birth of a Nation...Why did this movie grab so many people, then?...After all these years, why does it still matter?...Crowley knew himself and his sector of gay life well enough to capture it with some truth, and truth often luxuriates in its own permanence." Leslie Halliwell, British film critic: "Careful but claustrophobic filming of a Broadway play, which at the screen's closer quarters becomes overpowering well before the end." Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half of four stars: "Excellent filmization of Mart Crowley's landmark play about nine men at a birthday party: eight are gay, the ninth insists he's not. Often hilarious, frequently sad, but always thought provoking, and sensationally acted by the original stage cast; a rare case where a single claustrophobic set is actually an asset."
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."
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."
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."
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. 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."
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."

### Accolades

Kenneth Nelson was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor. The Producers Guild of America Laurel Awards honored Cliff Gorman and Leonard Frey as Stars of Tomorrow.

## Home media

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.

## Remake

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. The film was released by Netflix on September 30, 2020.