Mildred à Deux

Strong woman. Single mother. Never having to depend on a man, enjoying the thrill of making it on her own, but willing to sacrifice it all for the sake of her beloved daughter. That’s Mildred Pierce in a nutshell. Both film versions of James M. Cain’s gritty 1941 novel—the 1945 Warner Brothers classic and the 2011 HBO miniseries—are masterful works in their own right, with very different approaches to the material, but both films make strong feminist statements that continue to resonate, and fascinate audiences.  

At its core, Mildred is a twisted mother-daughter love story; in both versions the men in Mildred’s life are mere supporting characters. The real drama centers around a mother pining for the approval of her cold fish daughter, attempting to buy her love, to no avail. Housewife Mildred dotes too much on her children and her unemployed husband finds solace in the arms of another woman. She kicks him out and finds a job as a waitress to support herself and her two daughters, eventually finding a way to open her own restaurant. When Mildred loses her youngest daughter to pneumonia, Mildred redoubles her efforts to make her new venture a success—to give her spoiled surviving daughter Veda the glamorous life she craves.

Joan Crawford as Mildred

The 1945 version is a film noir masterpiece, directed by the legendary Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and photographed superbly and inventively by veteran cameraman Ernest Haller in moody black and white. For the film, Cain’s frank and hardboiled yarn had to be sanitized to pass the stringent Motion Picture Production Code. but screenwriter Ranald MacDougall manages to retain the tension and conflict in his tightly plotted script while skirting the novel’s racier passages. Curtiz and Haller elevate melodrama to an art form with the use of film noir techniques, using light and shadow to suggest and underline the more lurid story elements and character motivations.

Glamorous noir, with Blyth and Crawford

By contrast, Todd Haynes’s 2011 miniseries is far more faithful to its source material, gutsy, raw and real. Haynes, who had paid homage to Douglas Sirk with Far From Heaven (in which the production design unfortunately far exceeded its ho-hum storyline) recreates 1930s Depression-era Los Angeles in painstaking detail. And on HBO, there’s no need to shy away from the more explicit and adult angles to the story...Mildred and Veda’s numerous sexual entanglements and the clearly incestuous underpinnings of their fragile relationship are explored in unflinching detail. But in its way, Todd Haynes’s vision of Mildred is just as stylized as its classic counterpart, touching the subconscious with its vivid imagery...it is the director’s most inventive and magical work since his 1998 masterpiece Velvet Goldmine.

Kate Winslet as Mildred

Mildred Pierce marked a comeback for Joan Crawford, who had unceremoniously exited MGM after 17 years as one of its top stars, following a string of box office failures. The 1945 Warner Brothers film was originally planned as a vehicle for Bette Davis, who turned the role down upon learning she was to play mother to an adult actress. A desperate Joan Crawford said that she’d play Wally Beery’s grandmother if it was a good role, and campaigned actively for the part. Director Curtiz resisted working with Crawford and made her submit to a screen test before casting her in the title role.

For Crawford, Mildred turned out to be a career-redefining role.  It revitalized her image, won her her a Best Actress Academy Award and secured her career longevity for the next 20+ years. Crawford carries the picture on her capable shoulders; her performance is luminous and compelling. Haller’s haunting close-ups show a radiantly beautiful, maturing Crawford, whose famously large eyes had registered human emotion since the silent era. Her scenes with Ann Blyth as daughter Veda crackle with excitement and chemistry, as Crawford generously and wisely underplays as the long-suffering mother.

Kate Winslet is an altogether different brand of Mildred. Winslet, herself an iconic movie beauty, eschews the glamour angle to bring the “common frump” Veda calls her mother to vivid life. Winslet’s Mildred is more than a pound or two above her ideal weight, and her sometimes slovenly appearance illustrates the sweaty hard work of waitressing. (By contrast, the perfectly coiffed Crawford sports her trademark ankle-strap shoes and Adrian shoulder pads under her waitress uniform, creating a perfect movie star mannequin silhouette.) Moreover, Kate’s Mildred is a sensual and sexual animal, rolling into and out of bed with the men in her life with lusty abandon, often merely to achieve her aims. As Mildred, Winslet is electrifying and unforgettable.

Ann Blyth and Evan Rachel Wood as Veda

Pretty Ann Blyth (The Helen Morgan Story)  was never better than as the bitchy, self-centered Veda in the 1945 film. The promise she showed was never completely fulfilled (she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod for her work), though she did make a series of light musicals over the next decade. The 2011 version features an equally remarkable performance by beautiful young Evan Rachel Wood (True Blood) as Veda, who gives Blyth a run for her money. (Morgan Turner, too, is very good as the younger Veda.)

Guy Pearce as Monty

Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential, Adventures of Priscilla) whose slim physique and chiseled face closely resemble the leading men of the 1930s and 40s, is perfectly cast as Monty in the 2011 film, lending a dangerous air of depravity and debauched sexuality to the character originally played by a smarmy and somewhat effete Zachary Scott. (We have to give props to Mr. Scott, too, in the sex appeal department, especially in the beach scenes where he rocks a black speedo paired with a polo sweater.)

Though both films are carried by the talents of their titular stars, it’s their fine supporting performances that give them depth and dimension and brand them as classics of their times. The 1945 version is leavened by the humor and energy of veteran supporting actors like Jack Carson, Eve Arden and Butterfly McQueen. The 2011 version is darker, deeper, and peopled with fine actors at every turn, including the wonderful Hope Davis and the underrated James LeGros and Brían F. O’Byrne.  

Eve Arden as Ida

The role of Mildred’s mentor and confidante Ida, played with trademark comic timing by the brilliant Eve Arden, is actually a composite of two rival characters in Cain’s novel, and Haynes’s version casts the versatile Mare Winningham as the no-nonsense waitress Ida, and Oscar winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter)  as Mildred’s best friend Lucy, who both vie for Mildred’s attentions. In Haynes’s film, in fact, all the womens’ relationships completely overshadow the male characters—obviously by design.

Mare Winningham as Ida

Melissa Leo as Lucy

Both these fierce Mildreds are “women’s pictures” but for different reasons. The 1945 film can be summarized as the story of a woman—Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce; while the 2011 version seems to be a story about all women, how they survived during the dark days of the depression, how they raised their children, where they succeeded and failed.  I treasure both of these fine films, which stand next to one another in my DVD cabinet to be enjoyed equally, year after year.

Endless Splendor, Star-Crossed Sex

I was 15 years old when Endless Love hit the theaters in 1981. Because it had been given an  R rating by the MPAA, I was still not old enough to be admitted without a parent or guardian, even though the story was all about people almost exactly my age. So I had to sneak in. (First time I had ever done this was to see Saturday Night Fever at the age of 11...I found a seat next to a kindly-looking white-haired woman and struck up a conversation with her, so the usher would think she was my grandmother.) Nothing was going to stop me from seeing these beautiful young stars...naked. I freely admit it, I was a teenage voyeur.

Director Franco Zeffirelli, who so brilliantly captured the raptures and agonies of young love in his iconic version of Romeo and Juliet (1969), plays variations on the same theme for this adaptation of the novel by Scott Spencer. Obviously influenced by other classics of teen angst like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan’s adaptation of William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass, Zeffirelli takes the opportunity to push the envelope with this somewhat more explicit depiction of star-crossed love.

David (Martin Hewitt) and Jade (Brooke Shields)

In Zeffirelli’s view, young love and coming of age are, after all, really about sex...youth, beauty and throbbing teenage hormones. Love hurts, yet it hurts so good, especially when the youthful protagonists are obsessed with sex but unable to abandon themselves to nature.

Just before the Reagan ‘80s and the specter of AIDS put a damper on the burgeoning sexual revolution, there was a sweet spot in mainstream entertainment where the extraordinarily free let-it-all-hang-out sexuality of the 70s had a last hurrah. Even ordinary movies seemed to have a freer, more honest and frank approach to storytelling. Endless Love may not be one of the all-time great films, but it’s a potent story about the explosive power of sex, and how it destroys the life of an adolescent boy named David.

Martin Hewitt's defining role

The plot is unquestionably melodramatic and somewhat overwrought. When teenagers David and Jade fall so deeply, passionately and all-consumingly in love that they literally shut out the rest of the world, neglecting school, family and even sleeping and eating to be together, Jade’s worried father puts his foot down and orders them to not to see each other for 30 days...an eternity to a teenager. David has a nervous breakdown and hatches a dangerous plan to insinuate himself back into her family’s good graces: he sets fire to their house, intending to save Jade and them all from the conflagration. The plan backfires, and David must pay for the consequences of his actions; he’s institutionalized as the family moves away, but he never stops hoping to reconcile with Jade. Even more tragedy ensues.

The attractive and talented Martin Hewitt does a fine job carrying the film on his slim shoulders, conveying the dark inner turmoil, obsession and madness his character experiences. Unfortunately, this turned out to be Hewitt’s career pinnacle; he never became a box office personality, though this film was a modest hit upon its release in 1981.

Brooke Shields was flawlessly beautiful

Brooke is incandescently beautiful and has real screen presence, but her thin and reedy voice hampers her effectiveness, particularly in the later scenes in which she portrays Jade as a young adult. (She did work on her vocal instrument in the ensuing years, appearing on Broadway as Rizzo in Grease and in other stage productions, most incredibly as Chris MacNeil in a 2012 stage version of The Exorcist, in which she swore like a sailor!)

Though handsome Hewitt bares all in numerous scenes (reminiscent of Leonard Whiting’s unselfconscious nakedness as Zeffirelli’s Romeo), Shields’s nude scenes were famously played by a body double. After bad press that claimed she allowed the exploitation of her young daughter as sex object in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, mom Teri Shields carefully made sure that Brooke’s love scenes in both The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love were performed by a (rather well-endowed) double, a that fact was well-publicized...somewhat disingenuously, since Shields was still being sold to audiences as a nubile teenage sex nymph.

Beatrice Straight (Network, Poltergeist) and Richard Kiley (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) are effective as David’s cold and emotionless mother and father, more engrossed in their left-wing political causes than they are in parenting. It’s a small wonder that David is seduced not only by the beautiful Jade but by her permissive, hippie-bohemian family as well. The teenage children are allowed to drink wine with dinner, call their mom and dad by their first names and throw wild parties with their parents in attendance. When the young couple first fall in love, her mother and father even allow them to sleep together in Jade’s bedroom.

Don Murray and Shirley Knight as Hugh and Ann

Shirley Knight (remember her as Helen Hunt’s mom in As Good As It Gets?)  gives one of her finest performances as Jade’s mother Ann, the complicated cougar who is obviously attracted to David and gets a vicarious thrill watching her daughter make love to him in front of a roaring fire. Even after David has burned down her house, been convicted of arson and jumped parole to try and find Jade in New York City, Ann remains his friend, still mesmerized by David’s unwavering passion for her daughter.

As Hugh, Jade’s father, Don Murray (Bus Stop, Advise and Consent) fares less well than Knight in creating a nuanced character. Hugh is clearly the villain of the piece, the angry father forbidding Jade to see David and triggering David’s sociopathic behavior.

An early role for Mr. Cruise

The cast also includes a young and unpolished Tom Cruise in a memorable bit as a loquacious classmate, wearing Daisy Duke-style cutoff shorts and a goofy grin; forgotten but fine ‘70s actress Penelope Milford (Coming Home) as Hugh’s young girlfriend; and James Spader (to me, he will always be Jimmy Spader) as brother Keith, then handsome enough to be a teen idol himself, with his feathered blond hair and slim, toned physique, revealed shirtless in more than one scene.

James—then known as Jimmy—Spader

Despite some of its less-than-perfect elements, the film is made with real care and artistry. Zeffirelli creates exquisitely romantic tableaus of his lovers, and his use of light and color in the love scenes are surreal and dreamlike, with icy blues and florid reds, set to the lushly romantic music of Lionel Richie. The opening planetarium scene is an obvious homage to Rebel Without a Cause, and the relationship between Jade and David closely parallels the Romeo and Juliet intensity of Bud (Warren Beatty) and Deenie (Natalie Wood) of Splendor in the Grass, with Zeffirelli’s David having a nervous breakdown every bit as intense as Deenie’s. All in all, I find this film satisfying, even after more than 30 years.

And yes, I did watch the recent remake with Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde. No offense to those young actors, but the movie took too many liberties, reimagining both the plot and characters, to be considered a proper remake. And it just wasn’t any good, in my opinion; and certainly not sexy at all. I’ll stick with Zeffirelli’s original.

Judy D. Takes On Judy G.

Playing an iconic star in a musical biopic is a risk for any actor, but a few have risen to the challenge and triumphed: Sissy Spacek (Loretta Lynn), Angela Bassett (Tina Turner), Jamie Fox (Ray Charles), Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (Johnny and June Carter Cash) come to mind. Other talented performers have crashed and burned: Julie Andrews (Gertrude Lawrence), Val Kilmer (Jim Morrison) and Kevin Spacey (Bobby Darin) are among the genre’s valiant victims.

In 2001, it was announced that a TV version of Lorna Luft’s memoir Me and My Shadows would be produced as a two-night miniseries on ABC. I wasn’t expecting much, but I ended up loving it for the most part. The brilliant Australian actress Judy Davis had achieved what I thought no other actor would been able to attempt, capturing the essence of a superstar with more talent and more neuroses than any other in recent memory. 

Unlike fellow icons Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, who have been the subjects of numerous biopics, TV movies and miniseries, there have actually been very few occasions that an actor has attempted to play the role of Judy Garland on film or television.

Since early childhood, I have been a Garland super-fan (obviously anecdotal evidence of the so-called gay gene).  At the tender age of 5 or 6, I was old enough to stay up past my bedtime to watch The Wizard of Oz on TV with my family. As the camera lingered on a long, loving Technicolor close-up of Dorothy murmuring, “There’s no place like home,” I sighed. “I love her; she is so beautiful.”

“She’s dead,” my father said flatly. “She died of a drug overdose.” I gasped in horror and disbelief. But he wasn’t kidding. 

Garland in the 1960s

My mother had met her, actually been in the great lady’s presence, as a production assistant on the Ed Sullivan Show in the mid-1960s. “That poor thing,” she remembered. “We had to babysit her all afternoon, to make sure she didn’t get too drunk to do the show.”  Poor Dorothy! That girl in the blue gingham dress a drunk, a drug addict, and now...gone? It didn’t seem possible. 

Thus began my fascination with Judy Garland. I set out to find out everything about her, and in the process I became somewhat of a Garland scholar. Though I didn’t get to see most of her movies until the VHS/Blockbuster boom of the 1980s, I never missed Oz, Easter Parade and Meet Me in St. Louis on TV every year. A local library was showing (the truncated version of) A Star is Born,  and I dragged my mother there to see it. And I read every book I could get my hands on, including Judy by Gerold Frank, The MGM Story and best of all, Rainbow: The Stormy Life of Judy Garland by Christopher Finch.

In 1978, I was very excited to hear that Andrea McArdle, fresh from her Broadway triumph in the title role of Annie, had been cast in the role of young Frances Gumm in a TV adaptation of Rainbow (the first half of the Finch book). Like Judy, Andrea was a little girl with a big, big voice. Though the movie was quite faithful to the book in taking us through Garland’s nomadic childhood and relationship with her high-strung stage mother Ethel (well-played by Piper Laurie) and beloved gay father Frank (Don Murray), only one aspect jarred me, an important one. I didn’t buy McArdle in the role; her Frances had none of the humor, vulnerability and pathos that made Garland a star. In fact, her characterization seemed rather blank and colorless. I did enjoy her strong vocal renditions of songs like “Dinah” and “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart,” but I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief and accept Andrea as Judy. 

As an actress, Andrea was a great singer

Neither did the critics, apparently, or the viewers. Plans for a follow-up TV-movie covering of the second half of Finch’s Rainbow book, picking up in the 1940s with Stockard Channing as the grown-up Garland, were promptly shelved. (I would have loved to see what Miss Channing, after her star-making turn as Rizzo in the film version of Grease, could have done with the role.)

Stockard Channing might have been great as Judy

In 2001, Australian actress Judy Davis was given the role of a lifetime, the one that she considered her most challenging. Davis is a consummate character actor, known for her chameleon-like transformations in roles as varied as a proper Englishwoman in A Passage to India, criminal sociopath Sante Kimes in A Little Thing Called Murder, a few of Woody Allen’s most memorably neurotic women in several of the auteur’s films, and as a famously icy First Lady in The Reagans. 

The gifted and charismatic Judy Davis

In Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, Davis expertly captures all the various facets of the Garland personality and legend—movie star, stage icon, dragon lady, victim, drug addict, doting mother, gamine—with fierce energy and bona fide charisma. Perhaps Davis is just a shade tougher than the troubled lady she’s portraying (if the real Judy had been this iron-willed, she might not have faded away so soon), but she skillfully captures the famous gestures, vocal rhythms and inflections, and especially her fabled humor, in an always compelling and entertaining manner. And in the later sequences, the physical resemblance to the mature Judy is striking. A bit mechanical in the painstakingly recreated musical numbers in which she lip-syncs to the superstar’s real recordings (drag-queen style!), the actress nevertheless dominates the proceedings with utter assurance. For her performance, Davis won both the Golden Globe and Emmy Award as Best Actress in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. 

Davis emotes for "Over the Rainbow" 

Pantomiming "Get Happy"

Judy as Judy at the Palace with Lorna (Allison Pill) and Joey (Alex House)

Davis gives a tour de force performance as the mature Garland, but Tammy Blanchard (most recently one of the wicked stepsisters in Into The Woods) is equally effective as young Frances, especially during her climactic nervous breakdown scene with taskmaster Busby Berkeley (during the filming of the “I Got Rhythm” number from Girl Crazy). Blanchard does a masterful job of carrying Part 1 of the story, capturing the wistful vulnerability of child star Garland, and she received an Emmy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal.

Tammy Blanchard as Judy as Dorothy

Other notable performances: Marsha Mason, a wonderful actress who has made few appearances since her heyday in the late 1970s (The Goodbye Girl, Only When I Laugh), is effective as stage mama Ethel, and versatile Victor Garber (Titanic) is a standout as third husband Sid Luft.

Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows pulls out all the stops as the ultimate Garland film biography. As a result, it is less faithful to Lorna Luft’s memoir than the title leads us to believe--poor Lorna, in fact, is reduced to a minor supporting character in her own story. But it’s a top-notch biopic nevertheless, with an unforgettable star turn by Judy Davis. 

I’ve heard Anne Hathaway has been approached to play Judy in a new big-screen adaptation of the legendary star’s life and loves to be directed by Rob Marshall. Daughter Liza says she thinks Anne will be wonderful in the role. I reserve judgment! (And maybe, it will never even happen...fingers crossed.)

The Boys are Back in Vogue?

The fight for marriage equality is all but won as of 2015. Gay rights are now seen by the majority of the world for what they are, human rights. Gay is OK. But just a few short decades ago, the subject of homosexuality was taboo, and honest portrayals of gay people in theater and film simply did not exist. Until The Boys in the Band. 

Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking play was made into a film in 1970 and starred all the actors from its original 1968 stage production. Produced more than a year before the historic Stonewall riots, where a group of bar patrons banded together against police brutality and started the movement for equality, the play provided unprecedented visibility to the contemporary gay experience. Though leavened by its memorably caustic wit and humor, Crowley’s work revealed the loneliness and isolation of the gay lifestyle, and underlined the lack of emotional support available to gay men among members of their own “tribe.”

A rare moment of camaraderie 

In the intervening years between Stonewall and the present day, the reputation of The Boys in the Band suffered a backlash by the gay community itself. Perhaps fearing that Crowley’s brutally honest storytelling would forever brand gay people as pathetic, promiscuous, unlovable freaks of nature, downright scary to the rest of society, many shunned this seminal work for its negative portrayal of gay life. 

Beneath its razor-sharp wit and self-deprecating humor, The Boys in the Band is a searing and often heartbreaking exposé of urban gay life. When a group of friends converge for Harold’s birthday party at Michael’s downtown apartment, high drama ensues. With a nod to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Albee was among one of several “angels” who helped Crowley along the way), the centerpiece of the story is a terrifying party game in which the participants are dared to phone and reveal their feelings to the one person they have loved.

Natalie Wood and Mart Crowley

It was the play Mart Crowley was born to write. After failed forays into writing for film and television (authoring a campy TV pilot starring Bette Davis as an interior decorator!), Crowley had been working as a personal assistant to movie star Natalie Wood when he wrote the first draft of a groundbreaking and controversial new play. Championed by Wood and her second husband, attorney Richard Gregson (who came between her first and third marriages to RJ Wagner and is the father of actress Natasha Gregson Wagner), the play found its way into the right hands. Edward Albee helped arrange the play’s first workshop, which led to a successful Off-Broadway production that ran for more than 1,000 performances. 

In a rare example of artistic integrity winning out over the financial concerns of the “business of show,” Crowley refused to sell his property to Hollywood unless the entire original Broadway cast reprised their roles. Incredibly, Crowley prevailed, and the film version has forever preserved the brilliant ensemble’s now iconic characterizations. 

Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) and Michael (Kenneth Nelson)

Crowley later wrote a sequel, The Men from the Boys, became a writer and executive producer on Robert Wagner’s series Hart to Hart, and wrote the teleplay for There Must Be a Pony starring Elizabeth Taylor as a fading movie star attempting a comeback. But Boys in the Band is his masterpiece, and the 1970 film has captured it in perpetuity. 

Director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), the only artistic collaborator not a part of the original stage production, brings a cinematic approach to what could have ended up as merely a filmed stage play. His opening sequence captures the energy of New York and offers brief, telling glimpses into the main character’s lives. Though the rest of the action takes place in one setting—various rooms and the terrace of Michael’s apartment—Friedkin’s artful choreography and blocking and masterful use of the camera help drive the story, following and tracking the actors’ movements, darting in and out of the action for two shots, three-shots and close-ups. 

Harold (Leonard Frey) and the Cowboy (Robert La Torneaux)

Wisely, though, Friedkin creates an atmosphere that allows the actors to shine. The all-male cast (save for a fleeting glimpse of future Bond girl Maud Adams in an unbilled bit as one of fashion photographer Larry’s models) is uniformly astonishing, bringing to life just about every archetype in the gay pantheon. 

Kenneth Nelson is unforgettable as the high-strung host Michael, who shops obsessively, frets about his thinning hair and becomes a frighteningly mean drunk when he falls off the wagon early in the proceedings. Leonard Frey is hilariously caustic as neurotic guest of honor Harold, who has issues of his own, struggling with weight, food, acne and being Jewish.  

Kenneth Nelson

Leonard Frey

Peter White

The question of monogamy versus promiscuity is explored through the relationship of schoolteacher Hank and photographer Larry, played memorably by Laurence Luckinbill (longtime husband of Lucie Arnaz) and Keith Prentice. Reuben Greene is quietly affecting as Bernard, who struggles valiantly with the double whammy of being gay and black in a world that is slow to accept either. Frederick Combs underplays admirably as Donald, Michael’s compassionate friend and confidante. 

Peter White (familiar to longtime watchers of the ABC soap All My Children) perfectly captures the sexual ambiguity of Alan, the unexpected guest who serves as catalyst to Michael’s alcoholic breakdown. Robert La Tourneaux is charming and amusing as the guileless male escort who serves as Harold’s birthday present. 

Bernard (Reuben Greene), Emory (Cliff Gorman) and Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) 

Michael and Donald (Frederick Combs)

Cliff Gorman triumphs in the role of the flagrantly effeminate Emory, the outrageously campy queen who cooks up a storm and longs for domestic bliss but can’t find a man except in the dark caverns of the baths.  

To some gay audiences of the time, the character of Emory was as cringe-worthy a stereotype as Uncle Tom and Stepin Fetchit have been to the black community, but through Emory, Crowley makes a strong statement about the gay world’s own caste-and-class system. If you appear to be masculine, the unwritten rule goes, you can sleep with men, as long as you blend in with the mainstream. Hide your fabulousness under a bushel if you want to maintain your dignity as a human being. Effeminacy is the self-hating gay world’s ugly little secret...and only in very recent years has gender-fluid self-expression become more socially acceptable. Today, in viewing Boys in the Band, Emory comes off the strongest and most courageous character in the film.  

Cliff Gorman

But the LGBT community, hyper-vigilant and hyper-aware of how they were being portrayed in films, theater and television, turned their back on Boys for many years. (Interestingly, 10 years later Friedkin directed the even more controversial film Cruising, similarly accused of using gay life to perpetuate negative stereotypes.) Indeed, mainstream entertainment of the past tended to portray gays as either victims or villains, rather than fully developed characters. But in light of the tremendous progress the equality movement has made, the years have been kinder to The Boys in the Band, and I hope it now can enjoy its rightful place in the history of gay film. It is after all, a moving story about people—and Mart Crowley’s complex characters are flawed, fascinating and endearingly human.

Luckinbill, Greene, Frey, Prentice, Combs, Gorman, Nelson, White and La Torneaux