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.

Ken Russell took a break from his cinema of shock and gore to make this fun for the whole family saccharine sweet romantic nostalgia piece The Boyfriend. Sentimental with syrup running through its veins Boyfriend is also campy send up by the restrained Russell who surrounds his naive innocent lead Polly (Twiggy) with a cast of looking out for number one ambitious but mediocre troupers stepping all over each other to impress the rodent like Hollywood producer Cecil DeThrill sitting in a box in a balcony.When the lead (Glenda Jackson) goes down with a leg injury understudy Polly nervously steps into the role filled with anxiety. Distracting as well is her leading man who she's fallen madly for offstage. He does not reciprocate however and her melancholy takes on real meaning as she performs. Meanwhile amid a scant audience the rest of the players wildly undermine each other.One of the better film musicals of the era The Boyfriend avoids the big well oiled production in favor of the sparsely attended, sometimes clumsily choreographed stage hall feel where mostly minimally talented performers with healthy egos make comically vain (in both senses of the word) attempts to punch their ticket to Hollywood. Visually the film is spry and bright in costume and design with a couple of Berkely numbers thrown in for extra pizazz captured with the usual cinematic élan of cameraman David Watkin.The cast plays it broad with model Twiggy's wide eyed innocence as sweet and endearing as Glenda Farrell in Sunnyside forty years earlier. Max Adrian comically leads an army of hams still believing in themselves including Katherine Widmer, Bryan Fraser, Moya Fraser and Jackson sitting out front doing a slow burn over Polly's performance. The Boyfriend does have its slow moments and the imaginative Russell doesn't pull off all his conceits with the director's cut that runs in excess of two hours but overall it remains a unique musical to this day avoiding formula that subsequent big musicals dared not leave the comfort of. It gets better with age.

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"?

When I saw this as a teenager in 1971, I was amazed and delighted! I have kept a copy with me throughout the years, because it is my favorite film musical. It's SO gorgeous, SO inventive, SO witty! I know it's something of a guilty pleasure, and many people don't respond the way I do; but the clever blend of a musical within a musical (within a musical?) is just my cup of tea. Max Adrian is uproarious as the theatre impresario; Twiggy, Christopher Gable, and Tommy Tune are all delightful; and Glenda Jackson's uncredited cameo as the diva with the broken leg temporarily stops the show! The voracious scene-stealing and tap-dancing (watch the chorus girls in their opening number "Perfect Young Ladies") are just perfect!