Also tough to review

A few months back, I did a post on My Dinner With Andre pointing out it was tough to review because of the well-known subject material and lack of a plot. Another movie that for me somewhat defies review, albeit for different reasons, is the 1970 version of The Boys in the Band, which has another airing on TCM tonight (July 12) at 8:00 PM.

I'm sure the main plot point is known already to a lot of readers, and the reasons why it's well known. Michael (Kenneth Nelson) is going through lower Manhattan running errands in advance of a birthday he's hosting for Harold (Leonard Frey) and several mutual friends. After he gets back to his apartment, a couple of things happen. One is that his friend Donald (Frederick Combs) shows up early, his session with his analyst having been called off. It's made quite clear from the conversation, if you didn't already know the plot, that both of them, as well as all of the guests at the party, are gay men, and that Michael and Donald are in some stage of a relationship.

The other thing that happens is that Michael's college roommate Alan (Peter White) calls up, looking to meet with Michael for dinner or something because he has something very important of a personal nature to discuss. Now, Alan has come up from Washington, and is not a guest at the party because Alan is straight with a wife. The play having been first staged in 1968 and the movie being from 1970, it's easy to see the potential problems this causes. All the guests are comfortable being open about being gay in front of each other, but not necessarily with certain straight people they know well. Michael tries to push off a meeting with Alan until the next day, but Alan at least eventually does call off the meeting.

The various guests start to arrive, although Harold is going to show up fashionably late. Playwright Mart Crowley, who was openly gay and wrote both the play and screenplay, populates the guests with a bunch of different character types who might seem like archetypes. But one presumes that Crowley really did know gay men like each of the characters. The most important of the guests for plot purposes is not the guest of honor, but Emory (Cliff Gorman), who fills the stereotype of the flamboyant and combative gay man, but one who can also be seen as obnoxious.

The gay men, free to be themselves, enjoy the party when there's another knock on the door. Everybody expects it to be Harold who hasn't shown up yet. But it is in fact Alan. And it wasn't Michael who opened the door; if he had, he probably could have kept everybody out on the terrace while he talks about that "important" thing Alan wanted to discuss. But with somebody else answering the door, Alan realizes that everybody at the party is gay, which obviously includes his friend and former roommate Alan.

All hell breaks loose, especially with Emory, who decides the right thing to do is to taunt Alan and suggest that Alan is acutally gay himself but severely repressed. Emory, in fact, is the reason why I found myself having trouble coming up with a good review of The Boys in the Band. Ultimately, it hit me what made me dislike his character so much: I couldn't help but think of Emory as being like the obnoxious jerk antagonist stereotype from a 1980s teen movie, except that the character in the 1980s movie would be straight. Emory also comes across as the sort of character who would immediately jump to screaming homophobia if anybody objected to his obnoxiousness, even though we all know similarly annoying straight people.

Reading reviews on IMDb, however, brought up another insight that I didn't think of. Several reviewers made comparisons between The Boys and the Band and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that the parties spiral out of control in much the same way. As you may recall, I really disliked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because of the nonstop bickering and unlikeability of any of the characters. In the case of The Boys in the Band, though, it was really more just Emory that I really didn't like and wanted to smack.

A lot of the reviewers also discuss whether The Boys in the Band is dated. In some ways, it probably is, but at the same time, all the character types portrayed here still exist (both the gay and straight equivalents), and many of the themes are timeless.