Canadian Film Weekly (Apr 3, 1970)

April 3, 1970 CANADIAN FILM WEEKLY Page 7 movie reviews By GARY TOPP ar Meet The Boys In The Band The Boys In The Band (National General Pictures) Mart Crowley, author of The Boys In The Band . . . “I don’t remember how long I thought about writing The Boys In The Band specifically, but it was sort of brewing around in my head for easily six months before I wrote it. It had long occurred to me that it would be a good situation for some people to get drunk at a party and let their hair down and all, call up the person that they loved, on the telephone.” Crowley’s play is about nine men, eight of whom are homosexual. They are simple, human people; they have the same problems in their love relationships as heterosexuals do. The Boys In The Band is as much about love and need as it is about homosexuality — “in affairs of the heart, there are no rules”. The basis of the play/film is the throwing together of four male couples at a birthday party, the reshuffling of the partners, and the addition of a ‘straight’ fellow who eventually becomes the catalyst in a Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf-type game of Truth or Consequences, in which the prize is a loss of dignity. What results is a totally entertaining, but not-so-powerful work. All of the original actors who created Crowley’s play on stage appear in William Friedkin’s (Good Times, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, The Birthday Party) film adaptation, and they all tackle their roles with great fervor. The director has excitingly compacted all of the elements of the stage production into a motion picture which I’m sure has enlarged upon the feeling of the live: performance. Crowley’s much expanded film scenario, I feel, is far too sensational about its homosexual attitudes. It gradually becomes nothing more than a very amusing movie, when it was intended to be, and could have been, something with far greater significance. “Despite its reputation”, director Friedkin says, “The Boys In The Band is not avant-garde in any way. Nor are its ideas avant-garde. It possesses the unities of time, place and action. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. The characters are very clear. The Boys In The Band is in large part about ‘Who I am’, ‘Who are you?’, ‘Can I live with what I am?’, ‘Or do I hate myself?’. These are very basic problems.” ' were inevitable — repetitious nonsense, movie after movie. La Femme Infidele (Cinepix) Claude Chabrol is perhaps the French cinema’s foremost Hitchcockian. His new film, La Femme Infidele, is his first since Les Biches and is a perfect example for analyzing his own basic theories. Chabrol has approached Hitchcock’s art on the basis of psychological suspense, but has created a wholly original thriller concerning a wife and her cuckolded husband. The director (who also wrote the screenplay) mixes raw humour with tragedy and psychological probing; mixing his moods freely and confidently. La Femme Infidele is, at its simplest, a story of infidelity, jealousy and revenge — three basic ingredients for this type of film-making. A wealthy Parisian insurance man (Michel Bouquet) gets the feeling that his young, attractive wife (Stephane Audran — Chabrol’s wife) is not being loyal to him. He engages a private detective to follow her-— his suspicions are finally confirmed. Finding the whereabouts of his wife’s lover, a writer, the husband pays him a visit at his home. They talk (in a Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice manner) and in the end, the jealous husband kills the scoundrel (in the manner of Hitchcock’s Psycho). Chabrol is a first-rate creative artist, and it shows in his film. It is an extremely skilful drama, beautifully acted and, altogether, quite a gripping experience. In the olden days of motion pictures, when Hollywood producers parcelled out 500 features each year, the studios bought ideas and stories, and the directors had little or no say in what they produced. The results Today, the director is usually the boss, and for this reason, artists like Chabrol have only made a few movies recently. They decide what interests them, and they go ahead and make a carefully executed film. La Femme Infidele is devoted to the proposition that the old formulae, if not the greatest, are still more entertaining than most — if they are done with taste and know-how. Chabrol has taken something stagnant, and has enriched it into something engrossing and terribly graceful. MICHEL BOUQUET and STEPHANE AUDRAN M.A.S.H. to be U.S. bid at Cannes Film Festival “M.A.S.H.,” 20th Century-Fox’s record-breaking comedy, has been invited as a U.S. entry to the forth “M.A.S.H.,” are the film’s producer Ingo Preminger, director Robert Altman, screenplay writer Ring Lardner, Jr., and featured player Sally Kellerman. coming Cannes Film Festival. The smash attraction, which is playing to capacity audiences in all of its domestic engagements, will be shown in competition at the Festival on May 12. The international event, the most prestigious of all festivals, will be held from May 2-16, inclusive. Attending the fete, in conjunction with the showing of Universal’s Airport breaks RCMH records Ross Hunter’s Airport, for Universal, has registered the largest Easter attraction opening week mark in the history of Radio City Music Hall in New York by grossing $243,245. The seven-day figure also represents the largest opening gross for any film in the history of Universal Pictures.