Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Gideon24 The Boys in the Band was the ground breaking 1970 film, based on Mart Crowley's play that was probably the first mainstream theatrical film in which most of the characters are homosexual. Despite some extremely dated elements, this film was important in that it did not present all gay characters as flouncing fairies, though that stereotype is definitely represented here. What this film does do is present homosexuals in all shapes, sizes, colors, and degrees of masculinity.The film takes place during a birthday party thrown by Michael (Kenneth Nelson) for his friend Harold (Leonard Frey) with a short guest list which includes Michael's best friend Donald (Frederick Combs), a former trick with whom Michael eventually became BFF's. Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) and Larry (Keith Prentice) are in a committed relationship, though Hank seems a little more committed than Larry. Cliff Gorman is hysterically funny as the flouncing fairy Emory and Rueben Greene plays his gal pal Bernard, the only non-Caucasian party guest. Things get sticky when an old friend of Michael's from college named Alan (Peter White) shows up unexpectedly, who may or may not be gay and may or may not know about Michael and may or may not be attracted to Hank. Michael also initiates a vicious party game that turns really ugly and brings some long bubbling resentments to the surface.William Friedkin's masterful and in-your-face direction is a big plus here and the performances are uniformly first-rate down the line. Sadly, several of the actors in this film, who were gay in real life, are no longer with us, a sort of underlying message that the film still seems to send today. I also liked the fact that this film, like 1982's Making Love, addressed the fact that being married has nothing to do with sexual orientation. We learn that Hank was married and left his wife to be with Larry and Alan's confusion about it is kind of aggravating.If you have an open mind and looking for something a little different that has a significant spot in cinematic history, check this one out.

Dalbert Pringle If The Boys In The Band (TBITB, for short) was really supposed to be an accurate depiction of what happens at a party consisting of only gay men, then it sure looked to me like these unhappy campers didn't know how to have a good time (sober or drunk) when they were in each other's company. They really didn't.From hurling vicious insults, to hateful bitching & bickering, to basking in self-pity, to shoving each other around, to deep-rooted resentment & bitterness - Believe me, TBITB did not paint itself a pretty picture.Below are several quotes taken directly from this decidedly sordid homosexual soap opera. If these sorts of comments appeal to you, then, perhaps, TBITB will, indeed, entertain you to pieces - If not - Then you can always choose another movie to watch."There's nothing more boring than a queen doing a Judy Garland impersonation.""Who would want to be a flaming, little sissy like you?""Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse.""Just the same, old, tired fairies.""You remind me of an old maid, school teacher."(Get the picture?)*Note* - This sort of chit-chat went on and on and on, non-stop, throughout the entire course of the story.Personally, I believe that if director William Friedkin (who 3 years later directed The Exorcist) had thrown a few lesbians into the mix at Harold's birthday party, then that, I'm sure, would've helped heaps to alleviate some of the brutal pettiness and irksome monotony that prevailed from TBITB's swishy beginning to its trite and tearful finale.

Mark Dunlap It wasn't long after I first watched The Boys in the Band, in the mid-1980s, that I went out to find a book with a copy of the play script. I re-read the script so often that I can feel I can accurately say it is downright perfect script: the dialog is always believable, interesting, consistently gives keen insights into the characters' personalities, and has some moments of delightful humor. One of the most fascinating things about how the script "builds" is that the climactic moment occurs with the utterance of a single word. I remember once a large group of us were watching the movie together and when that one word was uttered, someone gasped out loud.Is the film as good as the written word? Yes, but only almost. I am disappointed at the way some dialog was cut out of the film, and I don't just mean a long monologue by Michael in an early scene. Even towards the end there were some brief but crucial bits of dialog that would reveal even more about the personalities of the characters. For example, some other reviewers here have commented on some vicious racial slurs that are uttered in the movie, but there is a crucial line cut from the movie that explains why Bernard tolerates the fact that Emory utters those slurs. Even the Cowboy has a great line in the play that was cut out of the movie. So I recommend that people interested in the movie also try to find any book that contains the script too, and gain even better insight to the characters than you'll see in the film alone.Lastly, I strongly agree with the other reviewers here that Friedkins' direction, the camera work, and the actors are excellent, but I do have a quibble about post-production, namely the editing. There are a couple of scenes in which the process of splicing together segments of different takes is too obvious.

Conrad Spoke I remember seeing about fifteen minutes of this many years ago, maybe in the late seventies. Back then it had that off-putting unpleasantness that repels you when you're pelted with too much information about people, language and customs that are weird and foreign. At the same time its display of a neat sociological spectrum of gay types was stagy and obvious. I expected things to get a lot creepier – kissing, perhaps – so I turned it off.I should have left it on because the story is manifestly about universals, not the specifics of gay culture. It gets to this point through a kind of gay over-exposure, and I'll bet the author was keenly aware of how this would deliver the audience to an unexpected destination. The limp-wristed flailing of the queerest character had nowhere to go after two or three cringe-inducing lines, and every possible synonym for gay is flung out for our edification. This seems very dated in its pushiness, but at the same time it quickly brought me the feeling that I sort of knew these people. After cycling through every possible variety of cattiness or kindness between every combination of characters, it finally precipitated a dramatic movement with something important to say.The way it culminated was ingenious and moving, even if I saw it coming about ten seconds before the big gasp. If a clumsy line had telegraphed this event, say, a minute or two too soon the revelation would have been corny. In the theater (which is where I wish I could have experienced this) the immediacy of live actors would likely have prevented even ten seconds of prescience. This moment was the work of a very skilled writer.However, despite its strong resolution, the build-up was awfully repetitive. The bitchy comments were too clever by half, too on-the-nose and too frequent. Even in 1968 a thoroughly gay audience must have groaned at a lot of this.The most dating aspect of this play/film is the absence of any discussion or worry about AIDS. Sex is either flippant or funny or an obvious concomitant of the melodrama of straight sex. It's never scary or foreboding in a life-or-death sense, but only difficult and maddening in a happy-or-despairing sense. Somebody might at least have mentioned the inconvenience of herpes or gonorrhea.The documentary features are excellent. Interviews with Crowley, Friedkin and two actors give a lively historical context to the production of the play and the film. They are honest about the film's outdated aspects but also generously enthusiastic regarding its lasting dramatic and cultural impact.Wikipedia says that five of the six gay actors have died of AIDS, a cruel fact that went unmentioned in the respectful but brief dedications at the very end.