7 - Shirley Russell and the Role of The Boy Friend in 1970s Retro

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Once there was a happy time that everyone remembers but no one ever really knew. How do you capture the look, the sound, the style of a time that has remained so vividly alive in our imagination? It isn’t easy but it can be a lot of fun.

In the short documentary All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing, by Kaleidoscope films, made to promote the release of The Boy Friend (MGM-EMI, 1971), the voice-over explains director Ken Russell’s approach to adapting composer Sandy Wilson’s 1950s Broadway hit, originally written as a pastiche of 1920s musicals: ‘Russell decided it would have to be three things: a typical stage musical of the twenties; an affectionate salute to the cinematic musical fantasies of the 1930s; and a take-off of all the backstage Hollywood musicals of all time.’ The documentary adds another layer to the conflation of time in Russell’s adaptation. Set in the 1920s, The Boy Friend blends the story of a down-at-heel English theatre company who are performing the musical ‘The Boy Friend’ on stage. When they hear that the Hollywood director Tony De Thrill (Vladek Sheybal) is in the audience, the vigour of their presentation is increasingly brought into contrast with the lacklustre backstage atmosphere and amateur production values and aesthetics. De Thrill reimagines the stage scenes in 1930s-style Technicolor, as cinematic fantasies implying the possibilities of Hollywood to come.

All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing shows the cast rehearsing and filming in 1971: learning the choreography in a dance studio in leotards, then being filmed doing the Charleston in their flapper dresses while Ken Russell, in wraparound shades, presides over the crew who are in jeans and T-shirts. Twiggy, interviewed in the back of a cab, switches from the innocence of her role as Polly Browne, to the insouciance of a famous fashion model. It also reveals how The Boy Friend is a testament to the ‘nostalgia mode’ of the early 1970s as identified by cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson.3 It is a quotation of the past which cannot be viewed without the context of the present.