Movie · 1971 · Music, Comedy, Romance · 2h 17m · PG · English
Curator score: 7.4/10 (12.7K ratings)
A glittering super colossal heart warming toe-tapping continuously delightful musical extravaganza!
Overview
When the leading lady of a low-budget musical revue sprains her ankle, the assistant stage manager is forced to understudy and perform in her place.
Ratings
Curator score: 7.4/10
IMDb: 6.8/10
Letterboxd: 3.85/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 78%
TMDB: 6.5/10
Director
Ken Russell
Production
Russflix, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, EMI Films
Cast
Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Max Adrian, Bryan Pringle, Murray Melvin, Moyra Fraser, Georgina Hale, Sally Bryant, Vladek Sheybal, Tommy Tune, Brian Murphy, Graham Armitage, Antonia Ellis, Caryl Little, Anne Jameson, Catherine Willmer, Robert La'Bassiere, Barbara Windsor, Glenda Jackson, Imogen Claire
Curator Review
Verdict
A wildly stylized, love-it-or-hate-it musical pastiche that turns backstage chaos into a delirious spectacle. If you enjoy camp, theatrical excess, and Ken Russell’s abrasive visual imagination, it’s a standout; if you want warmth, polish, or easy charm, it may feel intentionally grating.
Best for
Ken Russell completists
viewers who like campy or anti-musical energy
fans of backstage showbiz stories
people drawn to 1920s-inspired costume and production design
audiences who enjoy maximalist visual style
Skip if
you dislike loud, chaotic musicals
you want a sentimental or emotionally easy romance
you prefer clean, classical musical staging
you’re sensitive to shrill, exhausting, or deliberately alienating tone
Overview
The Boy Friend is less a cozy backstage musical than a gleeful assault on the genre’s manners. Ken Russell turns a low-stakes theater story into a feverish collage of fantasy, performance, and theatrical self-parody, with Twiggy as the cool center of a production that keeps threatening to spin off its axis.
Worth noting
What makes it memorable is the collision of old-fashioned musical form with Russell’s taste for excess. The film keeps shifting between rehearsal-room drudgery and extravagant dream sequences, so the pleasure comes from watching the movie become more unruly than the story can contain.
Bottom line
It is not especially tender, and that’s part of the point. The humor can feel abrasive, the energy relentless, but the design, choreography, and visual invention make it a major curiosity for anyone who likes musicals pushed into stranger, more acidic territory.
Top Letterboxd reviews
comrade_yui (5★) · 789 likes
this is a musical specifically designed to give an enormous headache to people who hate musicals and i absolutely respect its dedication to being extremely annoying and exhausting to watch
sarah squirm (4★) · 369 likes
need to watch 800000000 eye makeup tutorial videos after this
movie magic!!!
theriverjordan (3.5★) · 261 likes
“The Boy Friend” is a musical dream that unfolds in an inescapable horror of a theatrical nightmare.
Director Ken Russell is better known for his mind bending thrillers, “The Devils” and “Altered States,” so it’s with particular expertise that he brings his talents to a genre that never asked for them: musical comedy.
The first foray into a leading film role by recently retired supermodel Twiggy, “Boy Friend” is a loving pastiche of 20s theatre and Busby Berkeley. The aggressiveness… more
🔮 dana danger 🔮 (4.5★) · 249 likes
gaze within gaze within gaze. of course ken russell, with his penchant for vulgar excess, makes the perfect busby berkeley movie.
comrade_yui (5★) · 219 likes
dumbfounding and confounding, one of the most exhausting film experiences in my entire life, i can only really compare the feeling that the boy friend gives me to the same feeling that i have whenever i watch a michael bay movie -- at the end of it, i'm tired, drained, overwhelmed by the cacophonous images and sounds, bludgeoned into idiocy -- a feeling that i adore! ken russell is a master, i love him and his hyperbolic style.