The Boy Friend

A timid actress is forced to cover for the injured star and falls for the leading man, in Ken Russell's thoroughly British variant on the MGM musical.

Sandy Wilson, creator of 1954’s smash-hit salute to innocent Twenties musicals The Boy Friend, was scandalised by Ken Russell’s iconoclastic film adaptation that put the ‘vamp’ into ‘revamp’. Watching a clapped-out English stage production, Hollywood producer Mr. De Thrill reimagines it as a Busby Berkeley spectacular. Twiggy is disarmingly charming and the supporting cast is wonderfully bizarre. Russell's jaw-droppingly over-the-top dream sequences prove that nothing succeeds like excess.