by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Ritz, a 1976 farce comedy set in a Gay bathhouse and
reflecting the relative innocence of the Gay subculture in the 12 years between
the start of the Queer liberation movement in 1969 and the advent of AIDS in
1981. (There’s a sort of sinister drumroll of fate in the wisecrack, when the
protagonist worries about catching athlete’s foot from walking around the place
barefooted and he’s told, “You’re lucky if that’s all you catch here.”) The Ritz began life as a Broadway play by Terrence McNally,
back when he was still trying to get out of the shadow of his formidable
partner and prove to the theatrical world that he was a major writer in his own
right and not just Mrs. Edward Albee. The first scene of McNally’s script — he
got to adapt his own play for the film and most of the principal actors carried
over from the stage production — is the obligatory “opening up,” set in a palatial (as palatial as
the revenues from a Mob-controlled garbage business in Cleveland could make it,
anyway) mansion in which a dying gangster named Vespucci tells his son Carmine
(Jerry Stiller, who had a brilliantly funny stand-up act with his wife Anne
Meara and the two later produced Ben Stiller, who had a brilliant success as a
screen comedian even though he wasn’t anywhere nearly as funny as his parents),
“Get Proclo.” At first he — and we — merely means the old man is summoning
Gaetano Proclo (Jack Weston), the younger Vespucci’s brother-in-law, but it
soon becomes apparent that what it really means is the older Vespucci is
ordering his son to kill Proclo.
(Needless to say, this scene is shot in the dank brown lighting of The
Godfather, a virtually inevitable
reference for a 1976 movie spoofing the Mafia.) When this dawns on the rather
thick Proclo, he flees to New York City and tells his cab driver, “Take me to
the last place in New York the Mob would think of looking for me.”
Accordingly
the driver takes him to the Ritz, a free-swinging Gay bathhouse patterned on
the real-life Continental Baths, which offered not only the usual attractions
of a Gay bathhouse — including quite a lot of hot (and not-so-hot) men walking
around wearing nothing but bath towels and available for quick on-the-spot sex
— but entertainment as well. The real Continental Baths helped launch the
career of Bette Midler — she was spotted there by a talent scout and signed to
Atlantic Records (and the musical director for her first album was the young,
and then equally unknown, Barry Manilow) — and I’ve long been amused by the
Johnny Carson Tonight show
where he clearly edges around the actual nature of the place where she was
discovered while introducing her (“She was found in a Turkish bath … a men’s Turkish bath”). Alas, the fictitious Ritz has only
been able to attract a singularly lower level of talent: aspiring star Googie
Gomez (Rita Moreno, who clearly had to “dumb down” her performance to play
someone considerably less talented than she is for real), who performs a
version of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from the musical Gypsy, screeching the high notes and singing in a thick
Latina accent that makes the lyrics virtually unintelligible. (At that she’s
not that much worse than the song’s
originator, Ethel Merman.) Proclo finds himself in this world of prissy queens,
drag performers, wanna-be cowboys and the rest of the Gay world as it existed
(and as Hollywood was willing to depict it) in 1976 — and it’s to the credit of
director Richard Lester and his casting director, Mary Selway, that they didn’t
pick a whole bunch of drop-dead gorgeous men but instead filled the Ritz with
the same mix of physical “types” one would have found in a real Gay bathhouse.
Among them is “chubby chaser” Claude Perkins (Paul B. Price), who sees Proclo and
immediately falls in lust with him; Chris (F. Murray Abraham seven years before
Amadeus), the sort of decently
attractive but not wildly hot Gay man who tends to get ignored in places like
this and responds by trying way too hard; and Michael Brick (Treat Williams, easily the hottest guy in
the cast physically but speaking in a high-pitched voice — was it a “trick”
voice he worked out for the role, or was he dubbed?), who isn’t Gay at all but
is a private detective who’s been hired by Vespucci to trace Proclo and has
discovered him at the Ritz, where he’s infiltrated and has used the house phone
to bring Vespucci there. Vespucci duly arrives — where he’s handcuffed to one
of the Ritz’s beds by the insatiable Claude (who turns out to be an old Army
buddy of Proclo’s — don’t ask) — and so does his sister, Mrs. Proclo (Kaye
Ballard, who’s billed third even though she has all too little screen time),
who gets let into the Ritz because her clothes are so baggy and her general
demeanor so butch the doorman mistakes her for a man.
The Ritz is pretty much a French-style sex farce, differing
from a million other similar plays only in that it features Gay people, and it
gets pretty loud and formless towards the end, but it’s still quite a funny
movie and a nice reminder of how good a comic actor Jack Weston was in his
prime — as the clueless straight guy who’s literally fearful for his life as well as his sexuality,
he’s marvelous and the glue that holds this whole piece together. A more
sensitive author than the Terrence McNally of 1976 (including the McNally of
his later, more “serious” plays) might have made Googie Gomez, with her
aspirations and pretensions, a figure of genuine pathos like Marilyn Monroe’s
character in Bus Stop, but
she’s fine the way she is and Rita Moreno’s performance is a marvelous send-up
of every clichéd “Mexican Spitfire” role a young, attractive Latina actress has
ever been put through. One of the choicer bits is a sequence in which Weston’s
character joins two other men in doing a lip-synch routine to the Andrews
Sisters’ record “The Three Caballeros” as part of the Ritz’s amateur talent
contest (naturally the sign advertising it is misspelled “amatuer”!). The
Ritz’s greatest value is as a
period piece, showing the cheery insouciance of Queer male culture c. 1976 before first the
growing maturation of the movement (like other civil-rights struggles, the
early leaders of Queer rights were people on the fringes with little or nothing
to lose, and their successes paved the way for more “mainstream” people to come
out and join) and then the advent of AIDS (which became mythologized in Queer
history as the catastrophe which turned us away from sexual liberation and
multi-partner lifestyles and made us all want to get married — that’s an
oversimplification but not much of one) pretty much ended the party and led,
among other things, to the closure of virtually all the Gay bathhouses, to the
point where younger Gay men watching this movie would probably have to have the
whole concept explained to them. The DVD of The Ritz included the original trailer, which proclaimed it
“Richard Lester’s funniest movie!” — an odd thing to say when you consider this
is the man who made A Hard Day’s Night — and some other people who worked with Lester on his Beatles projects,
including Help! composer Ken Thorne and
Apple Films producer Denis O’Dell (note the spelling of his first name; this
film got it right but some of his other credits have it wrong), also worked on The
Ritz, which effectively
re-created New York City on the soundstages at Twickenham, England.
