1) I was 18 years old and attending college in San Francisco when The
Ritz had its West Coast premiere there. I recall the local papers running photos
of Moreno posing on a special The
Ritz cable car surrounded by a phalanx of attractive young men in
tight-fitting “The Ritz” t-shirts, ready to be transported to the film’s
screening, and later, if memory serves, to a disco after-party held at one of the city's more popular gay bathhouses. Movie premieres were rare in San Francisco, and everything about this one (disco-themed, gay-centric, hip, and a little kinky) encapsulated all the things I associate with that particular time and place.
2) The Ritz was released in the summer of 1976. America was caught up in Bicentennial and Olympics fever, and me...I was swept up in a fever of a different kind. One resulting from prolonged exposure to the pervasive and persuasive ad campaign for that other summer '76 release, The Omen ("You are one day closer to the end of the world!"). I went bonkers for that movie and saw The Omen at least four times that summer, never getting around to seeing The Ritz even once (although, in my defense, The Ritz performed so poorly that it was in theaters only a short time).
3) Curiously, while I couldn't be troubled to see the film itself, I did make the effort to go to the theater where The Ritz was playing just so I could buy myself a "The Ritz" t-shirt. It was this very cool
(for 1976, anyway) European-cut white shirt with the film’s title in black art-deco
lettering on the front and Al Hirschfeld’s poster art caricatures of the film’s cast
on the back. I absolutely loved that shirt!
It lasted all through college and survived for many years until finally
disintegrating in the wash sometime in the mid-'80s.
Even the usually reliable Ebay has proved fruitless in searching for another one of these T-shirts. I knew I should have bought two of them when I had the chance back in 1976 |
When I finally got around to seeing The Ritz on cable TV in the late-'70s, I found I enjoyed it a great deal, and it instantly became one of my all-time favorites. I was so impressed with the attempt to create a kind of modern Marx Brothers comedy of chaos —a classic farce full of broadly pitched performances and McNally's irreverent send-ups of everything from homophobia to show business, gay culture to gangster films.
The raw material is a great deal of outrageous good fun that could have perhaps benefited from that intangible, crazy "something" that Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich brought to Young Frankenstein and What's Up, Doc?, respectively, but while The Ritz never reaches the heights of comic lunacy necessary to make this kind of comedy really soar, it nevertheless has a tremendously funny freneticism to it that throws new things at you so fast that even if you're not laughing, you're rarely, if ever, bored.
Rita Moreno as Googie Gomez |
Jack Weston as Gaetano Proclo |
Jerry Stiller as Carmine Vespucci |
Treat Williams as Michael Brick |
F. Murray Abraham as Chris |
Kaye Ballard as Vivian Proclo |
I always regret that I didn't first see The Ritz back when the climate of the times better reflected the optimistic spirit of healthy hedonism depicted on the screen. This out-and-proud retooling of the classic bedroom farce was one of the earliest (if not the first) mainstream examples of gay sexuality presented as normal, fun, and every bit as prone to comical chaos and misunderstanding as heterosexual sex. Gay characters are introduced in a non-tragic, comic milieu where for once, the humor derives from their personalities. Being gay is merely a part of who they are, not the source of a joke. I can only think of a handful of films from that era (Saturday Night at the Baths, A Very Natural Thing, Some of My Best Friends Are) that successfully portrayed gay people in a gay-specific environment that was neither defined nor impacted by hetero acceptance or disapproval.
Summarizing a farce's plot in print is thankless and the written equivalent of a tongue-twister: you know what you intend to say, but it often sounds garbled. But I’ll give it my best (and briefest): Cleveland sanitation company president Gaetano Proclo (Weston) has a hit put out on him by his mafia-connected brother-in-law (Stiller), and mistakenly picks a N.Y. gay bathhouse to hide out in.
Hoping to just lay low for the duration, Proclo finds himself the unwitting target of an amorous chubby-chaser (Paul B. Price), a blackmail-minded private detective (Williams), and a monumentally untalented Puerto Rican cabaret singer (Moreno) who mistakes him for a producer. Of course, everything that can go wrong does, and complications escalate to a delightfully silly pitch, all leading to the anticipated chase/free-for-all finale.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Depending on the critic, the film legacy of director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, Petulia, The Three
Musketeers) has been categorized as either varied or
uneven. But that which has been most consistent in all of his work—a talent
for brilliant bits of staged pandemonium—is well-suited to this screwball fish-out-of-water burlesque that mines traditionally uncomfortable gay/straight confrontations for laughs.
In comedy, all is forgiven if you just come through with the funny, and on that score, Lester, with just a few minor lags in pacing, succeeds in keeping things moving at the requisite frenetic pace. Lester's confident handling of the dizzying particulars of so many characters, doorways, and complications never gets in the way of his Broadway-trained cast (Moreno, Weston, Stiller, Abraham, and mustachioed chubby-chaser, Paul B. Price all reprise their stage roles), each of whom is allowed their moment to shine.
PERFORMANCES
Before talent-free, self-deluding, fame-whores became a staple of show-biz (thanks, reality TV), they were the deserving targets of satirical derision. After years of American Idol, Rita Moreno’s Puerto Rican bombshell, Googie Gomez, doesn’t seem nearly the awful performer she’s supposed to be (she sings only marginally worse than, say, Katy Perry), but the loony, comedic brilliance of Moreno’s performance hasn't waned a bit. Like the late Madeline Kahn, Moreno is an actress capable of being outrageous and natural at the same time. Fabulously sexy, Moreno imbues Googie with a comic lunacy that steals every scene she's in.
Legend has it that Terrence McNally wrote The Ritz for Moreno after seeing her perform the character of Googie at parties. If so, the man should be commended for resisting the impulse to place this dynamically colorful character at the front and center of the play. As a peripheral but indispensable element of crazy in The Ritz’s party mix, she is the film's spice; The Ritz offers just enough Googie ineptitudes, tantrums, and malaprops to leave you wanting more.
In comedy, all is forgiven if you just come through with the funny, and on that score, Lester, with just a few minor lags in pacing, succeeds in keeping things moving at the requisite frenetic pace. Lester's confident handling of the dizzying particulars of so many characters, doorways, and complications never gets in the way of his Broadway-trained cast (Moreno, Weston, Stiller, Abraham, and mustachioed chubby-chaser, Paul B. Price all reprise their stage roles), each of whom is allowed their moment to shine.
Devoted fat-fetishist Claude Perkins (Paul B. Price) puts the moves on a badly-disguised Gaetano Proclo (Jack Weston) |
Before talent-free, self-deluding, fame-whores became a staple of show-biz (thanks, reality TV), they were the deserving targets of satirical derision. After years of American Idol, Rita Moreno’s Puerto Rican bombshell, Googie Gomez, doesn’t seem nearly the awful performer she’s supposed to be (she sings only marginally worse than, say, Katy Perry), but the loony, comedic brilliance of Moreno’s performance hasn't waned a bit. Like the late Madeline Kahn, Moreno is an actress capable of being outrageous and natural at the same time. Fabulously sexy, Moreno imbues Googie with a comic lunacy that steals every scene she's in.
Legend has it that Terrence McNally wrote The Ritz for Moreno after seeing her perform the character of Googie at parties. If so, the man should be commended for resisting the impulse to place this dynamically colorful character at the front and center of the play. As a peripheral but indispensable element of crazy in The Ritz’s party mix, she is the film's spice; The Ritz offers just enough Googie ineptitudes, tantrums, and malaprops to leave you wanting more.
Googie Gomez launches into a grievously misguided rendition of "Everything's Coming Up Roses" |
Every member of The Ritz’s gamely peripatetic ensemble cast is worthy of accolades (this film must have been a continuity nightmare), but Jack Weston is my personal favorite. A rubber-faced master of the double-take with all the corpulent grace of Oliver Hardy, Weston makes me laugh aloud time and time again over his incredulous reactions to the not-so-fine mess he’s gotten himself into.
Googie tries her hand at seduction |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The Ritz is about
as New York as you can get in terms of setting, subject, and humor, but was
filmed, most likely for financial reasons, in the UK (the illusion is shattered
less than a minute into the film when the actress cast as Jack Weston’s daughter
delivers the line, “I want to go back to Cleveland” with a pronounced British
lilt). What fascinates me about The Ritz
is how British and Carry On-ish it
all feels despite hewing so faithfully to the stage show and employing a
largely Yankee. Director Richard Lester may be American by birth, but in having made England his home since 1956, I think he
brings something to The Ritz that makes
me wonder if perhaps there isn’t something to the widely held belief that
there are really subtle and not-so-subtle differences between British and American humor.
In farce, all beds are made for hiding under, and situations are never as they seem |
"See something you like, buddy?" |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Given that the heaviest topics can be lightened through
levity, humor has always been one of the most pain-free ways to broach
controversial subjects on film. With The
Ritz, audiences otherwise loathe to spend 90 minutes watching a movie set in
an environment as alien and potentially disconcerting as a gay bathhouse can galvanize
around and have their latent homophobia assuaged by the more traditionally accessible
comedy targets: sexism - the sexually rapacious heterosexual female; xenophobia - Googie's Puerto Rican assault on the English Language (I think Al Pacino studied Moreno her for his accent in Scarface); and irony - Googie's deluded belief in her own talent.
And if laughs are hard to elicit from viewers unsure of what to make out of a nonjudgmental look at an establishment where men gather to have anonymous, promiscuous sex with other men, then Gaetano Proclo’s exaggerated Alice Through The Looking Glass sense of bemused amazement provides the perfect outlet for all that nervous tension building up inside.
And if laughs are hard to elicit from viewers unsure of what to make out of a nonjudgmental look at an establishment where men gather to have anonymous, promiscuous sex with other men, then Gaetano Proclo’s exaggerated Alice Through The Looking Glass sense of bemused amazement provides the perfect outlet for all that nervous tension building up inside.
If, however, at film's end, audiences are left with their presumptions challenged, replaced with only the awareness that one has spent 90 minutes in the presence of a bunch of zany, eccentric characters, each unique and yet somehow the same...sympathetic, misunderstood, likable;...well, to me that's one small blow for the power of comedy.
Three Gay Caballeros |
The Ritz is not perfect, but it IS a funny film, and there are more genuine laughs to be found here than in a great many more well-regarded comedies out there. It's a forgotten gem that has garnered a well-deserved cult following.
The Ritz was revived on Broadway in 2007 for a limited run and featured Rosie Perez as Googie.
Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012The Ritz was revived on Broadway in 2007 for a limited run and featured Rosie Perez as Googie.