Some of My Best Friends Are . . . (1971)

          A year after The Boys in the Band (1970) broke ground with its serious exploration of gay culture, representing a change from previous films in which homosexual characters were coded and/or marginalized, the low-budget ensemble piece Some of My Best Friends Are . . . explored similar terrain—with similar difficulty. Whereas The Boys in the Band was adapted from a well-regarded play and filmed by a promising new director (William Friedkin), Some of My Best Friends Are . . . was a screen original from first-time writer-director Mervyn Nelson, who only made one subsequent picture. His inexperience shows in every frame. The disparity in their technical polish aside, the films have interesting parallels. Some members of the LGBTQ community deride The Boys in the Band for over-the-top characterizations and a generalized theme of self-loathing, as if being gay is a curse. Some of My Best Friends Are . . . now plays gay film festivals somewhat regularly as a camp classic. Which is to say that if the folks behind either picture aspired to get early ’70s gay culture “right,” they were not fully successful—one project struck viewers as too heavy, and the other struck viewers as too silly. Seen today, The Boys in the Band is frustrating but intense and sharp, whereas Some of My Best Friends Are . . . is a bit of a mess.

          Set on New Year’s Eve in the Blue Jay Bar, a gay nightclub in Manhattan, the film tracks several gay men and their straight friends. In one poignant storyline, a nervous waiter named Phil (Nick De Noia) awaits the arrival of his blind date, Tim (Dick O’Neill), who believes Phil is a woman, since they’ve only met by phone. That storyline conveys something touching about the risks gay men in the early ’70s took when reaching outside their social circles for potential romantic partners, but De Noia’s cartoony performance diminishes the pathos. Far less interesting are scenes involving European ski instructor Michel (Uva Harden), who delivers this florid line in dubious English: “Facing death does not take courage—but two men making a life together does!” Again, right idea, wrong tone. And so it goes throughout the movie, which, incidentally, features three future TV stars. Gil Gerard, later to become Buck Rockers, plays a gay man who presents straight; Rue McLanahan, pre-Golden Girls, incarnates a clichéd “fag hag”; and Gary Sandy, a few years away from WKRP in Cincinatti, plays a hustler who experiences a major drug freakout. The other notable in the cast is Warhol-associated drag queen Candy Darling, who, no surprise, portrays a drag queen.

Some of My Best Friends Are . . . : FUNKY

Hooch (1977)

Before vapid leading man Gil Gerard found his signature role in the campy TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981), he appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows, none of which did much to elevate his stardom or to establish Gerard as a talent worthy of serious attention. Nonetheless, his productivity earned Gerard sufficient stature to claim behind-the-scenes involvement in some of his projects, such as the flavorless and plodding moonshine saga Hooch, for which Gerard served as cowriter and coproducer in addition to playing the starring role. A dull recitation of redneck-cinema clichés that’s populated by one-dimensional stereotypes instead of characters, Hooch is as bereft of entertainment value as it is of original ideas. It’s also poorly made, with anemic character introductions, shoddy transitions, and an undernourished musical score. More than anything, Hooch suffers from a lack of urgency, with the pacing of the movie feeling as laid-back as Gerard’s screen persona. The most that one can say is that Hooch is tolerable, but even mustering that much praise requires effort. It's all just so empty and trite. Gerard plays Eddie Joe, a moonshiner mired in competition with beardy and corpulent Old Bill (William T. Hicks). Eddie Joe juggles relationships with two women, one of whom is Bill's daughter, so we’re meant to perceive him as an irresistible charmer who enjoys living dangerously. The fun-and-games period of Eddie Joe's life ends when New York City gangster Tony (Danny Aiello) arrives as a lead man for crooks seeking to enter the moonshine business. Intrigue of a dimwitted sort ensues. So, too, do unnecessary scenes like the bit of Gerard and costar Melody Rogers performing a country song onstage at a hoedown. Aiello, appearing fairly early in his long career, keeps things lively during his scenes by rendering an over-the-top caricature of a goodfella. Reason enough to watch the flick? Not hardly.

Hooch: LAME

Battlestar Galactica (1978) & Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

          Writer-producer Glen A. Larson started developing the TV series that became Battlestar Galactica in the late ’60s, but didn’t get a green light until the success of Star Wars (1977) made space opera fashionable. To help recoup expenses, Universal assembled early episodes into a theatrical feature, and the movie is more than enough vintage Galactica for anyone but a hardcore fan. (Devotees of the 2003-2009 Galactica reboot will find none of that series’ provocative psychodrama in the straightforward original.) A pleasant overdose of genre tropes, the 125-minute Galactica feature is filled with wooden actors playing stock characters amidst gaudy production design and Star Wars-lite battle scenes.
          The story follows military commander Adama (Lorne Greene) as he leads a group of spaceships in flight from their devastated home worlds after a sneak attack by the lizard-like Cylons. The various human characters struggle with food shortages, wartime trauma, and a host of other melodramatic crises, all while wearing action-figure-ready costumes. Enlivened by an imaginative plot and the presence of polished guest stars including Ray Milland and Jane Seymour, Galactica moves along briskly, and some of the outer-space imagery is quite memorable, like the energetic scenes of heroes launching their “Viper” spaceships out of tubes housed inside the titular warship. As for the stars, Greene and leading man Richard Hatch are painfully earnest, so Dirk Benedict fares much better as a swaggering pilot in the Han Solo mode, while John Colicos, who plays the main human baddie, chews scenery like a termite let loose in a lumberyard, making his performance a guilty pleasure.
          The costly Galactica series was canceled after one season, but Larson took another stab at televised sci-fi with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a retread of the old pulp/serial character. Buck Rogers received the feature treatment as well, but the Buck Rogers movie is as tiresome as the Galactica movie is diverting. Gil Gerard plays the title character, a modern-day spaceman who falls into suspended animation until the 25th century, when he joins futuristic earth denizens in a galactic battle against a psychotic space princess and her various minions. As the princess, Pamela Hensley is all kinds of sexy, but the movie is sunk by stupid touches like a campy dance sequence, horrible jokes, pervy costumes (must everything be skin-tight?), and a cutesy robot voiced by Mel Blanc. Whereas Battlestar aimed for the all-ages appeal of Star Wars by mixing grown-up themes with aliens and laser fights, Buck Rogers targets infantile viewers with comic-book-style silliness.

Battlestar Galactica: FUNKY

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: LAME