![]() ![]() Price as Claude, the chubby chaser with a plot twist Abraham, who gives Chris some very funny flamboyance but never lets the character go completely over the top (Chris answering a pay phone is one of the funniest bits in the movie) and Moreno, whose character is cringe-inducingly politically incorrect (today) with her thick Spanish accent that sounds a lot like Charo (but the character is actually based on Better Midler, who got her big break doing shows at the Continental Baths … with Barry Manilow on piano!). Treat Williams looks fantastic in his tiny white towel and manages to pull off the Mickey Mouse voice without it becoming grating. The performances from the leads are very good, as they should be considering they essentially rehearsed for the film about 400 times! Weston is appropriately innocent and flabbergasted by what he sees, but his naivete begins to wear a little thin. Having never seen the show, I can’t say how the film compares but I suspect the more comedic elements of the story worked better on stage and with a live audience. Hearing Googie Gomez butcher Broadway showtunes and reacting every time someone thinks she’s a drag queen is worth the price of the DVD. The film was directed by Richard Lester ( A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Superman II), who would be able to bring his screwball sensibilities to the production, on a massive set constructed in a studio in England (it was cheaper to shoot there). McNally returned to write the screenplay, and Broadway cast members Weston, Moreno, Abraham and Jerry Stiller reprised their roles, while newcomer Treat Williams (his second movie) took over the role of Michael Brick, the detective played on Broadway by Stephen Collins (who would go on four years later to play Commander Will Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture). The play was a minor hit, running for 398 performances and garnering Moreno a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress (and upon her win, she said she wasn’t supporting anyone so the category was changed to Best Featured Actress the following year), so the next logical step was to turn the show into a movie. Meanwhile, Googie believes Guy is an important Broadway producer and is stalking him in hopes of getting cast in a bus and truck tour of Oklahoma! And all of this set in an era after the Stonewall riots and before the AIDS crisis, featuring what today we would call the worst of the gay stereotypes. Murray Abraham) as his guide to keep Guy from seeing things he shouldn’t see and to help divert attention from him as well. Guy Proclo spends his time dodging a “chubby chaser” and a delusional nightclub singer, Googie Gomez (Rita Moreno), while trying to hide out from a squeaky-voiced undercover detective and his homicidal brother-in-law. To save his life, he hops in a cab and tells the driver to take him to the last place anyone would think to look for him, and he ends up at The Ritz. The show starred Jack Weston as a Cleveland garbage man who married into a very Italian family, and with the patriarch’s final words being “Get Proclo,” a hit was put on the unsuspecting spouse. In 1975, new playwright Terrence McNally hit Broadway with the racy, screwball comedy The Ritz.
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