Could The Ritz be made today?

In 1975, new playwright Terrence McNally hit Broadway with the racy, screwball comedy 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. 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. Not the hotel. A gay bath house. 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. Luckily he has Chris (F. Murray Abraham) as his guide to keep Guy from seeing things he shouldn’t see and to help divert attention from him as well. 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.

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. 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 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).

The film, unsurprisingly, was a bomb because how do you sell a comedy about a gay bath house in New York to audiences in middle America? The film showed up occasionally on TV, heavily edited and mostly late at night, and only got some sporadic home video releases. The most recent DVD release went out of print at the retail level, but the folks at the Warner Archive Collection have rescued it from obscurity once again (apparently using the same master as for the last retail DVD release). The WB Shop website says the film has not been remastered for this DVD release, however the film looks and sounds just fine.

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. 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. Treat Williams looks fantastic in his tiny white towel and manages to pull off the Mickey Mouse voice without it becoming grating. The standouts are Paul B. 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!). Hearing Googie butcher Broadway showtunes with a full orchestra (in white tie and tails) playing poolside, and her reaction every time someone thinks she’s a drag queen, is worth the price of the DVD.

The story kicks into gear in the last third of the film when Guy’s brother-in-law (Stiller) gets into the bath house and the old mistaken identity twist comes into play while characters try hiding out in various locations. It may not be roll-on-the-floor hilarious, but there are some genuinely funny moments. Watching it today, however, one wonders if this film could ever have been made in this era without offending the LGBT community or setting LGBT rights back 50 years (not to mention the effect of AIDS on lives, but on the bath house industry as well). Most of the characters in the bath house, thankfully, seem rather benign as they lounge around the pool (we never see what goes on in the steam room) but would the overly queeny Chris and chubby chaser Claude be accepted as viable characters in a film set today? Would Googie Gomez offend the Hispanic community with her comically thick (“Joo don wanna mess wit Googie!”) accent?

The show was revived for a brief run in 2007, but the spark — and the naughtiness — of the 1975 production was lacking. The same could be said for the film itself. There are parts of it that I found to be very funny, and I thought the performances were all top-notch, but Lester just isn’t able to bring that same screwball sensibility to it like Peter Bogdanovich did in 1972’s What’s Up, Doc? The film is a curiosity, and maybe even a record of the original Broadway show that would otherwise not exist, so it’s good that the Warner Archive Collection has made it available on DVD. It’s certainly not a movie for everyone, but the target audience may find it to be a quaint reminder of a particular period of time.