A legendary playwright, Rita Moreno & a mobster all walk into a gay bathhouse…
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting 1976’s stage-to-screen adaptation of Terrence McNally’s gay bathhouse farce, The Ritz.Doing a weekly dive into the history of queer cinema (moving through various decades, genres, movie stars, budgets, and countries) has proven to be really eye-opening in terms of tracking which elements of our community have continued to change through the years, and which have remained the same.
Although the public perceptions of queerness (and people that identify within its umbrella) have evolved, what has remained at its center—at least through a cinematic lens—has been an unflinching sense of community and unity; of a group of people that keep looking for and finding each other, creating spaces to co-exist, and bonding both in pain and in joy.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.This week, we take a look back at 1976’s The Ritz, an adaptation of the Terrence McNally play of the same name.
It’s a film that, despite being a pure farce at its heart (perhaps one of the least “serious” movies we have covered so far), perfectly captures this aspect of shared queer identity.
It simultaneously depicts a type of space that has culturally changed and gone out of fashion today, but also shows an irreverence, wit, and spark in its depiction of gay men that feels familiar and current.The Ritz, directed by Richard Lester and written by McNally (adapting his own work), follows one night in the lives of a group of characters in the titular Manhattan gay bath house.
