The Boys in the Band

Harold (Leonard Fray, Fiddler on the Roof) is turning 32 and his friend Michael (Kenneth Nelson, Off-Broadway’s The Fantasticks) is hosting a party for him in his Upper East Side apartment in New York City. The party guests—Emory (Cliff Gorman, All That Jazz), Donald (Frederick Combs), Bernard (Reuben Greene, Mikey and Nicky), Hank (Laurence Luckinbill, Such Good Friends), Larry (Keith Prentice, Cruising) and “Cowboy Tex” (Robert La Tourneaux), who is also Harold’s gift from Michael—all arrive to Michael’s apartment. Like Harold and Michael, the party guests are all gay men. That is, until Michael’s straight friend Alan (Peter White, TV’s All My Children) unexpectedly crashes the party. As the night gets longer, and the guests get more inebriated, the festivities turn darker and raw emotions surface.

Adapted for the screen by Mart Crowley, from his groundbreaking play of the same name, The Boys In the Band is a pivotal film in the early career of director William Friedkin, released just a year shy of The French Connection, which would award him an Oscar for Best Director. The ensemble cast of the controversial Off-Broadway play reprised their roles on screen, many acting on camera for the first time. The Boys In the Band is often regarded as one of the first films from a major studio to explicitly feature openly gay characters, with Crowley’s colorful language fueled text offering profanities that many moviegoers hadn’t heard in a film prior. Cinématographe is proud to bring this essential landmark of queer cinema to 4K UHD for the first time in the world, from a brand new 4K restoration of its original camera negatives.