Boys' Night Out Revisited

Do you remember Boys' Night Out, the 1962 "sex comedy" starring James Garner, Howard Morris, Tony Randall and Howard Duff as the middle-aged Boys with Kim Novak as the blonde they all lust after?

Typical of the era, this a Hollywood comedy where the sex is all talk but no real action. Not on screen, anyway. (One can safely assume that then, as now, the real action was behind the scenes in Hollywood land.) I watch movies like this and feel suddenly nostalgic for a time in American life I was too young--and too black--to know. In the sixties only white people were having wild romantic misadventures like this. Apparently.

Tell me you remember this movie. If you don't, watch for it on Turner Classic Movies or one of those "romance" premium channels and see what you make of it.

Me, I love-hate the stuff. The performers in Boys' are second generation Golden Era ; slick, smoothly attractive, energetic and amusing. Watching them go through their paces is undeniably entertaining. But the story is utterly predictable. The early sixties was basically still the fifties. The New Frontier notwithstanding, America was still shoveling the same old shit about "morality." And Hollywood was still lumbered with a Code that mandated it tease American audiences with the promise of something it had no intention of delivering.

Howie (Morris), George (Randall), and Doug (Duff) are mad men in gray flannel suits, youngish marrieds longing to break free of the suburban restrictions of their lives. They envy what they imagine to be the swinging bachelor existence of their hunky buddy Fred (Garner), who, um, still lives with his mom, Ethel, played by the droll Jessie Royce Landis. (Catch her peevish tsk about the effrontery of a feisty waitress: "Have you noticed how insolent the help is becoming lately? Ever since the Kennedys got in!" It can't be coincidence that the witty Landis was Cary Grant's wisecracking mom in North by Northwest and Grace Kelly's wry and wily mom--and Grant's future mother-in-law--in To Catch a Thief.

And as long as I'm mentioning great character players, they really should have given the marvelously pixilated Ruth McDevitt more to do in this movie; she's nearly wasted as a snoopy neighbor. As is Jim "Mr. Magoo"/"Thurston Howell The Third" Backus as the opportunistic realtor. Where did the delightfully loopy Jim Backus go?)

Following yet another unexciting evening of wives, kids, and TV dinners, the married friends hit on the idea of jointly renting an apartment in the city and installing in it a Girl. A knowing, accommodating Girly-Girl they will democratically share. All they need is their pal, good ole Fred, to help them out. Unmarried, unencumbered Fred must know lots of knowing, accommodating girls or know where to find at least one, right? Fred is appalled--and intrigued. With misgiving he allows himself to get talked into setting things up.

Of course, nothing goes according to plan--that's supposed to be the fun, isn't it?--for Cathy the Girl (Novak) turns out to be brainy as well as beautiful. She's a grad student studying the adolescent fantasies of the adult suburban male. Well, of course. Cathy and Fred meet cute haggling over the rental of the deluxe apartment Fred has found for the guys. Realizing its purpose, Cathy decides for her own purposes to go along with the arrangement. (Incidentally, Christina Hendricks could have killed in this role.)

Cathy "goes along" only to a point; this is a Hollywood studio release featuring major movie stars, after all. We know going in nothing truly eyebrow-raising is going to happen in that bachelor pad. We're here to see how it's not going to happen.

And so what we get is the predictable: cold feet and confusion ensue as the neighbor snoops, the wives find out, and their mad men panic. Hysteria reigns, but only momentarily. The comely Cathy was never really a husband-stealing siren but a Good Girl in training to be a suburban spouse. In the end she wins over the wives by becoming one of them, marrying the hunky Fred and trading in her thesis for kids and TV dinners. Ah, Hollywood! In the America of 1962 I'll bet that ending was supposed to be very reassuring, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

What would life have been like if I'd been born a Cathy or some variation thereof? As I say, a part of me loves this movie and movies like it--the superior The Seven Year Itch comes to mind--and thinks the whole outrageous notion of being an alluring movie sexpot, all curves, hips and sly, full-lipped smiles, would be a hoot. Oh to be a Girly-Girl pursued by a quartet of furtive, randy skirt chasers!

Oh, put your eyebrows down. I said a "part of me" likes the idea. The rest of me--the part with the brain--knows damn well that a sexy woman being relentlessly pursued by skirt-chasing men would actually feel harassed, beleaguered, even demoralized. I retain enough memory of my twenties and thirties to know that only in fifties and sixties Hollywood movies is the experience of being pinched, palmed, and cornered by determined males something amusing.

Was the producer of Boys' Night Out Ross Hunter? It sure looks and feels like his kind of movie. Ross Hunter was not a skirt-chaser, unless we're talking Scottish kilts. He was gay. Like every Hollywood queer of his era he understood being gay was not necessarily a problem so long as you dedicated yourself to satisfying the heterosexist imperative. So while he cast Kim Novak as the Lust Object, the focus of the men's collective fantasies, one can't resist wondering whom Hunter would have cast if he'd had his Homo druthers. What would be the all-male version of Boys' Night Out (Note how the title totally works for this revision.)

Let's see.

In the Garner role--? Too easy. Rock Hudson. The strapping, handsome, homosexual Hudson, by 1962 an assured charmer with a silky baritone and impeccable comic timing, would have been perfection as the conflicted Fred.

For the others... I don't know. Tony Perkins? Rory Calhoun? Van Johnson? No, wait--how old is Van Johnson? I mean--you know what I mean--would Van Johnson have been too old in '62 to be one of the young and restless Boys? I think yes, so maybe not him... But you see where I'm going with this, yes? (Wait--wasn't Tony Randall gay? Was Rory Calhoun gay? Is it wrong that I honestly don't care?)

And for the blonde Lust Object...

He wouldn't have to be blonde of course, but since Novak was, I'm thinking inside the box. Who would have been the '62 equivalent of the young Brad Pitt? (Who is not gay, granted, but I'm talking sexual appeal, not orientation.)

Tab Hunter? How old was Tab Hunter in 1962? About thirty, wasn't he? About the same age as Novak that year? (Would thirty be too old? What is thirty in gay years?)

I mean, how different would this movie have been--and how different its impact--had the Boys all been down low brothers-in-arms? With Rock cast in the role of Fred, whose growing love for Tab, the blonde Boy Toy, forces him--forces them all--to confront his fears and come Out?

Okay, it would never have been made. Not in 1962, and not in any era with that cast. But that's a movie I would have paid to see, wouldn't you?

See Boys' Night Out starring Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Anthony Perkins and Rory Calhoun! With Tab Hunter as the delectable, dreamboat Boy Kevin! Howie, George and Doug are family men desperate for some man-on-man action. Watch the fun as with the help of their mother-dominated, confirmed bachelor friend Fred, they set up their own private playpen to make their fantasies come true! Nothing goes according to plan! The neighbor snoops! The wives find out! The mad men panic! And hysteria reigns!

But only momentarily.

Conceivably we could flip this in all sorts of directions: how about a gay black version of Boys' Night Out? Circa 2013? (Because frankly I'd have no idea how to cast it circa 1962.) With--help me out here--Tyler Perry in the role of Fred? What do you think?

And the closeted suburban mad men would be played by... Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan and Martin Lawrence? None of whom are gay--that I know of--but all of whom are very funny, and were very funny together in the 2010 remake of Death at a Funeral. They could, I think, bring a similar manic chemistry to another film about adolescent men having a lot of trouble growing up.

Note: Oh. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, it wasn't Ross Hunter who produced Boys' Night Out but the brainy beauty Cathy, star Kim Novak herself, who also worked tirelessly to promote the film. According to Mankiewicz, despite Novak's best efforts Boys' Night Out did only so-so box-office. Kim, slightly less svelte at age 29 than she used to be, took the film's relative failure as a sign that it was time to consider retirement.

Ah, well. If only the dynamic duo of Hudson and Hunter had been available... And the America of '62 had known how to lighten up.