Some of My Best Friends Are... (1971)

I don't recall ever having heard of this before seeing it listed in Alonso Duralde's book, "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas" in the chapter devoted to the worst Christmas movies of all time. Actually, it was in the "other titles to consider" section of that chapter, right between Six Weeks (agreed) and Thomas Kincaid's Christmas Cottage (so bad it's amazing). It was the year of production that really drew me to this one in particular - excluding specials, I really haven't seen that many Christmas movies produced in the 1970s, and far fewer I'd consider at all worthwhile. Lists of holiday films usually only include a spattering of examples. I suspect there are quite a few in hiding - I've been doing this long enough to have seen entire eras and subgenres of Christmas media seemingly emerge from the void several times in the past, but for whatever reason the '70s don't seem to have been excavated in the way that, say, '40s and '50s holiday noir was a couple years ago.

So, with that in mind let's talk about "Some of My Best Friends Are...", a low-budget movie about New York's gay community in the early '70s set in a bar on Christmas Eve.

That sounds like something with a lot of potential, right? All the more so when you learn it features a number of iconic actors from that community. Fannie Flagg, the actress and author who'd go on to write the novel, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe", as well as the screenplay to its Hollywood adaptation, has a part in this movie. So does Rue McClanahan, who'd play Blanche on Golden Girls a decade later. Trans actress, Candy Darling, who appeared in the Christmas horror movie, Silent Night, Bloody Night, a few years later, had a sizable role here, as well. The list goes on: after the movie I glanced through Wikipedia articles for the performers to get some context, and the people were fascinating.

The movie... not so much. But I kind of suspected as much when the guy who wrote the book on Christmas movies and the book on gay movies dropped this unceremoniously on a list of bad films.

It's difficult to summarize what went wrong here, because - frankly - it's a lot. It's almost equally difficult to describe the movie for the opposite reason: while the movie includes a number of storylines, none drive the film forward. It's structured as a series of loosely connected plotlines occurring over the course of the night at a crowded bar.

I spent most of the movie just trying to figure out what it was going for. Characters tell a lot of jokes, but the direction and editing undercut any attempt at comedy. There are several diegetic songs, but it certainly doesn't play like a musical. It's structured like a realistic slice-of-life look at a subculture, but if that was the intent it's undermined by exaggerated melodramatic confrontations, expressionistic dream sequences, and a pervasive sense of artificiality. That leaves drama, which aligns with the soundtrack. The problem there is the decentralized structure and massive number of characters mean you're never really given a chance to become invested in the individual stories.

While I wasn't clear on what this was trying to be, I kept feeling like it was desperately trying to be something. The movie feels like it's chasing a tone and style it can't catch. The consensus online is that the template it's attempting to emulate is the 1970 film, "The Boys in the Band", by director William Friedkin. I haven't seen that, so I can't weigh in one way or the other, save to reiterate that "Some of My Best Friends Are..." certainly feels like a faded xerox copy of some other movie.

As far as the holidays are concerned, I don't have much to add that isn't fairly self-evident. The movie returns to themes of the search for belonging: setting the movie at Christmas highlights the fact none of these characters are able or willing to spend the holiday with family. I was a little surprised the movie didn't do more with the idea of found family - it's in there a little, but there's so much animosity and isolation within the greater community that the concept is kept at arm's length. There's also a recurring implication that the bar is less a home than the only alternative available.

In terms of the concept and structure, the closest parallel I can think of might be last year's Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, but that comparison is still a stretch. I'm still undecided on Miller's Point, but there's no question it achieves the exact tone and feeling it's aiming for. That's really not the case with "Some of My Best Friends Are...", which stumbles in its attempts to sell weird cinematography as artistic vision. The impression I kept getting was that writer/director Mervyn Nelson just didn't understand movies as an artform. I wasn't at all surprised to learn his background is in theater, where this sort of script would feel more natural.

This movie just doesn't work, which is a shame as it features an impressive and unique cast. But whatever the movie was going for, it doesn't pull it off. I wasn't exactly bored watching this - the barrage of bizarre choices around framing, lighting, and direction make for a strangely compelling trainwreck. I can't quite recommend it on that alone - frankly, there are better "so bad it's good" options out there, but if you're particularly interested in any of the stars in this, consider that a bit of a consolation prize.