Synopsis
They're cool, flip, witty and charming, talented, creative, intelligent and lonely.
Regulars gather at The Blue Jay, a gay bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, to celebrate Christmas Eve 1971 with people they consider family.
Some of My Best Friends Are...
Cast
Tom Bade David Baker Paul Blake Gary Campbell Carleton Carpenter Robert Christian Candy Darling Jeff David Alan Dellay Nick De Noia Dan Drake David Drew Jim Enzel Thomas Fiorello Fannie Flagg Joe George Gil Gerard Uva Harden Rue McClanahan Hector Martinez Peg Murray Dick O'Neill Larry Reed Gary Sandy Lou Steele Clifton Steere Sylvia Syms Joe Taylor Ben Yaffee Show All…
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The Bar, Gay Bar, Algunos de mis mejores amigos son...
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Theatrical
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USAR
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USA
27 Oct 1971
- TheatricalR
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"This is our last moment to be honest," he says as they are about to step out of the bar. Out of the bar, into the closet. Back into the wide open world where we're sealed into an invisible box, where we can watch everyone else enjoy and engage and exist openly while we remain closed off, hidden, obscured even sometimes from ourselves. Ironically, within the claustrophobic confines of seedy, often-Mob-run bars did we find a chance to be free, to be released, to be unchained.
Some of My Best Friends Are... packs more than a dozen characters (mostly just images, fleeting lines spoken here, crowd-fillers in the background) into a space during the holidays, letting the slice-of-life unstill life…
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Old queer movies are a complicated vibe sometimes. This is really visceral and creatively made, telling a lot of little side stories and making some strong statements, especially for 1971. A lot of it is just a hangout film, observing a wide variety of different folks, but some parts are really intense and dramatic.
Ultimately it makes its central point very well, the idea of the gay bar as as a total life center for queer people, the one place where everyone can be themselves, though that doesn't mean everyone will find what they're looking for or get along. There are so many different types of queer people, and this film understands that we're not necessarily even remotely similar to…
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Kind of a fascinating (if obviously flawed) self-portrait of the queer community just a few years after Stonewall. Though all of these characters are painted in broad strokes -- Candy Darling as a self-loathing, self-conscious trans woman; a married man who can't leave his wife; a son who gets disowned by his mother on the dancefloor -- they all feel real, like the sort of patchwork community that would've come together at the Zodiac Bar on Christmas night in 1971. Yeah, there's plenty of self-hatred to go around, but none of it rings false -- especially when considering that homosexuality wouldn't be removed from the DSM until two years after this was made.
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☆"C'mon, let's blow this joint."
"I daaaare you. Hahaha!!"☆The TCM premiere of Some of My Best Friends Are… began with host Ben Mankiewicz invoking the riots at Stonewall in 1969, the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. In the wake of those protests, this film was made, "a shocking movie for 1971" says Mankiewicz, but simply one with people talking in a bar. Of course, what makes the film noteworthy, and one of historical importance, is that it's about homosexual men and women discussing their relationships openly and frankly, just like any adults would do. It makes for a fitting final picture for Pride Month.
Directed and written by Mervyn Nelson, what is by name a drama but…
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As often happens by this time of year, my watchlist has blown out so I decided to watch only two Christmas films this year, both set on Christmas Eve - this long forgotten gay film from the 70s, and then our regular Christmas Eve spent with Sin-Dee and Alexandra on the sun scorched streets of LA.
Writer/director Mervyn Nelson sets his film on Christmas Eve 1971 in the Blue Jay, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Interestingly, Nelson made his film four years before Robert Altman made Nashville and spawned a spate of films with a large cast of characters with overlapping story arcs. Nelson has structured his film around a core group of regular patrons, and one newbie from…
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invaluable as a snapshot of the 70s NY queer community, while also grappling with the sort of timeless questions that transcend any one historical moment (“what if Cheers was gay?”)
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almost Altmanesque in its expansiveness - the world of this film just feels so rich with all of these characters, all of these lives converging in one place at one time. that's the film's real strength, not just a ensemble cast in general but showing how queer communities - which are just as diverse as the general population - come together.
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“They're cool, flip, witty and charming, talented, creative, intelligent and lonely.” This tagline sums up what the movie is going for in a lot of ways. It takes place over the course of a night at a gay bar of the time (1971), sometime close to Christmas (synopses say Christmas Eve, but I don’t believe that’s ever stated). The clientele is cool, flip, witty and charming, talented, creative, and intelligent. And apparently lonely, if “lonely” is perhaps being used as a stand-in for general turmoil. I know movies need conflict, and real life has conflict. The problems faced by this community, as portrayed in the film, are not false. But I think this definitely could have worked as just a…
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Colorful, flamboyant, stressful. An incredible documentary on the nature of the lgbt of all time.
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I can definitely see this not aging well for modern audiences. I really enjoyed how this was a snapshot of gay life two years after Stonewall. It's a film riddled with self hate and melodrama, and while I would usually loathe a gay film like that, this film really harnesses that energy. Being around Christmas time conceding with the fact most of these people don't have bio families they can be authentic with or even to go to. They've forgotten what authenticity even is, as they can only be a version of themselves in this gay club. There are really tender moments between characters and moments where you can hear an echo of hollowness in the chests of the characters.…
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Some of My Best friends Are was released at the beginning of the gay rights movement and just two years after the Stonewall riots of 1969. It was also released at the time when cinema was beginning to change and address important issues frankly. I can't believe to begin to think just how shocking this film must've been when it was released. I liked Some of My Best Friends Are but wasn't completely sold by it.
The film is set in the Blue Jay Bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1971. It follows the bar's regular customers as they enter and leave the bar, talking about their loves, lives and sexual conquests. Sadie and Helen are the employees…
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Fragility, gregariousness, precarity, warmth, loneliness, insecurity, indecision—this is the emotional milieu of a gay bar's denizens celebrating Christmas only a few short years after the Stonewall riots, and in many ways, this milieu has not changed in the intervening years. Even if this particular world is locked in its time (a time when trans bashing in queer spaces was still very much an ugly reality), I think modern queer viewers will find something of themselves in one or more of these characters, who are awash in their vulnerability—even if they have their defense mechanisms to mask it. Though there are more than a few stereotypes here that have not aged well, this work holds up far better than some others…