New York Times Review

This review kind of made me laugh. I know 1976 was a very different climate for acceptance of other lifestyles, but jeez…this guy writes about it as if it were a gay porno. Funniest line: “There are simply too many male homosexual stomachs, arms and faces at too short a range”. WTF???!!


Movie Review
The Ritz (1976)
Screen: An Unfunny Thing Happened to 'The Ritz'
By RICHARD EDER
Published: August 13, 1976
WHEN TERRENCE McNally's. "The Ritz," opened on Broadway early last year, the critics and public liked it well enough to give it more than a year's run. It was a farce that laid claim to roughly the same patch of mania the Marx Brothers used to tear up: a scramble of mistaken identities, non sequiturs and people not so much in the wrong beds as under them.
It was hung upon a gimmick—a man takes refuge from his murderous brother-in-law inside a bathhouse full of homosexuals in full orgy—and the gimmick was the occasion for most of the jokes. As a farce though, despite the bumps and caperings, it had an essentially abstract spirit. It didn't dwell on the homosexuality, either the sentiment or the mechanics, any more than a sex farce actually dwells on sex.
In making a movie out of "The Ritz," Mr. McNally and his director, Richard Lester, have succumbed to the failing that has tended to go with screen adaptations of stage comedies ever since the 1930's, when they knew how to do such things. The bubbles don't disappear; on the contrary, they refuse to disappear as proper bubbles should. They are plotted, fixed, sprayed with lacquer.
Still, there are a lot of funny jokes. Most of the principal performers are the same as in the Broadway show, and they are at least serviceably amusing. Rita Moreno, as the female singing star at the bathhouse Saturday night entertainments, is comically incandescent. "The Ritz," which opened yesterday at the Cinema I, might have been a cheerfully lumpy affair. A fallen soufflé can still taste reasonably good, especially if you're hungry and eat it with bread.
And in this sense it does work to some degree. But if the farce suffers mainly from wearing lead shoes, the homosexual gimmick suffers from something more serious.
To have a tolerance, or even an acceptance of homosexuality doesn't rule out having an underlying physical distaste for it. Inevitably perhaps, the camera emphasizes the physical element far more than it was emphasized on the stage. To put it bluntly, it shoves up too close—for most of us, I think—too much pale flesh organized around unshared intentions. There are simply too many male homosexual stomachs, arms and faces at too short a range.
It spoils the picture. But it is only fair to point out a number of good things that remain in it. There are, as I have said, the jokes. The lineup of weird characters checking into the baths, the fugitive son-in-law among them, is lively and amusing. I particularly like the son-in-law's assumption—he is from out of town—that at such a sleazy establishment he can pay by check. And the fact that—as tends to happen in New York—such an outrageous assumption works.
The acting is often more energetic than funny; particularly in the case of Jack Weston as the fat, puffing son-in-law. On the other hand, Treat Williams is good as a shrill-voiced detective, and F. Murray Abraham manages some comic depth as one of the bathhouse regulars.