Torch Song Trilogy

Arnold sings in New York night clubs as a female impersonator. What he wants is simple: to live with somebody, to make a family, and for his mother to accept it. He meets Ed, but Ed also sees women and cannot decide. Then Alan arrives; young, certain, and he wants to live with Arnold. They make a home and talk about adopting. Then Alan is killed in the street. Arnold carries the grief alone, and when his mother comes he asks her to recognise it. She does not. Paul Bogart directs. Harvey Fierstein adapted the screenplay from his own 1982 play and plays Arnold himself. Anne Bancroft, Matthew Broderick and Brian Kerwin are in the cast. It is an American production. Fierstein had won a Tony award for the same play and carried the role from the stage to the film. Estelle Getty had played the mother on Broadway; when a television series made her unavailable the part went to Anne Bancroft. The narrative spreads over nine years and comes in three parts. The matter it treats is recognition; Arnold does not want pity, he wants his relationship counted as real. The conversation between mother and son at the cemetery stands at the centre and does not end in reconciliation. The film does not show the violence; Alan's death happens off screen. The narrative is set at the start of the eighties and keeps the language of the period. Fierstein plays the character in his own voice and with his own humour. Its limit is form; the stage origin shows, the speeches are long, and the pace is a theatre pace. Who it is for: viewers who like character drama and adaptations of plays. Who it is not for: it is talky, stagebound, and the ending rueful.