The Ritz

A camp farce, based with unrelenting obviousness on a Broadway play, this is one of those masochistic comedies that rely entirely on the (corpulent) vacillations of the leading man. Jack Weston proves that he is strictly a one-dimensional character actor, yet the action is constructed to provide as little relief from him as possible. It concerns his frenetic adventures as a straight forced to hide out in an all-gay New York bath-house of dream-like dimensions populated by cosmetic studs. After the single joke (Weston is nearly raped by a short, thin 'chubby-chaser'), Lester devotes himself with single-minded malevolence to repeating the same routine with weak variations for the entire length of the film. Despite the plot's superficial claims to be breaking new sexual ground, the resulting stale comedy is likely to be as boring to the gay community as to every other.