Outrageous!

What an unexpected treat.Long before Pricilla and all the others, there was Craig Russell. His impersonations remains vividly embedded in my brain because besides the look and mannerisms, I perceived the soul of the characters in question. They are not caricatures but tributes. His Judy Garland is heartbreaking and his Mae West hilarious.As if all that was not enough we have a screenplay of such intelligence and wit that I'm surprised this film is not a classic. When Holly's doctor finds out she lives with a man, he tries to warn her about the risks (she's bi polar) of an emotional, sexual entanglement. She reassures him telling him "Don't worry, we sleep in separate worlds" Lovely.

... has made me think of this movie thousands of times since I saw it (and marveled at Taylor) at the old Playboy Theater in Chicago on a particularly nasty winter night. This was when it (and I) first came out, and I've not seen it since, so pardon my fumbles on the details, but.... One character is *waaay* down in the pit of despair toward the end of the film, and second character basically delivers a get-over-it slap: "You're just like everybody else. You're alive and sick and living in Toronto...." The audience roared. Who needs "alive and well"? We all *are* alive and sick and living wherever. And alive and sick (or sick of heart, or sick of it all) and living lots of places since, it's slapped me back into a smile more times than I can count. It was quite a gift, in its sweet neurotic way.

The late Craig Russell is the star of Outrageous! It was a cult favorite here in the Boston area, playing for weeks at the late lamented Orson Welles Cinema. I had a bright red T-shirt with the movie logo on the front that I treasured for years.

First and foremost, the film is a document of his brilliant performances; he not only got the look and mannerisms of his subjects down cold, he also spoke and sung all the voices himself!

The plot, such as it is, is a tale about his attempts to become a successful performer, and about his schizophrenic friend and how he and she support and heal each other. It's not bad, but the performances are the heart and soul of the film.

Outrageous! was long out of print; happily for the world, it's available again. Get it while you can.

It's low budget shows in its grainy print and poor sound, but the quality performances by the entire cast make up for the films shortcomings.

The late Craig Russell pulls out all the stops as he displays his talent for female impersonation. Hollis McLaren is the ideal nut case. And Helen Shaver, in one of her earlier roles, is ideal as the friend who is accepting of people for who they are, embellishing their positive traits.

My one criticism of the film is the costuming. Not Russell's drag apparel, which matched each of his impersonations perfectly. But other wardrobe choices in the film were distractingly awful, especially during the Christmas party scene. Russell's jumpsuit was about 3 sizes too small, and Shaver's dress was something out of Ringling Brothers' clown reject closet.

Still, students and lovers of independent film will admire this one for its style, its daring, and its overall effort.

At first I reacted against the sentimentality of the madness-as-nonconformism theme, which is really mostly down to Hollis McLaren; as Craig Russell's heavily medicated roommate, she gets more than a little familiar when she expresses her downturns with hushed gibberish or staring through her fingers. But in between episodes she really gets to articulate the bill of outsiders' rights, and Russell is right there with her. No comparable clichés in this film's depiction of the Toronto gay scene, a diverse yet claustrophobic enclave that places transvestites on the bottom of a depressingly rigid hierarchy - an economic threat to closeted hairdressers, stealth patriarchs to the second-wave dykes. At a time when cinematic queerness was synonymous with effete self-loathing, this sympathetic and detailed depiction of a complex, vital skid-row subculture was decades ahead of its time, and has real time-capsule value today. All of which to say is that they're far from just marking time between Russell's impersonations, which are definitive even if he did steal them from Mae West herself. Put the two together and you've got a film that synthesizes social engagement and entertainment value with almost unprecedented verve.