Partners (1982)

A 92-minute gay panic joke, PARTNERS put a pin in Ryan O’Neal’s career as a leading man. After a string of flops (anyone remember GREEN ICE, SO FINE, or OLIVER’S STORY?), O’Neal hit a wall with this regressive comedy that not only failed to click with both critics and audiences, but also offended nearly everyone who saw it with its homophobia. Even in 1982, the film’s bad taste was obvious to everyone except Paramount Pictures.

The only feature directed by television legend James Burrows, whose career ranges from THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW to WILL & GRACE, PARTNERS treats homosexuals as if they’re aliens from another planet. References are made to “their stores” and “their restaurants,” as if gay people don’t shop and eat in the same places straight people do. Gays are portrayed in PARTNERS either as mincing queens who will screw anybody who asks or violent psychopaths. Or in the case of John Hurt’s character, fussbudgets who cook and clean and listen to 1940s music while sipping tea.

The humor, such as it is, in the screenplay by Francis Veber (LA CAGE AUX FOLLES) is centered around the odd coupling of macho Homicide detective Benson (O’Neal) and closeted records clerk Kerwin (John Hurt, just off THE ELEPHANT MAN), who are assigned to investigate the murder of a cover model on a gay magazine. Their gruff boss (Kenneth McMillan) forces them to move in together and pretend to be a couple. One would think driving around Los Angeles in a pink Volkswagen is bad strategy when working undercover, but who am I to argue with Kenneth McMillan?

The only fun in PARTNERS is O’Neal’s obvious discomfort knowing he’s in a career-killing turkey. You can almost smell the flop sweat. Though none of PARTNERS is funny — or maybe because none of it is funny — Burrows makes the odd choice to basically chuck the comedy heading into the third act and concentrate on the mystery angle, which is ludicrous. The cops spend precious little time investigating, and the clues are designed to get super-straight O’Neal into wacky gay situations instead of solving a case. It’s clear the filmmakers put little thought into who the serial killer is or the motivation for the murders.

To give the film some credit, Hurt plays his role sympathetically, as if he’s actually in a drama about a gay man in an unrequited relationship. O’Neal’s character faces his own prejudices after getting up close to the same cruel treatment Hurt’s character and other gays live with every day. Oddly, Burrows later directed two television sitcoms titled PARTNERS, but neither was related to this film.