Like the play upon which it is based, the film tells the story of a gay couple – Renato Baldi, the manager of a Saint-Tropez nightclub featuring drag entertainment, and Albin Mougeotte, his star attraction – and the madness that ensues when Renato's son, Laurent, brings home his fiancée, Andrea, and her ultra-conservative parents to meet them.
, La Cage aux Folles has remained the No. 11. foreign film released in the United States of America. The film was the second highest-grossing film of the year in France with 5,406,614 admissions. In Germany, it received 2.65 million admissions, making it the 11th highest-grossing film of the year.
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 95% rating based on 21 reviews, with an average rating of 7.82/10. The site's consensus reads: "La Cage aux Folles is a fine French-Italian farce with flamboyant, charming characters and deep laughs". Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "the comic turns in the plot are achieved with such clockwork timing that sometimes we're laughing at what's funny and sometimes we're just laughing at the movie's sheer comic invention. This is a great time at the movies." Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote in a negative review that the film "is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "For me, 'La Cage aux Folles' was over soon after it began. It's all so predictable. This could have been a Luci & Desicomedy routine. The film's only distinctive quality is the skill of its veteran actors in working with tired material." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a frequently hilarious French variation on Norman, Is That You? and has the same broad humor and appeal but has been put over with considerably more aplomb." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post panned the film for "stale, excruciating sex jokes" and direction that "has evidently failed to devise a playing rhythm to compensate for whatever farcical tempo the material enjoyed on the stage." David McGillivray of The Monthly Film Bulletin described the film as "a crude amalgam of Norman, Is That You? and John Bowen's play Trevor... All shrieks, mincing and limp wrists, La Cage aux folles also looks positively antiquated beside the sophisticated gay comedy of such as Craig Russell."
Awards and honors
Legacy
Sequels
The film was followed by two sequels: La Cage aux Folles II, also directed by Molinaro, and , directed by Georges Lautner.
Musical adaptation
The 1983 Broadway musicalLa Cage aux Folles based on the play and the film was also successful.
La Cage aux Folles caught the attention of television producer Danny Arnold, who in 1979 pitched the concept of a weekly series about a gay couple similar to the one in the film to ABC. His planned title was Adam and Yves, a play on both Adam and Eve and a slogan used by some anti-gay groups. After months in development, Arnold realized that the concept was unsustainable as a weekly series, which led to the show getting dropped.
