Ken Russell's Tommy reviewed – archive, March 1975

The Guardian

27-03-2025

It is at least arguable that Tommy (Leicester Square Theatre, AA) was not only the first but the best rock opera yet written. Now we have it, in blasting Quintaphonic sound, flung at us from the screen by the amazing Ken Russell. Take your earplugs and possibly a sedative, put on your dark glasses, but go. Some of it is quite extraordinary, a battering but exact synthesis of sound and images the like of which only Russell, of contemporary film-makers, could achieve. Even if you think he's the most irritating director in the world, you have to allow that to him. By his own lights, he could scarcely have done better.
Tommy, for the benefit of those who haven't yet seen or heard it, is a parable about a boy who grows up deaf, dumb and blind after a traumatic experience in his youth, somehow survives a series of miracle cures, becomes pinball champion of the world and, finally freed of his disabilities, turns into the Superstar Messiah.
All this is built round music that, to some extent, defuses it of portentousness since it is culled from the experience of a group (The Who) that has been one of the most musical around even when Pete Townshend was smashing up guitars. What Russell has done is to marry their work to his style with an abandon that at least gives it freshness even if it often diverts the total experience along different channels. Certainly he has vulgarised, but a rock opera without that quality would seem a contradiction in terms and not much to do with the pop scene from which it was generated.
Some sections of the film, such as the superb Pinball Wizard sequence with a mammoth-booted Elton John, the Acid Queen scene with the magnificent Tina Turner and two numbers with Paul Nicholas and Keith Moon as Tommy's tormenting babysitters, are perfectly matched to the songs that the imagination boggles at Russell's audacity and the way he can bring the impossible off by believing in it so utterly.
At other points, it will be all too much for those who find Russell hard to take and a combination of him and The Who even harder. Even so, there are some stunning, and stunningly energetic performances to admire which match step for step what Russell is trying for on the screens. Roger Daltrey's innocent, blank-eyed Tommy, Ann Margret and Oliver Reed as his hapless prole parents, and Jack Nicholson in an all-too-brief cameo role as a spurious specialist give everything they have, and sometimes more than we thought they had, to the general-cause.
And the sight of leering Reed, striding around Russell's approximation of a fifties Butlin's in teddy boy gear or of Ann-Margret having a nervous breakdown in a torrent of baked beans will live with me for a good deal longer than the film will run. Which is probably a very long time, since Russell going all out in the pop field is an experience that makes the recent spate of disaster films seem like pigmy pinpricks on the subconscious. The experience, like it or not, is quite something.