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The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ken Russell's Tommy reviewed – archive, March 1975
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.
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mark Kermode on… director Ken Russell, the king of cult classics who was so much more than a sensationalist
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of one of the most important and groundbreaking pop movies of all time: Ken Russell's psychedelic screen adaptation of the Who's rock opera Tommy (1975). Marketed with the eye-catching tag lines 'Your senses will never be the same' and 'He will tear your soul apart', the film starred Roger Daltrey as the traumatised kid who becomes a Pinball Wizard and (more importantly) a cult messiah. Blending themes to which Russell would return throughout his career (the transformative power of music; the alchemical madness of genius; the dark power of false religion), Tommy was a typically wild ride that swung between the sublime and the ridiculous. Among its most memorable set pieces were Elton John in mile-high bovver boots getting trashed at the pinball table; Tina Turner's Acid Queen blowing Daltrey's mind with a hallucinogenic Metropolis-style robot suit filled with needles and snakes; and Oscar-nominated Ann-Margret writhing in a sea of washing powder foam and baked beans that spews from her exploding television set. Pete Townshend earned an Academy Award nomination for the film's music, intended to be played in an ear-bleeding Quintaphonic sound mix for which most cinemas were totally unprepared (Russell told me on multiple occasions that very few audiences who saw Tommy heard the movie the way it was intended). Daltrey would go on to star in Russell's equally OTT epic Lisztomania (1975), one of several composer biographies that began with his innovative work for the BBC's Monitor and Omnibus series in the 60s (which included Elgar, 1962; The Debussy Film, 1965; Song of Summer, 1968) and continued through such celebrated features as The Music Lovers (1971) and Mahler (1974). When I asked Russell where his passion for classical music began, he told me that, as a child, he heard either Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky on the radio (the composer varied with each retelling), cycled down to the local record store to buy the disc, then rushed back to his Southampton home where he tore off all his clothes ('Why wouldn't you?') and danced naked around the front room. That sense of passionate abandonment was a trademark of much of Russell's work, from the crazed orgies of The Devils (a horrifying true story, adapted from Aldous Huxley's nonfiction book The Devils of Loudun), through the head-spinning visuals of Altered States (1980), on which Russell famously clashed with author and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, to the kinky Stoker-fuelled madness of The Lair of the White Worm (1988), a genuinely bonkers oddity (Hugh Grant has never looked so baffled) that was rubbished by critics on first release but has now become something of a cult classic. Yet for all his infamous excesses, Russell was so much more than a sensationalist. Take The Devils, a film that was cut by censors and studio alike on first release in 1971, and which American producers Warner Bros still refuse to release in its uncut form despite a restoration of the excised sequences (in which I was proud to be involved) in 2004, a full 21 years ago. For Warner, the 'distasteful tonality' of the infamous 'rape of Christ' sequence (which respected Catholic theologian Gene D Phillips correctly described as 'depicting blasphemy' without 'being blasphemous') remains beyond the pale. Yet for Russell, The Devils was 'my most, indeed my only, political film' – a cautionary tale about the unholy marriage of church and state, and a powerful parable about brainwashing that seems more relevant than ever in today's US, where rightwing evangelism and 'post-truth' craziness increasingly rule the roost. Russell's most celebrated feature was Women in Love, a superbly nuanced adaptation of a controversial novel by DH Lawrence, which had itself once been a source of scandal. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Billy Williams, Russell's film managed to transpose the homoerotic charge of Lawrence's source to the screen, most notably in a fireside wrestling sequence featuring Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, which remains one of the most artfully orchestrated depictions of male bonding ever filmed. Russell and Williams both earned Oscar nominations (shockingly this would be Russell's only awards acknowledgment by the Academy), as did screenwriter Larry Kramer, while Glenda Jackson won best actress. As for Russell's love affair with the works of Lawrence, this would continue through such later works as The Rainbow (1989) and his 1993 TV serial Lady Chatterley. Reflecting in this paper on Russell's legacy following his death in 2011, I noted that 'he may have been the greatest film-maker of the postwar period, a visionary genius who broke the mould of stuffy British cinema, but there was always something of the punk-rocker about Russell – the rebel with a cause, even at the age of 84'. As Tommy turns 50, I stand by that assessment of Russell as the great disruptor of our time – someone I was proud to call a friend, but who always left me starstruck. All titles in bold are available to stream The Monkey(In cinemas) Osgood 'Oz' Perkins's adaptation of a short story by Stephen King is an absolute treat – a blood-splattered satire that owes a debt to such offal-drenched horror comedies as The Evil Dead and An American Werewolf in London, and delivers enough gross-out slapstick to satisfy even the most hardened gore-hounds. A riot! Toxic Town(Netflix) This Jack Thorne-scripted drama about the Corby toxic waste case (which drew comparisons with Erin Brockovich's famous lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric in the US) is alternately gripping, disturbing and enraging. Strong performances from Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lou Wood, Robert Carlyle and Rory Kinnear add to the impact, but it's Thorne's sinewy script that pulls it all together.
