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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.
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