The Music Lovers (1970)

          Relative to British director Ken Russell’s many other biopics about troubled artists, The Music Lovers falls somewhere between the grounded darkness of Savage Messiah (1972) and the vulgar excess of Mahler (1974)—never mind the deranged Lisztomania (1975), which exists in a universe all its own. Offering a florid take on the life of Russian composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers has several long passages that are both lyrical and rational, cleverly dramatizing the way artists use their work to speak to the people in their lives as well as to society in general. But then, as happens with depressing frequency throughout Russell’s career, the director’s lower instincts take control, dragging The Music Lovers into psychosexual ugliness.

          Set in Russia during the second half of the 19th century, The Music Lovers tracks Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) over many years. At the beginning of the picture, he works as a music teacher while periodically performing original compositions that only a few people appreciate, so in one early sequence, Russell places significant characters in the audience of a recital, then uses insert scenes to depict how each person reacts to Tchaikovsky’s melodies. Eventually, key relationships take shape. Tchaikovsky marries a fan, the emotionally unstable Antonia (Glenda Jackson), even though he’s gay. Concurrently, the wealthy Nadezhda (Izabella Telezynksa) becomes Tchaikovsky’s patron on the condition they never meet. Predictably, these dynamics prove untenable. As Antonia descends into insanity, Tchaikovsky’s refusal to sleep with her becomes a wedge in their combative relationship. Meanwhile, Nadezhda suffers from unrequited love, lusting for the man whom she financially supports but from whom she remains distant. It’s all very twisted, the situation made even more fraught by Tchaikovsky’s conflicted feelings about his sexuality, by the danger to his status if his gay liaisons become public knowledge, and by trauma originating with his mother’s death from cholera.

          Some scenes in The Music Lovers are so lovely that it’s a shame Russell couldn’t control his impulses—a sequence of people dressed in white as they dance among birch trees in a snowy forest is mesmerizing, and it’s not the only passage with real visual splendor. During the film’s best moments, Russell creates shots that time perfectly with Tchaikovsky’s music, thus conjuring an intoxicating form of heightened reality. And then he goes wild. In one of the film’s crudest moments, a feverish Antonia offers herself to Tchaikovsky while they ride on a rocking train, so Russell cuts back and forth between closeups of Jackson’s nether regions and reaction shots of Chamberlain looking close to nausea. It’s a degrading moment for everyone involved, not least the audience. Jackson easily steals the picture with her unbridled performance, though her powerful work reveals, by comparison, the limitations in Chamberlain’s stilted acting. In a way, that contrast epitomizes the problem with The Music Lovers—the movie periodically loses Tchaikovsky because of the lurid focus on the troubled women in his life.

The Music Lovers: FUNKY

The Devils (1971)

          By the mid-’70s, British director Ken Russell’s penchant for shock value took him deep into the realm of self-parody, despite his myriad gifts as a filmmaker and storyteller—it seemed as if he couldn’t stop himself from creating cartoonish excess. Many would say that Russell lost the thread while making two 1975 movies starring rock singer Roger Daltrey, Lisztomania and Tommy, both of which explode with juvenile imagery. Yet an earlier Russell film, The Devils, is likely the most extreme thing he ever made.

          Cruel, perverse, repulsive, sacrilegious, and vulgar, The Devils dramatizes a gruesome historical incident that occurred in the 17th century. On one level, the movie is purposeful and serious, exploring such heavy themes as groupthink, paranoia, political conspiracies, and unrequited love that sours into deadly animus. Washing over this highbrow material is a geyser of effluvium—Russell depicts enemas, orgies, the sexualized defiling of religious artifacts, torture, and even the vile act of sorting through a person’s vomit for clues. In some scenes, The Devils presents intimate drama with far-reaching moralistic implications, and in other scenes, The Devils presents cheap jokes straight out of burlesque. In sum, those seeking a microcosm of the identity crisis at the core of Russell’s artistic output need look no further. Everything bad about his style is here in abundance, and so, to, is everything good.

          The broad strokes of the narrative are as follows. Charismatic priest Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) gains control over the French city of Loudon during a time of religious conflict. Specifically, the Vatican has persuaded King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to demolish walls around cities, including Loudon, in order to quell an incipient Protestant revolution. Meanwhile, Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave), the deformed and disturbed Reverend Mother of a Loudon convent, is sexually fixated on Father Urbain. When Father Urbain marries his lover, Sister Jeanne goes insane, accusing Father Urbain of witchcraft. Hysteria ensues, leading to the spectacle of the nuns in Sister Jeanne’s convent becoming sex fiends. Sadistic witch-hunter Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard) arrives in Loudon to exorcise demons from the “bewitched” nuns, but few of the players realize that all of these events have been manipulated to scapegoat Father Urbain.

          Grasping the story’s deeper implications is challenging, and even simply tracking the events depicted onscreen requires close attention. Not only are the politics dense, but Russell drifts in and out of phantasmagorical sequences. Even the “real” stuff is sufficiently bizarre to confound many viewers. In the opening scene, Louis XIII performs a cross-dressing stage show. Later, viewers are shown a skeleton with maggots crawling in its eye sockets; Sister Jeanne giggling like a fool before climaxing from the mere sight of Father Urbain; and a silly bit during which the king shoots a man dressed in a bird costume, then says, “Bye bye, blackbird!” (Russell was fond of comedic anachronisms.)

          The movie crosses so many lines with its religiously themed imagery that it’s like a hand grenade thrown into the middle of a crowded church. In a dream sequence, Reed is envisioned as Jesus stepping off the cross, complete with a crown of thorns, and Redgrave licks his bloody wounds as if the act gives both of them sexual pleasure. During the long mass-hysteria sequence passage, Russell bashes the audience with forced enemas that are staged like anal rapes, armies of half-naked nuns, and money shots of said nuns gyrating atop a figure of Christ. The film’s climax contains horrors all its own.

          Saying there’s a resonant movie buried inside The Devils isn’t exactly correct, because there’s no way to separate the tale from the telling. Any dramatization of the Grandier story would be extreme. Furthermore, Redgrave and Reed give exceptionally committed performances, so much so that they risk becoming comical at times. The Devils is what it is, an assault on the senses and a scabrous sort of social commentary. Weirdly, the film was made in such a way as to repulse the very people who might otherwise have engaged most deeply with the subject matter, since it’s hard to imagine the faithful enduring more than a few minutes of The Devils. Even for nonbelievers, the film is as much of an endurance test as it is an artistic expression.

The Devils: FREAKY

1980 Week: Altered States

          Unquestionably one of the trippiest movies ever released by a Hollywood studio, the sci-fi/horror saga Altered States was an odd swan song for Paddy Chayefsky. Following a celebrated career during which his melodramas and social satires earned the writer three Oscars—for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971), and Network (1976)—Chayefsky penned his first and only novel, Altered States (1978). Suggested by the experiments of “psychonaut” John C. Lilly, who used hallucinogens and sensory-deprivation tanks to explore the furthest recesses of the human mind, Altered States was a far cry from Chayefky’s usual fare.

          Nonetheless, Chayefsky wrote the screen adaptation of his own book and prepared to make the movie with director Arthur Penn. Disagreements pushed Penn off the project, and his replacement was Ken Russell, a British maverick known for boundary-pushing imagery and puerile fascinations. Chayefsky didn’t click with Russell, either, but this time it was the writer who left the project, replacing his name on the script with a pseudonym. Watching Altered States, it’s possible to see why Chayefsky distanced himself from the movie—which is forever on the verge of self-parody—and yet it’s also possible to see what made the underlying material so fascinating in the first place. The protagonist of Altered States tries to scientifically identify the fundamental nature of the human species.

          Psychology professor Edward Jessup (William Hurt) spends time in sensory-deprivation tanks, treating his visits like exploratory journeys into the outer realms of consciousness. Even as he clumsily attempts to build a “normal” life with a beautiful colleague named Emily (Blair Brown), Edward remains obsessed with his research. That’s why he follows a lead and visits South America, consuming a powerful drug that elicits mind-expanding hallucinations. Returning to the U.S., Edward combines the drug and the sensory-deprivation tank, with shocking results.

          By about halfway through its running time, Altered States becomes an out-and-out fantasy film, complete with elaborate special effects. Seeing as how the picture is loaded with hyper-articulate dialogue and persuasive scientific jargon, the introduction of paranormal phenomena makes for a heady shift. Accordingly, many critics and viewers have dismissed Altered States as a lark with a great pedigree, even though it arguably belongs on the same continuum of existential sci-fi as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972). Chayefsky’s style is evident, pseudonym be damned, because no one else writes lines like this one: “She prefers the senseless pain we inflict on each other to the pain we would otherwise inflict on ourselves—but I’m not afraid of that solitary pain.”

           Similarly, only Russell could manufacture the out-there imagery of Edward’s hallucinations: bloody bibles, mutant animals, spewing volcanoes, naked bodies transforming into sand sculptures that blow away when attacked by vicious winds. Composer John Corigliano, contributing his first-ever music score, energizes Russell’s crazy images with an extraordinary score defined by avant-garde flourishes, insinuating rhythms, and an almost primal energy. Vivid performances elevate the film, as well. Making his movie debut, theater-trained William Hurt channels his über-WASP persona into the spectacularly alive portrayal of a seeker chasing the one thing he finds hardest to grasp—true human connection. Blair Brown matches him in terms of intelligence and passion, while also adding a layer of sensuality, and costars Bob Balaban and Charles Haid lend comic relief playing, respectively, the believer and the skeptic in Edward’s social circle.

          Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Altered States is that whenever he’s not overseeing whackadoodle hallucination scenes, Russell provides crackerjack storytelling clarity. He handles dramatic scenes with restraint and taste, manufacturing fast but disciplined pacing. One can only imagine what shape Altered States would have taken if Chayefsky and Russell had been simpatico.

Altered States: GROOVY

Mahler (1974)

          Some Ken Russell movies are consistently restrained and most of them are consistently crazy, but Mahler falls somewhere in the middle. About half the film uses straightforward dramatic scenes to explore the life of famed composer Gustav Mahler, who lived from 1860 to 1911 and contributed significantly to the classical-music canon. Bits and pieces are tweaked for comic effect, but most of these segments occupy the known universe. And then there’s the other half of Mahler—the one with the anachronistic Nazi imagery, the outrageous ethnic stereotypes, and the shock-value sex and violence. Based on the totality of Russell’s career, one suspects that’s the part of Mahler that spoke most deeply to the filmmaker’s soul. Even though he’d gone for the cinematic jugular many times before, once the mid-’70s arrived, he seemed almost pathologically incapable of resisting puerile narrative impulses.

          The trajectory of Mahler’s conventional storyline is fairly interesting, depicting how the young composer drifted away from the anti-intellectual influence of his family by embracing lessons about the beauty of nature. As the film progresses, Mahler (played as an adult by Robert Powell) faces such familiar rigors as balancing creative endeavors with paying gigs. He also endures humiliation from those who regard him as a second-rate successor to Richard Wagner. Most troublingly, Mahler navigates a complicated marriage to Alma (Georgina Hale), whom he unwisely takes for granted even though he knows she has an extramarital suitor. Eventually, the problems of Mahler’s life coalesce in the crucial moment when he converts from Judaism for Christianity in order to secure a lucrative job.

          This material should have been sufficient, but Russell gilds the lily—and then paints the thing bright, whorish red—with ridiculous dream/fantasy sequences. In the most epic of these, which is staged like a comedic silent film complete with title cards, Mahler wears an exaggerated Jewish-intellectual costume while facing Cosima Wagner (Antonia Ellis), the powerful and deeply anti-Semitic widow of Richard Wagner. Wearing a Nazi-dominatix costume, she whips Mahler, makes him jump through flaming hoops, forces him to eat the flesh off a pig’s head, and stands atop a mountain like a Teutonic demigoddess, a gigantic sword towering behind her. Need it be said that this silly film-within-a-film is such an excessive directorial indulgence that it nearly derails the whole movie?
          At least the film-within-a-film is amusing, just like the goofy visual reference that Russell makes to the Italian art film Death in Venice (1971), which featured an all-Mahler soundtrack. Incredibly, Powell retains his dignity throughout most of this film, delivering a credible performance as a diva who learns humility. Furthermore, Hale is spirited as Alma, and it’s hard to find fault with the soundtrack, which almost exclusively comprises selections from Mahler’s magnificent oeuvre.

Mahler: FUNKY

Lisztomania (1975)

          With the possible exception of The Devils (1971), which employs provocative imagery while telling a meaningful story about historical persecution, the musical biopic Lisztomania is British director Ken Russell’s most outrageous movie—no small accomplishment. Lisztomania is also one of the weirdest big-budget films ever made, since it contains a man riding a giant phallus like it’s a bucking bronco, composer Richard Wagner reincarnated as a machine-gun-wielding hybrid of Frankenstein’s monster and Adolf Hitler, and a climactic battle in which composer Franz Liszt flies a fighter jet built from organ pipes that blast his music like guided missiles. Not exactly Amadeus.

          Based upon a real-life phenomenon that occurred during the career of 19th-century Hungarian composer Liszt, who reportedly drove audiences into something like the frenzied adoration later associated with 20th-century rock stars, Lisztomania opens in such a juvenile fashion that writer-director Russell makes it immediately clear he is uninterested in simply re-creating history. Liszt (Roger Daltrey) cavorts in bed with aristocrat Marie (Fiona Lewis), kissing her breasts in time with the clicks of a metronome. She repeatedly accelerates the metronome’s speed, so Liszt accelerates his smooching. Then Marie’s husband arrives, and a “comical” duel ensues, during which Liszt—clad only a s sheet he’s tied around his privates like a diaper—tries to evade the rapier with which the husband hopes to castrate Liszt. From camera angles to editing and music, the whole scene is designed to feel like a cartoon, setting the childish tone for everything that follows.

          In the course of telling a story that’s only vaguely connected to the real Lizzt’s experiences, Russell portrays Liszt as a debauched celebrity pandering to public appetites with performances that are beneath his talent, while also spending much of his private time bouncing from one woman’s bedroom to the next. Liszt’s sexual wanderings climax with a fantasy sequence during which Liszt grows the aforementioned Godzilla-sized erection—which, at one point, several women straddle simultaneously.

          As the movie drags on, the plot grows to similarly oversized proportions. On instructions from the Pope (played by Ringo Starr of the Beatles), Liszt is charged with luring his former colleague, Wagner (Paul Nicholas), back to Christianity. This doesn’t go well, because Wagner has become an evil scientist preoccupied with bringing the Norse god Thor (Rick Wakeman) to life, although Thor, for some reason, wears the costume associated with the version of the character appearing in Marvel Comics of the ’60s and ’70s. Sprinkled amid this nonsense are various scenes in which Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who and the star of Russell’s previous film, Tommy (released a few months earlier in 1975), sings original rock songs. There’s more, too, including a scene decorated with ceramic buttocks that issue smoke through their—you get the idea.

          One imagines that Russell had a grand old time generating concepts and then seeing if his production team could realize them without quitting in protest of his bad taste. Furthermore, actors play their roles with tremendous glee. However, the level of stupidity on display throughout Lisztomania is staggering. Whereas Russell’s best films are the work of a sophisticated provocateur, Lisztomania feels more like the bathroom-wall scratchings of a 13-year-old boy who giggles whenever the subject of sex is raised. Suffice to say, Russell’s lifelong devotion to classical music found more worthwhile expression elsewhere.

Lisztomania: FREAKY

Savage Messiah (1972)

          The outrageous British director Ken Russell spent most of the ’70s making biopics, some comparatively restrained and some unapologetically insane. Savage Messiah, about the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, falls somewhere in between these extremes. Adapted by Christopher Logue from a book by H.S. Ede, the movie charts the artist’s short but intense life, illustrating how he railed against mainstream culture before dying at the age of 23. Although the movie is set in the early 20th century, it’s clearly meant to parallel the counterculture attitudes of the early ’70s, as seen in episodes of civil disobedience and—thanks to fearless costar Helen Mirren—a lengthy scene of full-frontal nudity.

          As with most of Russell’s films, Savage Messiah is made with more craftsmanship than discipline, because very often, scenes that are acted and filmed skillfully serve dubious narrative purposes. And, as was true throughout his career, Russell never knows when to quit, so instead of one or two sequences featuring the lead character giving insufferably self-aggrandizing speeches about the importance of pushing artistic boundaries, the movie has seemingly dozens of such scenes. While Savage Messiah doesn’t give viewers a pounding headache the way that some of Russell’s phantasmagorias do—the bizarre composer biopic Lisztomania (1975) comes to mind—it nonetheless suffers for its excesses.

          Set in London, Savage Messiah revolves around the complex relationship between Henri (Scott Anthony) and the Polish writer Sopie Brzeska (Dorthy Tutin). Both headstrong and idealistic, they meet while positioned on opposite ends of the existential spectrum—he’s bursting with excitement based upon his artistic potential, whereas she is suicidal. Henri wows Sophie by making a scene in a public garden, drawing a crowd while splashing in a fountain and screaming slogans: “Art is dirt! Art is sex! Art is revolution!” Eventually, the two form a platonic bond while Henri uses questionable means to acquire art supplies and simutaneously battles with gallery owners, building a reputation as a mad genius. For a while, the arrangement works, but then Henri meets willful suffragette Gosh Boyle (Mirren), who shares his lack of inhibitions. Henri’s relationship with Gosh creates distance between Henri and Sophie, even though Sophie pays for Henri’s room and board.

          Given all this domestic tumult, Russell ends up portraying his central character a bit like a rock star—part romantic visionary, part self-centered hedonist. During Savage Messiah’s most obnoxious scenes, Henri storms into public spaces, including a museum and a theater, and makes noisy spectacles by causing property damage and/or hurling insults at strangers. One gets the sense that he’s on about something he considers important, but it’s hard to endure his overbearing behavior and even harder to parse his jumbled rhetoric. Still, Russell puts across the counterculture parallels effectively, and he does an expert job of using cues from the classical-music canon to score the piece. The performances are all strong, with Tutin the standout, and Mirren somehow manages to make nudity seem dignified during her show-stopping scene. Savage Messiah trumpets its messages loudly and proudly, even if the actual content of those messages remains elusive.

Savage Messiah: FUNKY

Tommy (1975)

          Interesting as case study in what happens when two artists from different mediums bring their equally strong visions to bear on the same project, Tommy is eccentric British filmmaker Ken Russell’s visualization of the Who’s famous “rock opera” LP, which is arguably the crowning achievement of Who songwriter Pete Townshend’s career. Townshend’s ambitious musical cycle uses rock songs to tell a complete narrative, and the strain of this massive storytelling effort shows in the record’s inconsistency; for every incisive moment like “The Acid Queen,” sung from the perspective of a drug-peddling prostitute, there are clumsily literal tunes along the lines of the paired set “Go to the Mirror!” and “Smash the Mirror.” It’s commendable that Townshend maintained his aesthetic focus, but not every song is a winner. Furthermore, the narrative is ludicrous: After a young man is rendered blind, deaf, and dumb through melodramatic circumstances, he becomes a pinball champion and then a messiah for young followers who are inspired by his surmounting of physical challenges and his eventual recovery of his senses.
          Predictably, the storyline is even sillier in filmic form, because Russell illustrates many of Townshend’s overwrought images literally—and when Russell takes liberties, he adds childish flourishes like the scene in which Tommy’s mother (Ann-Margaret) gets hosed down with geysers of baked beans while writhing in sexual delight. Plus, the less said about Russell’s infatuation with oversized props and phallic symbols, the better. In fact, Russell’s apparent desire to live up to his reputation for outrageousness is Tommy’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness—adapted by a less whimsical director, Tommy might have become unrelentingly grim, but at the same time, Russell’s excess makes it impossible to take the movie seriously, because it’s all way too camp.

          Still, Russell creates a handful of memorable scenes, and the combination of lively music, offbeat casting, and speedy pacing keeps Tommy moving along. Who singer Roger Daltrey plays Tommy as an adult, relying on commitment and intensity instead of dramatic skill, and the other members of the Who lurk on the movie’s periphery, with the exception of madman drummer Keith Moon, who plays Tommy’s pedophile uncle. Ann-Margret is quite terrible as Tommy’s mother, overacting ridiculously and warbling her songs, though Oliver Reed gives an effectively seedy performance a Tommy’s scumbag stepfather. Jack Nicholson’s brief appearance as a doctor seeking to treat Tommy’s afflictions represents pointless stunt casting, but fellow guest stars Elton John and Tina Turner make important contributions in their supporting roles.

          John, of course, sings Tommy’s most famous song, “Pinball Wizard,” so effectively that John’s cover of the tune became a chart hit; similarly, his onscreen appearance in a cartoonish costume echoes the performer’s over-the-top ’70s stage persona. Turner, despite being photographed grotesquely with fisheye lenses and such, rips the screen apart with her wailing, wild number as the Acid Queen, providing a go-for-broke energy the rest of the movie fails to match.

Tommy: FUNKY

The Boy Friend (1971)

          British director Ken Russell earned his bad-boy bona fides with his breakout movie, Women in Love (1969), a posh literary adaptation infamous for its scene of nude male wrestling. And though he seemed intent on continuing down the road of sexualized content with The Music Lovers (1970) and his first 1971 release, The Devils, he instead took the exact opposite tack with his second 1971 release. Adapted from the 1954 stage musical that made Julie Andrews a star, The Boy Friend is so chaste it could have been made in the 1930s—and, indeed, the strongest scenes feature Russell’s tributes to the work of Depression-era musical-movie auteurs like Busby Berkley. Loaded with flapper-styled costumes, opulent sets, and outrageous compositions that turn actors into elements of candy-colored tableaux, these sequences are visually resplendent. Unfortunately, the film containing these highlights is frothy and meandering, so The Boy Friend becomes quite dull as it sprawls across 137 repetitive minutes. Those who savor coordinated chorines and tricky tapping will find much to devour, but those craving a potent narrative will be left starving for substance.

          Finding a clever-ish way to give playwright Sandy Wilson’s storyline added dimension, Russell (who also penned the script and produced the picture) turns Wilson’s The Boy Friend into a play-within-a-movie. Thus, Polly Browne (Twiggy) is not just the lovestruck girl in the play, longing for sparks with a handsome delivery boy (Christopher Gable); she’s also an actress playing the lead role in a stage musical titled The Boy Friend. This device allows Russell to balance Wilson’s trite onstage patter with more realistic vignettes taking place offstage. Equally helpful is Russell’s addition of a theatrical star (played by an uncredited Glenda Jackson) whose injury forces Polly to take the stage in her place; this gives the Polly character a poignant underdog quality. Russell’s third big gimmick is the unexpected appearance of a Hollywood producer (Vladek Sheybal) on the very night Polly steps into the spotlight, filling all the stage performers with excitement about the possibility of big-screen stardom.

          Yet even though Russell’s efforts to toughen up the narrative are admirable, The Boy Friend is still just a compendium of 20 forgettable songs. Furthermore, leading lady Twiggy, a former model, is endearing but not particularly compelling (although she somehow managed to win two Golden Globes for this movie), so she’s regularly upstaged by livelier performers. In particular, long-limbed ’70s Broadway star Tommy Tune is impressive whenever he puts his gangly frame to the task of blazing tap-dance performances. The Boy Friend looks gorgeous, not only because of the impressive production design but also because of delicate photography by David Watkin, and it’s interesting to see Russell’s over-the-top style presented without his customary vibe of juvenile perversity. At more than two and a half hours, however, The Boy Friend is a slog for anyone but diehard movie-musical fans. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Boy Friend: FUNKY

Valentino (1977)

          The life of silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino would seem ideal for biopic treatment. In addition to the usual rise-and-fall drama associated with any actor’s career, the narrative is infused with sex because Valentino was the greatest heartthrob of his time, driving legions of female fans insane with lust. The same elements that make the story attractive for cinematic treatment invite excess, however, so when producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler teamed with flamboyant British filmmaker Ken Russell, they were asking for trouble. Sure enough, Valentino is loud, silly, and vulgar, stringing together real and imagined episodes from Valentino’s life to create an adolescent fantasy about a superstud driven by supersized passions.

          The picture begins at the actor’s funeral, and each time one of his past lovers approaches the casket, the film flashes back to Valentino’s involvement with that woman. And even though Valentino is relatively tame by Russell’s standards, it’s outrageously lurid and stylized compared to any normal Hollywood movie. Using the fashion excesses of the Jazz Age as their inspiration, Russell and his team fill the screen with decadent décor and ridiculous costumes, ensuring that every frame is suffocated in art direction. Some of the sets are spectacularly beautiful, particularly the interiors of mansions toward the end of the picture, but when characters are walking around with capes the length of swimming pools and hordes of native bearers, it’s clear that historical accuracy wasn’t the guiding aesthetic.

          Again opting for style over substance, Russell cast the lead roles brazenly, to the picture’s detriment. The stunt casting at the heart of the film is the appearance of celebrated Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino. Appropriately enough for a story about a silent-film star, the gimmick almost works when the character doesn’t speak, because Nureyev is darkly handsome and his physical grace is spellbinding. Russell plays to the performer’s strengths by accentuating Valentino’s origins as a dancehall gigolo, so Nureyev gets to perform in a variety of dance styles, and his movements are wonderful to watch. Yet the spell is broken whenever he speaks, since Nureyev has a thick Russian accent made even more difficult to understand by his weak attempt at mimicking Valentino’s Italian accent. He ends up sounding a bit like Bela Lugosi, which is more than a little bit distracting. Nureyev is also a terrible actor, mugging his way through scenes with bulging eyes and campy hand gestures.

          As Valentino’s first important patron, narcissistic silent-screen star Alla Nazimova, Leslie Caron is equally bad, giving a performance so cartoonish that it enters the realm of Norma Desmond surrealism. Pop singer Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, is marginally better as Valentino’s second wife, Natacha Rambova, a would-be auteur who derails her husband’s career with her megalomania, but Phillips can’t make Russell’s florid style or the script’s purple-prose dialogue seem credible.

          Beyond the bad acting, what really sinks the movie—or sends it into the I-can’t-believe-I’m-watching-this stratosphere, depending on how you get your cinematic kicks—is Russell’s unhinged dramaturgy. Almost pathologically incapable of restraint, Russell turns everything into an excuse for grotesquerie or opulence, if not both simultaneously. The movie’s sex scenes are laughable, like the lavishly choreographed nude romp with Nureyev and Phillips in a desert tent, echoing Valentino’s signature role in The Sheik (1921).
          In the picture’s most outrageous scene, Nureyev ends up in jail on a bigamy charge—but not just any jail, an over-the-top Ken Russell madhouse. As harpy-like hookers claw at Valentino from the next cell, freakazoid inmates including a toothless masturbator stalk him within the cell until he trips and falls into a giant pile of vomit, and then a malicious guard (Bill McKinney) pokes Valentino’s stomach until the actor, who has been denied bathroom privileges, urinates in his pants. Ken Russell: always a class act. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Valentino: FREAKY