Crimes Of Passion (1984)—“Joanna Crane/China Blue”
KT: Well, Ken Russell, honey. I mean, Ken Russell, he was a genius. Ken called me a few months ago because he wanted to shoot Alice In Wonderland, and he wanted me for the Red Queen. And we were talking about it just before he died. That was a real shocker. I understand they’re going to go ahead with the film, but for me, the point was Ken. Just to work with Ken. He was absolutely certifiable, the man. But, in truth, a genius.

AVC: That was a very sexual film.

KT: I think that was some of my best work, honestly. That he really challenged me.

AVC: What was it like to be directed by Ken Russell?

KT: Confusing, at times. He drank a lot. He drank from early in the morning on, so as the day progressed, you’d have different levels of comprehensive ability, in terms of what he wanted from his direction. So you kind of had to take that into account, but at the same time, his passions were so contagious, he made you risk more than you normally might with someone else.

AVC: Your leading man in that movie was Anthony Perkins—

KT: Whoa, that was tough. I can say this, because it was all public. He was doing this stuff—I believe it was a form of nitrate that was a step down from amyl. So we’d rehearse, and then just before Ken would roll camera, Anthony would pull out this little bottle and sniff it, and he’d go all red and break into a sweat and you go, “I don’t know what’s going to happen now.” So that was kind of scary at times.

AVC: That’s reflected in the film.

KT: That was really tough. When I came home from that film, my fiancé at that time picked me up from the airport and took me out to our country place, and he told me I slept 22 hours. He said if I got to 24, he was going to take me to the hospital. That was hard.

Some years ago in London, at the premiere of John Cage’s “Europeras 3 & 4,” I bumped into Ken Russell in the press queue. He complained that he had been marginalized in film and television, where it was becoming next to impossible to do anything imaginative. He had lately been staging operas and raised so many hackles that he didn’t think he’d have much more of a career in that. So he thought he’d become a music critic.
“But that’s what you’ve always been,” I said.
“Oh, you noticed,” he replied as he headed for the Champagne.
I don’t know that Russell, who died in London on Sunday at 84, ever actually wrote any reviews. He did write some books about composers once his film career had tanked. They include “Elgar: The Erotic Variations” and “Brahms Gets Laid.” They are not what he is going to be remembered for.
But neither do I predict that Russell ultimately will be known as “the chief defiler of celebrities of the past and present,” which is what Pauline Kael called him. Russell was not only one of the most musical of all filmmakers, he was one of film’s great imaginers of music. No one made music films so infused with, so intoxicated by, music.
 Yes, he could be puerile. He portrayed Liszt as a sex-crazed rock star pursued by a giant penis. He showed Richard  Strauss cavorting with Hitler so salaciously that the censorious Strauss estate has managed to get that particular television documentary pulled from circulation. The neurotic, erotic carryings on of his Mahler and Tchaikovsky don’t qualify as proper musicology.
But Russell always started with the music — how it made him feel, how it took over his life. Music was, for him, the key to our inner lives. It gave us permission to fantasize, to dream, to be extravagant. That is what he showed. He said he made films to get pictures music created out of his mind.
He began with black-and-white, low-budget documentaries on composers for a highbrow BBC television show called “Monitor,” in which it was thought improper for actors to portray the subjects in documentaries. Russell soon changed that.
“Elgar: Portrait of a Composer,” one of Russell’s early “Monitor” documentaries, opens with a shot of the boyhood Elgar riding his horse in the country to the accompaniment of his high-spirited Serenade for Strings. The image illustrates the music, not the other way around, and you are immediately hooked on Elgar.
Three years later, after films on Bartók and Vaughan Williams, Russell was already significantly pushing limits in “The Debussy Film.” He begins like a French New Wave film, with a film crew arriving on a location to stage Debussy’s funeral. A beautiful girl in a T-shirt is pierced with arrows. A silly British reporter shows up. It is not until seven minutes in that any music is heard, and by then it sounds miraculous.
“Song of Summer,” Russell’s deeply moving 1968 account of Delius’ last five years, is often called his masterpiece by people who couldn’t stand the director’s later, more outrageous films. It chronicles the relationship between a syphilitic composer — blind, paralyzed, impossible — and a young composer, Eric Fenby, who helped Delius write his final works.

Delius had all but consumed Fenby’s own creativity, and when Fenby saw the film he found it so true to life that he had a nervous breakdown. He also developed a skin condition that made it impossible for him to wear any clothes for a year, as if all that he had suppressed throughout his life came pouring out of his body thanks to this unflinching, mesmerizing film and its ability to reveal the haunting quality of Delius’ music. 
The success of “Song of Summer” allowed Russell to begin making feature films, and along with such notable successes as “Women in Love,” he made his three, increasingly eccentric composer biopics.  “The Music Lovers” starred Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky. Next came “Mahler,” then Lisztomania,” with Roger Daltrey as the composer. All were ahead of their times, particularly “The Music Lovers,” which, in 1970, explored Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality at a time when that wasn’t an open topic. It is a flamboyant film, certainly. But it is also honest with a sophisticated screenplay by Melvin Bragg. It makes clear, as few biopics ever do, what is fanciful. And Tchaikovsky’s music, superbly conducted by André Previn, makes clear why.
Russell also deserves credit for hiring major composers to write soundtracks for many of his other films. Peter Maxwell Davies was one. He scored “The Devils” and the musical “The Boy Friend,” which starred Twiggy. Now “Sir Peter,” the Master of the Queen’s Music and one of Britain’s most distinguished composers, Davies remembered Russell Monday in the Guardian newspaper.
“His approach to film-making,” Davies said, “was very similar to that of a musician: his films evolved in long musical sentences.”
In the ’80s and early ’90s, Russell turned to opera direction, and just as he had made his movies operatic, he made opera outlandishly cinematic. At a festival in Florence, he set Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress,” an opera about moral decay, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and he invited Derek Jarman (a striking and controversial filmmaker in his own right) to design the set. Abbott and Costello were inspiration for Russell’s Geneva Opera staging of Rossini’s “Italian Girl in Algiers.”
There is so much more. Among his exceptional and, sadly, exceptionally hard to find these days television films are one of Bruckner in a sanitarium, an exuberant “ABC of British Music” and a Fellini-esque illumination of Holst’s “The Planets.”

Music made Russell what he was, and he paid music back royally.

— Mark Swed

Written by David Hudson

Published on 28 November 2011

“Ken Russell, the British director whose daring and sometimes outrageous films often tested the patience of audiences and critics, has died,” reports the AP. “He was 84.”

“Known for a flamboyant style that was developed during his early career in television, Russell’s films often courted controversy,” writes Henry Barnes for the Guardian. “Women in Love, released in 1969, became notorious for its nude male wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, while Tommy, his starry version of The Who’s rock opera, was his biggest commercial success, beginning as a stage musical before being reimagined for the screen in 1976. But Russell fell out of the limelight in recent years, as some of his funding resources dried up and his proposed projects ever more eclectic. He returned to the public eye in 2007, when he appeared on the fifth edition of Celebrity Big Brother, before quitting the show after a disagreement with fellow contestant Jade Goody.”

Earlier this month, when the British Film Institute announced that it’d be giving The Devils (1971) its first-ever release on DVD, we posted a roundup on what long-time Russells champion Mark Kermode calls “his most incendiary work.” (See, too, Adrian Curry in 2009 on the poster.) And last month, we noted that Russell’s collaboration with The Who’s Roger Daltry would carry on after Tommy with Lisztomania (1975), which NPR’s Phil Harrell calls “a bit over the top,” a mini-review that might serve for nearly all of Russell’s work and one that he himself would surely relish.

Updates: From the BBC: “He specialized in the interpretation of the great classical composers, extravaganzas which matched powerful images with a dramatic score…. He harbored a childhood ambition to be a ballet dancer but, instead, joined the Merchant Navy as a teenager. On one occasion he was made to stand watch in the blazing sun for hours on end while crossing the Pacific. His lunatic captain feared an attack by Japanese midget submarines despite the war having ended. A nervous breakdown ensued and, it was during his recovery that he first heard Tchaikovsky on the radio, inspiring a lifelong obsession with the classical composers. After a spell in the Royal Air Force he became a photographer and first made amateur films while working for the magazine, Picture Post. Music became his passion. Delius, Debussy, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler and Liszt were among the composers given the Russell treatment.”

Related reading from Rouge 8: Donald Phelps on “Ken Russell’s Portraits of Elgar, Delius and Mahler.” And in February, Mike Dempsy noted that Elgar (1962) “is still regarded by the BFI as one of the best television documentaries. In 1966 Russell made Isadora Duncan and a year later Song of Summer — a beautifully crafted piece on the closing years of British composer, Fredrick Delius. This for me was the culmination of Russell’s trail-blazing work in this ‘dramadoc’ genre.”

On the occasion of a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the summer of 2010, Nicolas Rapold wrote in the Voice that “art and history were carnival grounds for exhilarating spectacle and Romantic mania…. Case in point: The Music Lovers, an extended 1970 fever dream on Tchaikovsky’s sexual torment that opens in medias res with a wordless scene of lushly scored winter revelry. In a favored Russell technique, single events — like a public recital wracked with excitement and insecurity — are elongated by long fantasy sequences, and whole stretches of images seem pushed and pulled along before our eyes by projected desires and anxieties. Cutting himself off from a secret relationship with a count, Tchaikovsky convinces himself to accept the fanaticism of an admirer ([Glenda] Jackson, a Russell axiom), and weds to pursue a new fantasy. As the composer-conductor, Richard Chamberlain looks like he might shiver into pieces.”

“The typical line on Russell is that he blew open a stagnating British film industry with iconoclastic blasts of bad taste and a virtuoso style that rubbished the rulebook,” wrote Justin Stewart for the L at around the same time. “It is true that the industry there was not flourishing as the 60s became the 70s, though Ken Loach’s Kes, a beautiful movie with a sensitivity galaxies removed from Russell’s self-indulgence, came out in 1969. Joseph Losey and Kubrick were flourishing in England. Peckinpah made Straw Dogs in ‘71, Hitchcock Frenzy in ‘72. But American funding was drying up along with fresh ideas and methods, and George Lazenby was James Bond, so the time was right for a Brit enfant terrible like Russell. With years of work as a photographer and maker of arts documentaries for the BBC, he had just the right mixture of technical adequacy, industry pull, personalized vision, and a trendy beatnik streak to echo, in his own way, the exciting things that were starting to happen in American moviemaking.”

From Film Comment: Gene D Phillips’s 1970 interview and Stephen Farber in 1975 on “Russellmania!”

Catherine Grant has begun “assembling links to scholarly studies of Russell’s work, and to related online resources.”

Viewing (15’03”). Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, Russell’s portrait of the playwright who died just a week ago.

Viewing (1’56”). On the BBC, Michael Winner pays tribute and notes that he saw what was cut out of The Devils: “It was almost longer than the film itself!” And more viewing (2’50”). The BBC’s video obit.

More from the Guardian, which has a special section devoted to Russell: Stuart Jeffries’s interview from April of this year, an image gallery, a collection of clips and Bernard Rose in 2008: “François Truffaut once said that if you love a man’s work, you love all of it. That’s how I feel about Ken Russell. Of the British directors active in the 1960s and 1970s who inspired me, Nic Roeg and Jim Henson were mentors in a very direct way (I worked for them), while Stanley Kubrick and Lindsay Anderson were remote, mythical figures. But Russell was my hero, the heir to Michael Powell’s peculiarly emotional Englishness and vivid visual rhapsodies. And, sadly, a controversial figure more loved abroad than here.”

Women in Love, Russell’s “sexually-graphic 1969 adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel, earned him an Oscar nomination and international recognition with Glenda Jackson picking up the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the movie,” notes Murray Wardrop in the Telegraph, adding that Oliver Reed “said that Russell ‘started to go crazy’ when he worked with him on the film. Reed said: ‘Before that he was a sane, likable TV director. Now he’s an insane, likable film director.’” And the Telegraph’s posted an image gallery.

“He ventured into the American studio system with Altered States (1980), a hallucinogenic science-fiction film starring William Hurt,” writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. “In his autobiography Mr Russell revealed that he was hired by Warner Brothers only after 26 other directors had passed on the project. He feuded with the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who took his name off the project, but Altered States earned him some of his best reviews and has since developed a cult following…. But even with his directing career in eclipse, Mr Russell kept busy with films and documentaries for British television, occasional acting roles and self-financed low-budget features like The Fall of the Louse of Usher, a 2002 horror spoof literally shot in his backyard. He wrote several novels — including a few on the sex lives of famous composers (Beethoven Confidential, Brahms Gets Laid) — and made his off-Broadway directing debut in 2008 with Mindgame, a play starring Keith Carradine…. In a column in The Times in 2008 about a critical biography on him by Joseph Lanza titled Phallic Frenzy, Mr Russell reflected on his longtime status as a critical punching bag. ‘I believe in what I’m doing wholeheartedly, passionately, and what’s more, I simply go about my business,’ he wrote. ‘I suppose such a thing can be annoying to some people.’”

For the Telegraph’s Tim Robey, The Devils “come to be seen as the defining film of a great hellraising career: one in which hell was sometimes almost literally raised, as at the castle of Lord Byron in his 1986 literary fantasia, Gothic…. There was mischief, insult and daring in Russell’s vision, and a playfulness that made him unique — his favorite game was to exploit the starchy norms of British prestige cinema and then abruptly throw an orgy, or blow loud raspberries in the direction of the church. In this sense he followed the rudely provocative tradition of Fellini or Buñuel, but fused that with an antic spirit of thoroughly British eccentricity.”

John Bridcut, who wrote and directed Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask (2010) for BBC4, and is currently working on a film about Delius, in the Guardian: “People sometimes look back wistfully to Russell’s early work at the BBC, where he first made his name, under the fond illusion that, when he was making films for Monitor, he had not yet gone off the rails. His 1968 Delius film Song of Summer (in my view the best composer film he ever made) featured Max Adrian as the blind and paralysed composer, with [Christopher] Gable again as his gawky amanuensis, Eric Fenby. Even here there were telltale flashes of sexual fascination, with clerical groping in the church, or the supposition that Delius’s wife had a lesbian relationship with Ida Gerhardi. But the sombre outcome of Delius’s tertiary syphilis for some reason steered Russell away from the raunchy sex life that Delius had had as a younger man. Perhaps the ageing Fenby kept Russell’s eye on the music.” As for Elgar, “it would not be an exaggeration to say that, more than any other single factor, it triggered the Elgar revival, which has continued unabated to this day. For that alone, Russell deserves a place of glory.”

Viewing (1’06”). Russell tells a story about Fellini.

Viewing (1’51”). Martin Scorsese tells the BBC about his admiration for Russell. Listening (3’32”). More on the BBC from an angry Glenda Jackson.

“In March last year, I interviewed Ken Russell,” recalls Sean O’Hagan. “We spoke over the phone about his days as a working photographer in the 1950s. It was a tough call: he was slightly deaf and very grumpy. Our first attempt at communication ended abruptly when he shouted: ‘That will be all, thank you very much!’ and slammed the phone down. I persevered and, with the help of Lucy Bell, who was hosting an exhibition of his work in her gallery in St Leonards-on-sea, finally got a more illuminating interview…. [H]e referred to his photographs as ‘still films’ which, in a way, they were. Initially he was a street photographer, wandering the streets of London’s Notting Hill ‘until something caught my eye.’ He also made portraits, mainly of the lithe and pretty girls with whom he had studied dance. Even then, the surrealism of his later films was evident.”

Also in the Guardian, Derek Malcolm writes that Russell “was so often called rude names – the wild man of British cinema, the apostle of excess, the oldest angry young man in the business – that he gave up denying it all quite early in his career. Indeed, he often seemed to court the very publicity that emphasised only the crudest assessment of his work. He gave the impression that he cared not a damn. Those who knew him better, however, knew that he did. Underneath all the showbiz bluster, he was an old softie. Or, perhaps as accurately, a talented boy who never quite grew up…. Whether you loved or hated his work, he was an original. And not quite the ‘shrill, screaming gossip’ Pauline Kael called him. He once wrote an article entitled ‘The Films I Do Best Are About the People I Believe In.’ And he made a television programme called Ken Russell’s ABC of British Music (1988) which proved that point absolutely. It won an Emmy for the best performing arts programme. Look at that film and at Song of Summer and the Elgar film and you have the best of Russell on television. Look at The Devils and Crimes of Passion — and the first quickfire 20 minutes of Tommy — and you have just about the best of him in the cinema.”

Gerard Raymond interviewed Russell for Slant in 2010.

“Russell told of his four-decade ‘crush; on actress turned MP Glenda Jackson in his final TV interview,” reports the Telegraph. The as-yet-unseen interview will be broadcast on Friday on Sky Arts.

For Glenn Kenny, The Boy Friend (1971) is “a genuinely clever slice of affectionate post-modernism that toggled between delicacy and grotesquerie more purposefully than many other of his films ever would.”

Time’s Richard Corliss: “It’s strange that people can’t reconcile vulgarity and artistry,’ Ken Russell told his biographer John Baxter. ‘They’re the same thing to me. But don’t get vulgarity mixed up with commercialism. By vulgarity I mean an exuberant over-the-top larger-than-life slightly bad taste red-blooded thing. And if that’s not anything to do with Art, let’s have nothing to do with Art.’” Further in, Corliss notes that, when it came to Elgar, BBC exec Huw Wheldon “told Russell he could use actors only mute and in long shot. The director used that restriction as an advantage, creating a hallucinatory musical landscape. As Michael Brooke writes for BFI Screenonline: ‘When Russell’s camera isn’t swooping and gliding over Elgar’s beloved Malvern Hills, it’s fixating on strangely arresting shots: the sequence covering Lady Elgar’s death begins with tendrils of mist snaking through a silver birch wood, continues with a dark room full of mysteriously shrouded furniture and ends with the bereaved Elgar’s new and obsessive interest in microscopic natural phenomena.’” And Corliss himself on Altered States: “It’s an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring — into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit. The film changes tone, even form, with its hero’s every new mood and mutation. It expands and contracts with his mind until both almost crack. It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on its threat, and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire.”

“It was as if,” suggests the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “Russell looked around at the stupefying dullness of Britain in the Heath/Wilson era and thought: what can I do to shake this lot up? ‘I conduct to live; I live to compose,’ says Robert Powell in Russell’s 1974 movie, Mahler — and perhaps Russell, in his heart, admired the clarity and calm of an artist who could keep distinct money-making endeavour in the public sphere, and creative labour in private.”

The Guardian also collects tributes from Glenda Jackson, Robert Powell, Melvyn Bragg, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Maxwell Davies, Douglas Hodge and Don Boyd.

IndieWIRE asks Shade Rupe, a personal friend of Russell’s, for his thoughts. He begins, “Kenneth Alfred Henry Russell entered Earth on July 3, 1927, in Southampton, England and quickly found his way to the cinema, citing Milton Rosmer’s 1934 picture The Secret of the Loch as his first bout at the flickers. The story of a loonish Scottish academic trying to convince everyone the Loch Ness Monster was a real beast would find a new home in Russell’s skull in his hypersexual The Lair of the White Worm….”

Viewing (13’14”). Guardian film writers Xan Brooks, Catherine Shoard and Andrew Pulver discuss the legacy. And more viewing (1’25”). Vanessa Redgrave on the BBC.