Crimes of Passion (1984)

Crimes of Passion is a 1984 Ken Russell movie and as such it is impossible to assign it to a genre. New World Pictures probably thought they were going to get a straightforward erotic thriller. That is certainly what a brief synopsis of the plot might have suggested. One can only assume that they had never seen any of Ken Russell’s pictures and had no idea what they were actually going to get.

It’s really more a black comedy.

Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) is around 30. He lives the American Dream. He has a security business. He has a perfect wife, Amy (Annie Potts), and two great little kids. They live in a nice suburban house. Bobby has always been a straight arrow and it’s paid off. He played football in college. He married his high school sweetheart.

So why is he attending a group therapy session? He’s just there to support a buddy. Bobby doesn’t have any problems. And then he lets the mask skip. He and his perfect suburban wife no longer have perfect suburban sex. They no longer have sex at all.

Bobby has never been aware of it but he has been living a lie. He’s been wearing a mask of perfect middle-class happiness to cover up the fact that all the passion has long since departed from the marriage. He and Amy have been wearing masks. They have been playing a game of make-believe.

Then he takes a security assignment, to check out a woman named Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner) suspected of industrial espionage. That’s how Bobby meets China Blue. China Blue is Joanna Crane. China Blue is her secret identity. Her mask. Or perhaps Joanna Crane is China Blue’s mask.

China Blue gives Bobby the best sex he has ever had in his life. That’s when Bobby realises how empty his life had become.

Bobby is not the only man obsessed with China Blue. There’s also the Reverend Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins), a crazed preacher. Or perhaps just a crazy man who has convinced himself that he is a preacher. The Reverend’s mission is to save China Blue. He is a saviour, and possibly sees himself as an avenging angel. The Reverend is tortured by his sexual desires.

As I said, it’s a setup for a conventional erotic thriller but Ken Russell takes it in wild crazy directions.

Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins share top billing. Kathleen Turner is simply amazing.

China Blue is not just a mask won by Joanna. China Blue then plays various parts for various clients, depending on what she thinks will excite them. Sometimes she tells them stories of her past traumas that led her into a life of prostitution but her stories are pure invention.

All the characters are sheltering behind a mask of some kind, playing roles, and often there are masks on top of masks. When he takes the surveillance job Bobby dons another mask - the hardboiled private eye. He doesn’t do it convincingly (because he’s not a tough guy) but it’s telling that at a time when he feels powerless in his relationship he resorts to play-acting as a cynical tough guy. What he needs in his life is honesty, but that’s too scary.

My initial impression was that the Reverend was a character that just didn’t work and that the performance of Tony Perkins was more parody than anything else. In fact, had this been a straightforward erotic thriller this performance would have been enough to sink the movie. But this is a different kind of movie and in a way the character does work. We don’t have to believe in him.

We don’t have to believe that anything in this movie corresponds to real life. The look and tone of the movie suggest a fever dream, or even a twisted fairy tale. The Reverend is perhaps a fairy tale monster, or perhaps a nightmare conjured from the unconscious. There is even a slight hint of a comic-book feel (and the Reverend could certainly have been a comic-book villain).

It’s significant that Joanne’s house looks like a fairy-tale castle. She has constructed for herself a world of fantasies and make-believe. Perhaps her China Blue persona is her eroticised fantasy of being a fairy-tale princess.

And the suburban life of Bobby and his wife is their version of a perfect fairy-tale world but they’re miserable because they’re not really living happily ever after. The perfect love needed to sustain their fantasy has vanished. Their sex life has been built on lies because without the love they’ve just been going through the motions.

Like so many of Ken Russell’s movies it’s impossible to fully appreciate this film without taking into account that Russell was raised a Catholic. The movie is not just littered with religious iconography. Religious themes are all-pervasive. Russell belongs to the rich tradition of Catholic film-makers, a tradition that includes Lang and Hitchcock. It’s a tradition that is now a thing of the past, and cinema has as a result lost much of its power and magic.

The use of colour is absolutely extraordinary. On a limited budget Russell still manages to deliver a visual extravaganza. Dick Bush’s cinematography is superb.

Crimes of Passion has a quality I really really love in a movie - a sense that the story takes place in a world very much like the real world but there’s just something slightly off-kilter. This is hyper-reality or exaggerated or heightened reality. It’s almost, dare I say it, an anticipation of the David Lynch approach.

This is certainly not a movie that is anti-sex. There’s nothing wrong with Joanne’s taste for kinky sex, but it doesn’t satisfy her because she needs passion and love as well.

Crimes of Passion is one of Ken Russell’s best movies. Very highly recommended.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray offers both the unrated cut and the slightly raunchier director’s cut, with an audio commentary by scriptwriter Barry Sandler and the man himself, Ken Russell.

Savage Messiah (1972)

Savage Messiah is a 1972 Ken Russell movie which gets slightly overshadowed by his more well-known (and more notorious) 1970s movies.

Ken Russell made his initial reputation in television in the 60s with a series of wonderful TV films. At this stage it was obvious that Russell was obsessed by the idea of exploring the psychology of creative individuals (mainly composers but sometimes writers and painters as well), and by the idea of doing this in an interesting, unconventional and visually inventive way. These Ken Russell TV-films bore no resemblance to the usual run of dry dreary documentaries. They were fresh, exciting and challenging.

It was a subject to which Russell would return over and over again throughout his career. In 1972, after making a couple of features on other subjects, he was ready to explore this matter once again. Savage Messiah is the story of French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Russell was fascinated by genius. He made films about men like Mahler, Debussy, Liszt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tchaikovsky. Men who achieved immense success and are universally considered to be among the greats. Russell was also interested in the effect that success had on these people, an effect that that was perhaps not always positive.

In Savage Messiah he has chosen to make a movie about a sculptor, Henri Gaudier, who is not a great deal more than a footnote in art history. And Gaudier never had to worry about the effect that success might have on him. He never enjoyed any. While the other creative artists about whom Russell made movies lived in luxury and elegance Henri and Sophie live in squalor. It’s not just their surroundings that are squalid. Their lives are squalid.

The movie focuses a good deal on Henri’s relationship with Sophie Brzeska, a writer who achieved even less success than Henri.

Gaudier was a modernist, and I’m afraid my prejudice against modernism made me less than sympathetic to him, and to the art he created which to me seems extraordinarily ugly and uninteresting.

Since Russell was fascinated by genius we have at assume that he thought Gaudier was a genius, and to appreciate the movie you have to accept that assessment. But unlike his other similar movies this is a movie about genius unrecognised and thwarted.

The nature of the relationship between Henri Gaudier and Sophie remains obscure. It seems to have been passionate but mostly (or more probably entirely) sexless. In the movie, as in reality, Henri consoles himself with prostitutes, paid for by Sophie.

The movie opens with Henri’s meeting with Sophie. Henri is young, irrepressible, arrogant, hyper-confident and hyper-active. Sophie is twice his age, her ambitions to write have been frustrated. Sophie is drawn to Henri’s energy and enthusiasm. Sophie thinks about suicide a lot.

They move to London. Gaudier meets eccentric art dealer Angus Corky (Lindsay Kemp) and his equally strange friends who see themselves as the artistic avant-garde. They’re the counterculture of the Edwardian era (and remember this movie was made in 1972 so it’s fair to assume that the parallels with the 1960/70s counterculture are deliberate). They’re a gallery of grotesques.

Gaudier tries to make a success of his art and never doubts for one moment that he will succeed.

He then meets Gosh Boyle (yes her name is Gosh and she’s played by Helen Mirren). Gosh seems more than willing to offer him the physical side of love that Sophie has always denied.

It’s a film (like all of Russell’s movies about geniuses) about the madness of genius but in this case there is a greater madness on the horizon as war fever sweeps England. The madness of genius is a positive madness but there is nothing positive about the madness of war. But an obsession with death is common to the genius heroes of many of Russell’s movies (notably The Music Lovers and Mahler).

It’s hard to judge the acting since all the characters are mad and hyper-active and the performances reflect this. Scott Antony (whose career proved to be astonishingly brief) is weirdly compelling as Gaudier. Dorothy Tutin is even weirder as Sophie, and Helen Mirren chews the scenery with abandon as Gosh. Lindsay Kemp is bizarrely likeable as Angus Corky, Gaudier’s crazy agent. It’s fun to see wonderful actors like Peter Vaughan, Robert Lang and Michael Gough in the supporting cast.

There’s no shortage of Ken Russell excess in this production. If you hate his movies you’ll hate this one. If you love his movies you’ll love this one.

Savage Messiah is on DVD in the Warner Archive series. It’s still obtainable but not that easy to find.

Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Blu-Ray review

Billion Dollar Brain (1967) is a spy movie directed by Ken Russell, which is certainly an intriguing idea. This is one of the Harry Palmer spy movies starring Michael Caine, based on Len Deighton’s unnamed spy novels, and that makes it even more intriguing.

Not everyone likes this movie. I love it - a Len Deighton story done with Ken Russell visual brilliance just works for me.

Here's my full review.

Tommy (1975)

Mention Ken Russell to most people and chances are the movie they’ll think of is Tommy, based on the rock opera of the same name by Pete Townshend of The Who’s. It’s a movie I’ve avoided seeing for years, much as I revere Ken Russell. And it’s definitely a mixed bag.

Tommy is a boy born during the Second World War. His father is a British bomber pilot who is posted as missing in action. After the war his mother finds a new love, at a seaside holiday camp. The father returns and is killed by the mother and her lover. The shock of witnessing the killing renders Tommy deaf, dumb and blind. He suffers various indignities at the hands of an assortment of strange characters - his crazy cousin Kevin, his crazier Uncle Ernie, and is given psychedelic drugs and encounters the Acid Queen.

Tommy eventually discovers an unexpected skill - he becomes the greatest pinball player in the history of the world. He and his family become fabulously rich as a result but pinball is only the start. Tommy will go on to found a major religious cult, and will endure further sufferings.

It’s a story that gave Ken Russell the chance to indulge his visual imagination to the full without having to fret to much about narrative coherence. It’s essentially a string of musical numbers, rather like a linked series of lavish music videos, and the episodic structure offers the opportunity to present a succession of visual set-pieces. Each set-piece has its own visual style, its own mood.

So far so good. But there are some problems. The first problem is that the rock opera as a concept is one of the worst ideas in the history of western civilisation. Don’t get me wrong. I like rock’n’roll and I like opera. But the two should never, ever be mixed. Just as rock musicians should never have been permitted to consort with symphony orchestras.

The second problem is that the music is awful. This is of course a matter of personal taste. I like some of The Who’s early material but they rapidly degenerated into bombastic stadium rock of the worst sort.

The third problem is that Pete Townshend was getting into some serious hippie-dippie territory at the time he wrote Tommy. The combination of the pomposity of rock opera with hippie ideals is enough to make strong men shudder.

The fourth problem is Ann-Margret, who plays Tommy’s mother. Not that her performance is bad. Far from it. She’s just too good. She completely dominates the film and entirely overshadows the central character. She unbalances the movie.

With all these problems the movie still has one big thing in its favour. It has Ken Russell. With Ken Russell’s visual genius you can even ignore the terrible music. The images tell the story quite successfully without the music anyway. Russell was attracted to the theme of false religions and false prophets and has a good deal of fun with it. The Cult of Marilyn might have been an obvious idea, but only Ken Russell would have pushed it so far and made it work. There’s a good deal of Christ imagery as well. The combination of Russell’s Catholicism and Pete Townshend’s new age silliness works better than you might expect.

While Ann-Margret does dominate the movie this is really no bad thing. She’s magnificent. Roger Daltrey is adequate enough as Tommy. Oliver Reed is bizarre but entertaining as Tommy’s stepfather.

A good deal of credit must go Russell’s first wife Shirley. Her costume designs are a major part of the film’s outrageousness. The movie was apparently made on a relatively small budget, demonstrating once again that talent and imagination are so much more important than money and technology when it comes to making visually striking movies.

Everything in this movie is real. That really is Roger Daltrey doing the insanely dangerous stunts. That really is Ann-Margret writhing on the carpet covered from head to toe in baked beans. There are no doubles. And no dubbing of singing voices. When Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson sing, you’re hearing Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson sing.

Ken Russell’s commentary track is well worth the time taken to hear it. He has very fond memories of the film. His admiration for Ann-Margret knows no bounds.

Not a complete success, Tommy remains an extraordinary experience.

Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film (1965)

The Debussy Film is one of the Ken Russell BBC-TV films made for the Monitor arts documentary series. Made the same year as the Rousseau film, this one is much more ambitious, much more interesting and much more successful.

It’s actually a film about someone making a film about Debussy, and added to the very strong Nouvelle Vague flavour of the piece it invites the obvious comparison - Godard’s Le Mepris (Contempt). But it’s actually closer in feel to the more exuberant Godard of Band of Outsiders, with a strong admixture of absurdism and even a hint of Richard Lester’s A Hard Days’ Night. It’s an odd mix but it works. Compared to the Rousseau movie this is also much more obviously a Ken Russell film.

It focuses quite a bit on Debussy’s troubled relations with women (two of his girlfriends attempted suicide) and on his influences. Not his musical influences - what made Debussy so interesting was that he was so heavily influenced by painting and by literature. The film gives the impression that he never really sat down and wrote a piece of pure music - all his music was about something, and mostly it was about a painting or a story or a poem that appealed to the composer. This blending and cross-influencing of different arts is both fascinating in its own right and makes for an interesting film.

The early influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, and especially Rossetti, is stressed. The Symbolist writers were of course immensely important to Debussy’s music, as was one of my favourite decadent writers, Pierre Louÿs (who was effectively Debussy’s patron for a number of years). There’s a considerable dose of fin de siècle decadence, juxtaposed with some Swinging 60s decadence!

I hadn’t realised that Debussy spent years on a musical adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and that he was quite obsessed by Poe.

Oliver Reed might might not have been most people’s first choice for the role of Debussy, but Ken Russell had great faith in the actor and Ollie never let him down. Reed is in fact extremely good - his natural sensuality makes him perfect casting.

Unlike Always on Sunday, this one has a proper feature-length running time of 82 minutes and it has much more of a real feature film feel to it, albeit on a limited BBC budget! Given the subject matter it’s perhaps just a little unfortunate this one was made before the BBC switched to colour, and the black-and-white cinematography (although very well done) doesn’t quite have the necessary lushness and excessiveness, or the necessary sensuousness.

This is still an intriguing and generally rather satisfying little film. It has the classic Ken Russell stye, not quite as over-the-top as it would later become and on a smaller scale, but it’s still a movie that could only have been made by Ken Russell.

Lisztomania (1975)

Lisztomania, released in 1975, can be seen as a logical development of Ken Russell’s early 70s movies, with the bizarre surreal dream/fantasy sequences finally taking over the movie completely. Such plot as the film possesses is driven entirely by these sequences. There is no conventional narrative at all. And even by Ken Russell standards, this movie is excessive. In fact excessive is a pitifully inadequate word to describe this movie.

The inspiration for the movie was the career of 19th century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. He was not merely a notable composer. As a concert pianist he was arguably the first musician to develop the kind of following later to be associated with rock stars. He also lived something of a rock star lifestyle, involving numerous liaisons with rich and important women, none of whom he married. He was an early champion of Wagner, and his daughter Cosima later married Wagner. In later life he entered the Franciscan order.

Despite its outrageous style, most of the events of the movie have some basis in Liszt’s actual life. But the style is very outrageous indeed - with Wagner as a Nazi vampire, a gigantic penis, rock’n’roll, a pipe-organ spaceship, groupies, lots of sex, Ringo Starr as the pope in a rather cool motorised papal throne and a drunken mechanical Norse God being some of the highlights. The fact that Wagner wields an electric guitar that doubles as a nachine-gun, while Liszt fights back with a flamethrower-equipped piano, will give you some idea of the film’s tone.

The casting of The Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, as Liszt works surprisingly well. Daltrey’s perfomance isn’t a conventional acting performance, but that’s not what the film calls for. He has the charisma, and he has the right combination of arrogance, charm and a rather naïve likeability. And he succeeds in capturing much of the actual personality of the composer, and most certainly captures the magic that was the secret of his immense popular appeal. He’s a showman, and he plays Liszt as a showman.

The movie takes a particular aspect of Russell’s film-making as far as it can possibly go, and even without the chronic financing problems that have bedeviled his subsequent career he would still have needed to change direction after this film. It’s to his credit that he realised this, and despite their lack of critical and public acceptance the movies he made from the late 70s to the early 90s, movies like Valentino, Crimes of Passion, Lair of the White Worm and Whore, represent an interesting and impressive achievement.

It’s impossible to do justice to the full extent of this movie’s weirdness. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that it is essentially a comedy. If you remember this then I think the movie can be considered a success. The director’s intention was to have some fun, and you're not supposed to take it as seriously as, for example, The Music Lovers or Mahler.

The cleverest thing about the movie is the way Ken Russell is able to weave such bizarre and grotesque fantasy sequences without actually departing from the essential facts of Liszt’s life. The very term Lisztomania was in fact coined in the 19th century to describe the hysterical reactions of Liszt’s female fans to his concert performances.

If you like Ken Russell’s style you’ll probably like this one, but if you don’t like his work then Lisztomania will probably confirm every negative feeling you have about him! I don’t think it’s a great Ken Russell movie, but it’s amusing and I quite enjoyed it.

The Region 2 DVD includes a commentary track by Ken Russell.

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

I’m not sure if this is really a cult movie, but it is an under-appreciated movie, and it isBillion Dollar Brain, released in 1967, was the third of the Harry Palmer spy movies of the 1960s. Some people don't regard it as a true Ken Russell movie but I don’t agree. I think it has his visual signature all over it. And it has the characteristic Russell excess. It has almost nothing in common with the earlier Harry Palmer films. There's no pretence here of a realistic spy thriller. Billion Dollar Brain has more in common with Dr Strangelove, or even Apocalypse Now. This is the strange, deluded, paranoid world of the right-wing zealot. It's a surreal world of plots, both imaginary and real, a glimpse inside the mind of a madman. It's the mental landscape of the obsessed. If you’ve always wondered what a Ken Russell spy movie would be like, this is it. If you were going to compare it to another Ken Russell film it would have to be The Devils, with General Midwinter's rabidly anti-communist conservative fanatics in place of the religious fanatics of the later movie. The plot concerns an attempt by a crazed Texan oil billionaire to overthrow Soviet communism. In many of the British spy movies of the 60s there is no moral difference between the Cold War antagonists. That's not the case here – in this movie the Russians are unequivocally the good guys.

Harry Palmer provided Michael Caine with one of his best roles and he turns in a fine performance. Karl Malden is superb as corrupt CIA agent Leo Newbigen. It’s a role that allows him to be more flamboyant and more morally ambiguous than usual and he’s clearly enjoying himself. Ed Begley is terrifying as General Midwinter, while Oscar Homolka is delightful as the cynical but extremely likeable KGB chief Colonel Stok. Billion Dollar Brain looks superb, with some fascinatingly odd and interesting sets and enormous visual flair. It also benefits from a great score by Richard Rodney Bennett. This isn't just a real Ken Russell movie, it's a great Ken Russell movie. It's a fantastic movie. I can't recommend this movie too highly.