Ken Russell
" Tommy " (1975)
The
Rock opera with the Russell touch
Interview
by Alice Wethli
Film
International magazine April 1975
Film Reviews
Film International magazine June 1975
Κινηματογραφικά
Director Ken Russell discusses his latest film Tommy, based on the popular rock opera
composed by Pete Townshend and The Who.
Tommy
The Rock opera with the Russell touch
Interview
by Alice Wethli
Roger Daltrey makes his acting debut in the title
role of Tommy.
SIX YEARS have
passed since the explosive rock opera “Tommy” was released in a double album by
Peter Townshend and The Who. British film director, Ken Russell is now
releasing his film version of the widely acclaimed rock opera, and it promises
to be one of the brighter film experiences of the year.
After a full
year of preparation, Townshend joined Ken Russell in a rigorous twelve week
schedule in England recreating the opera on film.
Prominent in
the production is a fascinating and unusual bit of casting, ranging from Ann-Margret
and Jack Nicholson to rock superstars Eric Clapton and included, of Elton John.
Also included of course, are the Who themselves. Lead guitarist Pete Townshend
composed all of the film’s thirty songs except for two by bassist John
Entwistle and one by the Who’s eccentric and kinetic drummer Keith Moon. In
addition, Townshend contributes four new songs for the filmed version.
The Who's
fourth member and lead singer, Roger Daltrey, makes his successful acting debut
in Tommy. Russell quickly recognized Daltrey as “ʻa natural talent” and enlisted
him to star in his next project, a film about the life of composer Franz Lizst.
Ken Russell’s
Tommy is a high-keyed, hard-edged,
and chromatic excursion in cinematography.
Assuming the
proportions of popular myth, the story recounts the psychic odyssey of a boy
deprived of physical sensation; he is struck deaf, dumb, and blind after
witnessing the murder of his father.
The plot is
sparked visually through an exploration of Tommy’s inner universe, his
desolation, his plea for help (See me,
feel me, touch me, heal me...’) as well as the outer world through which he
progresses in his bizarre quest toward a miracle cure. Tommy’s co-producer
Robert Stigwood sums it up: “This is not a story easily explained in words.”
One afternoon
I visited with Ken Russell to talk about his part in creating Tommy and its relationship to the work
he has created thus far. Russell was receptive, his bushy countenance
fluctuating at once between that of a sage philosopher and a jovial St. Nick.
He spoke articulately and had much to say about his new film in addition to
remarks about his work in general.
Russell
unravels a consistent thread in his work by quoting a thought from Mahler, his last film, based on the life
of the German composer. “Why are we here, where do we come from, is it all a huge
joke?” All my films are about that.”
Tommy is no exception. While many
regard the excitement of the original rock opera as more “rock” than “opera,”
Russell has another opinion.
“I’d heard
lots of loud music in a very strong, primitive, rather boring beat which I
think was rock. And I found it rhythmically pretty dreary. What I often thought
of doing would be to—in the middle of a rock concert—get the band off the stage
and put on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
And I think that would really blow the minds of people who always thought they
were carried away by the rhythm of rock.”
“It’s a cheat
in a way. If you played rock quietly, as Townshend has said, it doesn’t work,
so it’s just a form of noise and the music value of it is rather dubious. As
far as Tommy is concerned, it might
be called a rock opera, but to me it is just an opera, just as Bach wrote jigs
and popular dances of his day. That Townshend happens to have used the rock idiom
to write an opera seems to me beside the point. It stands, as far as I’m
concerned, on its own merits. And I think when rock’s long forgotten...and rock
just means a piece of stone. . . Tommy will go on because: (a) it says
something very important, and (b) it’s a good piece of music. To me, the film,
although it’s still got the old rock beat, has taken it about two hundred light
years ahead, in so far as the instrumentation and the instrumental color of the
score. It’s very, very musically exciting.”
His original
opinion of the album itself was fairly unenthusiastic and many changes occurred
in the soundtrack for the film.
Nora (Ann-Margret) tries in vain to reach her son
Tommy (Roger Daltrey).
“In the
original album I heard, I thought it was pretty monotonous, I just got bored
listening to it. But Townshend did that six years ago. For the film, he started
off with basically the same thing, in so far as it had the backing group of The
Who with the occasional added piano or extra guitar. When we finished recording
it, we found that certain sections had to be extended.
We always
knew we wanted a prologue, because in the opera there is no beginning, only a
murder, but you don’t know anything about the people concerned, so you feel
nothing about them. I told this to Pete and he said, ‘You film what you think
is necessary.’ We discussed it and filmed what took about six minutes, then we
discussed what feelings we wanted to go with the music. Pete then wrote some
more music afterwards. And on all the other backing tracks he added and took
away. Then with a sixteen-track recorder up in his attic he worked night and
day adding moog and synthesizer sounds, either sounding like a symphony
orchestra, but with linear, clean sounds, or something like bird song or
screaming masses or whatever. To me it’s quite an amazing sound and he
certainly couldn’t have thought of that when he did the original thing, and it
seems to be a great leap forward. There’s an amazing variety of texture.”
Russell has
more to say about Townshend.
“The way
Townshend treated what is basically boring for me is what makes Tommy really stand out. Not being a fan
of that genre, it seems to me that rock’s a sort of straight-jacket that Pete
Townshend will one day break out of. It might sound sacrilegious, and I never
said that to him, but I mean that’s his thing, he’s been brought up on it and
he knows the power of it. He knows it moves people and so forth, but, as far as
I’m concerned he doesn’t need it. I think it’s a limiting thing to his
development.”
While in
other films (Mahler, The Music Lovers) Russell has expressed
passionate curiosity for the composer, in this film he has actually created
with one.
One unique
aspect of the film is that every line is set to music, no words are spoken at
any time. Russell responds to the obvious uncertainties of this approach:
“There was a
danger of being very conscious that the story was being told by the people
singing to each other, at each other, and about things. But after the first few
songs you do forget they’re singing. You can like or dislike the songs, but
they just carry the story on and it’s as if there had never been such a thing
as dialogue.”
Like any
artist, Russell has studied the work of those he admires.
“People that
have influenced my work are from an earlier generation, although I very much
like dear, old Truffaut. I’ve loved Truffaut. I loved Jules et Jim, and loved Shoot
the Piano Player. They were great. I love Eisenstein films too.”
“Orson Welles
is the only American film director who’s influenced me at all consciously. I
know I consciously copied him, in so far as you copy things you love. He is
it.”
In a brief
memory from his childhood, Russell reveals something subtly linked to his life
in the present.
“T lived on a
street that no traffic ever seemed to go down. Literally it was a very cut off
street in South Hampton.”
“I do
remember seeing a rather great flux of humanity, inasmuch as there was a
terrible place called Cancel Walk, which in retrospect I realize was full of
brothels and Chinese opium dens. It was a teeming sort of cauldron of people
and flesh and strangeness.”
“But in my
little road I just had this big tree in which I would just sit most of the day
and imagine amazing adventures. And there were these puddles in the road. This
may be a terrible cliche, but, they did mean something to me because the clouds
down there seemed like hills, that you could actually get down to them. More so
than looking up into the sky which you could never get up to. Getting down
there was the thing, and I would always just stare at the puddles.”
The
film’s final scene.
TOMMY
προωθητική αφίσσα της ταινίας
Sounds magazine, April 12,
1975.
Part II.
Film
International magazine June 1975
Film
Reviews
Tommy
KEN
RUSSELL'S Tommy
is an explosive, surreal fairy tale for rock-music freaks — but it's also a
little bit more. Taken from the rock opera by Pete Townshend (performed by The
Who, whose lead singer, Roger Daltrey, is in the title role here), the film
succeeds best in capturing visually the manic, larger-than-life world of rock.
The pounding music, of course, is in abundance — every word of dialogue is sung
— but the visual assaults are just as broad:
a field littered with flaming pinball machines;
a hypodermic-studded, robot-like contraption that
swallows Tommy and takes him on an acid trip;
a plushly carpeted bedroom flooded with soapsuds;
baked beans, and melted chocolate erupting from a
shattered TV set.
There is no
respite either from the music or from Russell's manic imagination.
Those
"into" heavy rock will turn on to the movie —the young audience with
me certainly did — but, I should add quickly, there is also a great deal for
the uninitiated. From the frantic rubble, moments of surprising power and beauty
emerge. When Tommy, six years old, witnesses the murder of his father by his
stepfather — the traumatic kicking-off point for the wild plot — the scene has
real dramatic intensity, a broad, operatic intensity.
Oliver Reed
and Ann-Margret
—excellent as the stepfather and the mother — realize Tommy has seen all, and
they corner him, singing “You saw nothing, you heard nothing" with such
force that we can’t help feeling the effect on little Tommy.
Tommy,
traumatized, becomes deaf, dumb, and blind, and his mother and “Uncle Frank”
seek to cure him; each “cure” explodes into an orgy of music and Russell
flamboyance. The religious cure, for example, takes place in a church where
Marilyn Monroe is god —attendants wear Marilyn masks with bright-red puckered lips,
small Marilyn crosses are waved about in rhythmic ritual, and the disabled,
gathered to be cured, kiss the feet of a giant Marilyn statue.
The idea is
wonderful, the scene visually imaginative, and it clicks — briefly. But the
problem — a problem central to the film — is that Russell drags the scene out
to the breaking point. It goes beyond mere miscalculation — miscalculation of
how long the bit can work; it drags on with clear intent to assault. But for
what reason? What artistic justification could there be for deliberately
alienating the audience after going to so much trouble, expending so much
imaginative energy, on creating an effect? It does not make the message
stronger; it dilutes it.
The film too
perfectly reflects rock music: It takes a good thing and turns up the volume,
stretches the boundaries, and deadens the eardrums — with most of the art. But
much of the music, when it stays at a tolerable decibel level, is lively and
engaging, and the film has many moments; it is saved from disaster, finally, by
not taking itself completely seriously.
It is laden
down with the religious symbolism we expect from Russell — Tommy is an obvious
Christ figure — but there is a pervading awareness that it's all a game, a
put-on.
Roger Daltry, the Who's lead
singer, plays the deaf, dumb and blind Tommy.
Oliver Reed mixes these elements perfectly,
and that's why his performance is so appealing. And Ann-Margret catches it in a
few wonderful moments.
Ann Margret is the mother who
traumatized Tommy.
But often
some of the actors seem confused, not knowing what to do, what mood to create,
as if the unfathomable mind of Ken Russell had left them all behind.
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 16 Φεβρουαρίου 2024 :
Ken Russell
Tommy (1975)
The Rock opera with the Russell touch
Interview by Alice Wethli
Film International
magazine April 1975
Film Reviews
Film International magazine June 1975
Κινηματογραφικά ]
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