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Ken Russell

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Ken Russell
File:Russell The Boyfriend.jpg
Russell Directing Twiggy and Christopher Gable in 'The Boy Friend' (1971)

Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell, known as Ken Russell (born July 3 1927) is a controversial British film director, particularly known for his films about famous composers.

Early career

Russell was born in Southampton, served in both the RAF and the Merchant Navy, and moved into television work after a brief affair with dancing and photography. In the late 1950s, Russell's amateur films secured him a job at the BBC, where he worked regularly from 1959–1970 making arts documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus. Amongst his best known works from this period were Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965), Isadora Duncan - The Biggest Dancer in the World (1967) and Song of Summer (1968). His television films became increasingly flamboyant and outrageous — The Debussy Film opens with a scene in which a woman is shot full of arrows (a reference to Debussy's The Martyrdom of St Sebastian), while Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a self-styled "comic strip in seven parts on the life of Richard Strauss", caused such outrage that questions were asked in the British Parliament and the Strauss family withdrew all music rights, effectively banning it from legal circulation. Although the majority of his BBC films were about musical subjects, he also tackled visual art, in the seminal film on British Pop Art, Pop Goes the Easel (1963) and a biopic of French painter Henri Rousseau, Always on Sunday (1965).

Russell's first feature was French Dressing, a comedy loosely based on Brigitte Bardot's And God Created Woman (dir. Roger Vadim) made in 1963; its critical and commercial failure sent Russell back to the BBC. His second big-screen effort was part of author Len Deighton's Harry Palmer spy cycle, Billion-Dollar Brain (1967).

1970s and controversy

His first truly personal feature film was 1969's Women in Love, based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence. The film made a star of Glenda Jackson and broke the cinema taboo of full frontal male nudity. Work in a similar vein continued with The Music Lovers (1970), a biopic of Tchaikovsky which drew attention to his homosexuality, and The Devils, based on Aldous Huxley's book The Devils of Loudun, starring Vanessa Redgrave in a highly controversial role as a nun. The Devils was among a number of high-profile films released in this period with an X-rating, including Greetings, Midnight Cowboy, and A Clockwork Orange. Like all of these films The Devils was later released R-rated without any edits to home video.

Russell's first attempt to break into America with the period musical/Twiggy vehicle The Boyfriend met with critical derision and audience apathy. Russell turned to European financing for Savage Messiah, a biopic of artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Mahler resulting in mild critical praise. It became evident, however, that the die had been cast against Russell in the critical community, with David Thompson and Pauline Kael vociferously denouncing his output.

In 1975 Russell was gifted a hit with the star studded film version of The Who's Tommy starring Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Elton John, Tina Turner, Eric Clapton, and Jack Nicholson. The film premiered at Cannes, enjoyed high financial returns and went on to become a sort of cult film. The success of Tommy allowed Russell to indulge his visual flair in his follow up Lizstomania, designed as a vehicle for Roger Daltrey. Charges of self-indulgence that had dogged Russell's ouvre peaked with Lizstomania, and the resulting film was a cinematic non-starter. Despite the setback, the success of Tommy gave Russell another shot at Hollywood, but the biopic Valentino satisfied neither Russell's fans nor the general public.

1980s

Russell's 1980 effort, Altered States was a departure in both genre and tone, such that it is Russell's only foray into serious science fiction and contains few overt elements of satire and caricature. Working from Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay (based upon a novel of the same name), Russell used his penchant for elaborate visual effects to translate Chayefsky's hallucinatory story to the cinema and gave him the opportunity to add his trademark religious and sexual imagery. The film itself was a mild success financially, scored with critics who had otherwise dismissed Russell's work, and has since been reclassified, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey as a classic "head-film." Nevertheless, any praise the film received was dampened by Chayefsky's vocal dissatisfaction with the project, having dropped out shortly after filming began. A litigious man known for his intractibility, Chayefsky had previously fired Arthur Penn from the project and, prior to its release, requested the screenplay credit substitute "Sidney Aaron" for Chayefsky's own name. The move was designed to emphasize Chayefsky's vitriol. This, and Chayefsky's subsequent death from stress-related illnesses has clouded Russell's attempt at a comeback. Russell's last American film was Crimes of Passion (1984), and returns to his major themes, sex and religion, contrasting the prostitute with the "priest" and benefits from the performances of Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins.

Unable to comply with the conservatism of Hollywood, Russell returned to Europe and mostly found financing in independent and fly-by-night companies like Vestron. Gothic (1986) was a suitably hysterical treatment of Lord Byron and the creation of the story that became Frankenstein.

In 1988 he released two films: the Hammer spoof The Lair of the White Worm and Salome's Last Dance that reunited him with his Women in Love star Glenda Jackson. Worm, which often plays like self-parody, was accepted in many quarters as a trashy lark, while Salome received grudging praise. Russell returned to Lawrence for what, so far, has been his last personal project for the cinema, an adaptation of The Rainbow.

He directed the music video for Pandora's Box's "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" in 1989.

1990s

By the 1990s, Russell's notoriety and persona had attracted so much media attention that he was widely regarded as unemployable in the cinema, and is now largely reliant on his own finances to continue making films. Much of his work since 1990 has been commissioned for television and he has contributed regularly to The South Bank Show. Prisoner of Honor marked Russell's final feature with Oliver Reed, Mindbender was dismissed as propaganda for mentalist Uri Geller, and Tracked (aka Dogboys) unrecognizable as a Russell film. Efforts such as The Lion's Mouth and Fall of the Louse of Usher suffer from low production values (shot on video on Russell's estate, often featuring Russell himself) and limited distribution.

Russell has written several books on filmmaking, the British film industry, an autobiography "A British Picture" (published in the U.S., confusingly, as "Altered States"), and books for young readers.

Filmography

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