Ken Russell RIP

[Sheilbh]

Ken Russell
Ken Russell, the film maker, who has died aged 84, took a distinctive, visual approach to his work and favoured an unapologetic choice of subject matter which created one of the most extrovert styles in post-War cinema.
Ken Russell


Women in Love (1969), famous for its naked wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed Photo: Allstar/Cinetext/

12:34PM GMT 28 Nov 2011

In a career spanning 30 years, his name became a reference point for critics. At first synonymous with lyrical flair and elegiac beauty, exemplified by his BBC film Elgar, Russell fed his talent on increasingly explicit material, dramatised with operatic gusto and lavishly adorned with images culled from his Roman Catholicism.

His reputation as a self-styled enfant terrible was sealed by his 1971 film The Devils, a hysterical cornucopia of mass-rape, torture and vomit-splattered exorcism set in a 17th-century convent. Later he gilded this rich mixture of the sacred and profane with a layer of self-parodying excess of such garish hue that many were baffled as to where the serious intent lay.

Crimes of Passion (1984), a popular success, in which a prostitute recounted her experiences at a group-therapy session, was described as "one of the silliest movies for a long time". It was by no means a unique accolade for Russell, nor the last of the kind that he was to receive.

Once a dancer, then a photographer by trade, Russell first came to note through an exceptional series of biographies of musical figures made in the 1960s for the BBC arts programme Monitor. His originality lay in his ability to narrate visually, using extensive reconstructions which dramatised the internal conflicts lying behind the genius of Elgar, Delius, Bartok and Debussy.

Eschewing the fashionable realism of the 1960s, Russell formed a poetic alliance between image, word and music that opened up new vistas for television. An artist more Continental than British, who encouraged comparisons with Fellini and Pasolini, his gifts were soon sought after by major film producers. His preference for biographical subjects remained, but increasingly he showed a predilection for the creative opportunities afforded by the internal, rather than the external, lives of his subjects.

Loneliness, madness, death and sex — whether fantastic or factual — became overt themes, leading by the end of the decade to the controversy that he thereafter gleefully courted.

Russell remained unrepentant, and expressed regrets only over Valentino, his 1977 film featuring Rudolph Nureyev, the abject commercial failure of which he blamed for a substantial hiatus in his career. He aligned himself with the romantic artists whose lives formed the core of his work, and derided the criticism aimed at his extravagance. "Whoever heard of a work of art being restrained?" he exclaimed to his fellow film maker Alan Parker.

A burly, unmistakable figure, and a bon vivant who favoured a bizarre range of anachronistic clothing, Russell was a mixture of exhibitionist and recluse. While he lived in splendid isolation in his beloved Lake District for many years, and was considered by intimates to be an essentially shy man, he was happy to compensate when promoting his latest film. He varnished his nails red and sported blue eye shadow for television interviews. He was always quotable, and had pet subjects; few have so publicly and so thoroughly meditated on the desire aroused by the sight of a nun. Few artists, indeed, have tried to leave so little to the imagination.

Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born in Southampton on July 3 1927, the elder of two sons of a shoe-shop owner. He was educated formally at a series of minor private schools, but from an early age privately developed a love for the moving image. His mother took him regularly to the cinema, and by the age of eight he was mounting his own screenings of expressionist classics in the garage. Cinema provided a refuge. His schooling was unhappy, as was his parents' marriage, and his mother suffered from mental illness.

After school Russell joined the Merchant Navy, but was invalided out in 1946. Kept on watch for eight hours at a stretch under a Pacific sun, he suffered a nervous breakdown. His recovery he later said, was hastened by his discovery of Tchaikovsky, and he rapidly acquired a passion for the romantic composers.

He joined the RAF and qualified in radio, but, inspired by a fellow serviceman, soon left to essay his fortunes as a ballet dancer. After training at the Hampstead Ballet Club, he persisted for five years as a dancer and for three weeks as an actor before admitting that his legs were too short and fat ever to permit him to achieve greatness.

He trained in photography at Walthamstow Technical College and afterwards freelanced. It was on the strength of four amateur films that, in 1958, he was finally embraced by the BBC — and specifically by Huw Wheldon, then the editor of Monitor. Wheldon later became Director-General, and he and Russell had a close and mutually respectful relationship.

Russell never considered that he had wasted his twenties, regarding the years of dance, music and photography as crucial to his evolution. Over the next 11 years he recovered ground in making some 35 films for the BBC, stylishly fulfilling his brief to popularise arts programming, and establishing fruitful relationships with, among others, Melvyn Bragg.

In 1970 he created a furore with his BBC biography of Richard Strauss, The Dance of the Seven Veils. Containing scenes of rape and violence, it displayed the composer in Nazi uniform and placed him in compromising positions with various nuns. It transpired to be a mere curtain raiser.

Russell had already made his feature film debut with French Dressing (1964) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the latter a well-received thriller starring Michael Caine. In 1969 Women in Love, Russell's version of DH Lawrence's novel, boasting the famous nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, received five Oscar nominations. Glenda Jackson won Best Actress, and Russell became a major international film maker.

In 1970 Russell turned his camera on Tchaikovsky. The Music Lovers, which he tersely described as the story of "a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac", was another hit, despite critical broadsides. By now there was a certain resigned respect in the attitude of the cognoscenti. "If Russell makes a dreadful movie," wrote one critic, "at least it is his own uniquely dreadful movie."

In the same year that his Strauss film assailed the sensibilities of the public, The Devils, an account of a historic case of demonic possession in a French convent, was released. A film in which no conceivable horror was overlooked, swarming with the by now familiar onanistic and highly disturbed nuns, it was reviled by the critics and accompanied by allegations that not all the sex was simulated.

In the ensuing controversy, Russell went on television with Alexander Walker, the esteemed film critic of the Evening Standard and rapped him over the head with a furled copy of his splenetic review. Despite being banned in places as diverse as Surrey and the Vatican, the film did excellent business.

Throughout the 1970s Russell mined this vein of high camp with varying degrees of artistic success, embraced by American producers so long as his films continued to make money. Mahler (1974) was considered an inspired piece of film-making, while Lisztomania (1975) — the most calculatedly obscene of his films — was called a "gaudy compendium of second-hand Freud and third rate pastiche". The Who recruited Russell for their 1975 rock opera Tommy, to which he did ample justice.

After the financial failure of Valentino, Russell found work hard to come by and did not direct a major film for three years. Then, in 1980, he took over from an ailing Arthur Penn on Altered States, an updated, psychedelic version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The studio had tried to obtain 27 other directors before calling for Russell. The popularity of the film restored his career, though it never regained its former momentum. He chose to live in England, which limited his opportunities of finding American work, and he struggled to raise money for his projects. Beset by financial difficulties resulting from divorces and a contractual lawsuit with Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, over an abortive plan to film Moll Flanders, he was obliged to work harder as he grew older.

Though he frequently complained of being neglected, unemployed and indigent, Russell was rarely idle and consistently newsworthy. In comparison with others, his directing output for television, film and video remained prodigious.

For the BBC he returned to make film biographies of the composers Martinu and Bax, citing the restrained content of these as evidence that he had mellowed. In addition he directed operas in many major European venues, though not without predictable controversy. At the age of 62 he made his first television commercial for 20 years. The advertisement for frozen food was awaited with trepidation, and greeted with disappointment. Not even Russell could romanticise the inner life of a fish finger, and there was not a deranged nun in sight.

He also wrote a successful autobiography, a book on the English film industry, and enjoyed a brief stint as the opera critic of the Evening Standard, a post in which he gave fulsome expression to his personal feelings, and in which the proprietors felt he was more creative than critical.

His later work for the cinema, however proficiently executed, added little to his long established repertoire of interests, and rather less to his reputation. Gothic (1987), a version of the famous evening in which Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein, was a torrid failure; while The Lair of The White Worm was described as "two hours of sticky self-indulgence".

He also made occasional acting appearances, such as in The Russia House (1990), based on the novel by John Le Carre and starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer; Russell took the part of a secret agent. Meanwhile his passion for music led him to direct several operas, including The Rake's Progress, Madame Butterfly, Faust and La Bohème, in theatres from Florence to Vienna.

In 1991 he signed a deal with Westron, the first fruit of which was the obliquely entitled Whore. As the basis for this everyday story of a working woman, Russell used a play thrust into his hand by a London taxi driver named David Hines, who had written a sympathetic piece of drama based on the true experiences of prostitutes he had encountered as fares around King's Cross. The action was transposed to Los Angeles, and Russell subjected the material to the full weight of his imagination. Public sympathy naturally inclined towards Hines, who received little money and, perhaps fortuitously, no recognition; when he attended the preview, he found he did not even have a seat.

In 2002 Russell directed the horror film The Fall Of The Louse Of Usher (2002), in which he took the role of Dr Calahari; the movie was panned by the critics. Five years later he succumbed to making an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, lasting for four days before being ejected.

Despite his excesses, the best of Russell's work exerted a lasting influence. "Films are images, choreography, not words with pictures," he asserted. His passionate commitment to the visual earned him the respect, at times reverential, of those who worked with him.

Ken Russell was married four times. His first wife was the costume designer, Shirley Kingdom, whom he met at Walthamstow Technical College and married in 1958. An outstandingly successful designer, she was his collaborator on many films, and they had four sons and a daughter before divorcing in 1978. In 1984 he married an American film-graduate, Vivian Jolly, with the actor Anthony Perkins as the officiating priest; they had a son and a daughter, but this relationship also disintegrated. He had another son with this third wife, the actress Hetty Baines, whom he met while working on his BBC film The Secret Life of Sir Arnold Bax and married in 1992. Again divorced in 1997, Russell married Elize Tribble in 2001. In 2006 they lost most of their possessions when their 16th-century house in the New Forest burned down.


Ken Russell, born July 3 1927, died November 28 2011

He wasn't ejected from Big Brother.  He triumphantly walked out after an argument.

Very sad news.  I agree with Mark Kermode, this is the director who made British cinema a bit more expansive than gritty social realist dramas.  RIP

[Duque de Bragança]

RIP
Perhaps we'll get an official release by Warner of the Devils now 
Edit : The BFI actually announced a DVD edition for March 2012 last week ! 
http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2011/11/26/full-details-on-the-bfi-release-of-the-devils/

PS : The Lair of the White Worm has been described as his "so bad it's good movie".

[PDH]

Not to be disrespectful, but damn when I get old I want pants like that.

[Razgovory]

Man who made bad movies dies, cultists grieve.

[Sheilbh]

Perhaps we'll get an official release by Warner of the Devils now 

I believe it is getting released uncensored

My friend's mum is one of the topless orgiastic nuns in that film

Not to be disrespectful, but damn when I get old I want pants like that.

There is nothing in that outfit I don't want when I'm old.

[The Brain]

He's no Kurt.

[Caliga]

He's no Kurt.

He's a Computer Who Wore Sandals?

[CountDeMoney]

Crimes of Passion.  Man, what middle school whacking material that was.  Combined with Body Heat, I guess there's the reason why I dig chicks with throaty voices.
Kathleen Turner, circa 1985

[mongers]

Perhaps we'll get an official release by Warner of the Devils now 

I believe it is getting released uncensored

My friend's mum is one of the topless orgiastic nuns in that film

Not to be disrespectful, but damn when I get old I want pants like that.

There is nothing in that outfit I don't want when I'm old.

Sadly it isn't.

Warner Brothers recently released a digitally restored version for the spanish market, but kept the 'censored' scenes out.  I think this is the version about to be released over here.

Why do some corporations indulge in such moralistic grandstanding ? Can't be the bottom line surely, as there are plenty of people out there willing to pay good money to see complete versions of such movies.

I'm one of a probably small minority of people on this forum who've seen the full original release, I saw it as a young teenager on British TV, didn't do me any harm. 

[fhdz]

RIP, Ken. You made rad movies.

[citizen k]

... rad movies.

You just dated yourself.

[Caliga]

Did he he get any action?

[Ed Anger]

I like his red pants.

[fhdz]

Did he he get any action?

If I am dating myself, I am GUARANTEED to get some action, MUTHAFUCKA

[Duque de Bragança]

Sadly it isn't.

Warner Brothers recently released a digitally restored version for the spanish market, but kept the 'censored' scenes out.  I think this is the version about to be released over here.

Why do some corporations indulge in such moralistic grandstanding ? Can't be the bottom line surely, as there are plenty of people out there willing to pay good money to see complete versions of such movies.

I'm one of a probably small minority of people on this forum who've seen the full original release, I saw it as a young teenager on British TV, didn't do me any harm. 

Well, the last time the original uncut version was shown was at a festival in 2004 so you could harass the BFI for a screening in London and then having them loan the print.

PS: "Los demonios" is indeed available at fnac.es among other places. The BFI version will probably have more extras though.