THE TRIPLE ECHO 1972

"A triple echo is the sound a shotgun blast makes when fired in the country."  

A triple echo is also the sound of the triangular collision of three lives.

I first became aware of the late British director Michael Apted back in the early '70s as the filmmaker responsible for picking up the mantle and expanding upon Paul Almond's groundbreakingly innovative Seven Up! documentary series. Nine in total, these social documentaries spanned 1964 to 2019, chronicling the lives of its original subjects…14 children, each 7 years old…and checking in with them every seven years, from childhood to their 60s.

Over time, Apted established himself in feature films, gaining considerable success, if not Oscar recognition, for the superior celebrity biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and for taking on the James Bond franchise with The World is Not Enough (1999). A 3-time BAFTA winner and recipient of several DGA awards, when Michael Apted died at age 79 on January 7, 2020, he left behind a varied legacy of outstanding films reflective not only of his roots in television and years as a documentarian but his lifelong commitment to exploring the emotional truth of human relationships. 

The latter is a distinguishing characteristic of his impressive feature film debut, The Triple Echo.

Glenda Jackson as Alice Charlesworth

Brian Deacon as Pvt. Barton 

Oliver Reed as Sgt. Arthur

Because The Triple Echo has the confined, minimalist structure of a three-act chamber drama, before I learned that it was based on a 1970 novella by H.E. Bates (co-screenwriter of the 1955 Katharine Hepburn film Summertime), I was under the impression the film was adapted from a stage play. 

The time is WWII, the spring of 1943. The place is a remote farm in a hilly expanse of rural Wiltshire, England. A farm maintained solely and with some difficulty by Alice Charlesworth (Glenda Jackson), a solid, no-nonsense type whose husband is a POW in a Japanese prison camp. Alice’s reconciled solitude is interrupted one day when Barton (Brian Deacon), a young man from a nearby military training camp, accidentally trespasses on her land. Hostile wariness warms to measured affinity when the boyish soldier reveals himself to be a sensitive type enamored of nature, disdainful of authority, and a farmer’s son with a knack for fixing machinery. 

The Triple Echo marks the film debut of television & theater actor Brian Deacon 

From compassion and homesickness, the two strike up a tentative friendship. Out of loneliness and need—him: to forget the war, her: to remember who she was before the war—an incautious romance develops. (The film references but fails to specify the couple’s age difference. In real life, Glenda Jackson is Brian Deacon's senior by 13 years.) 

They spend their extended leave together on the farm. The undisturbed seclusion provides an artificial Eden so lullingly appealing to the discontented squaddy that when the time comes to return to camp, he decides to make his temporary absence a permanent one by deserting and going AWOL. Barton's abrupt decision precipitates an equally hastily-arrived-at solution from Alice: to elude detection and avoid capture, Barton must grow out his hair and nails, dress in women’s clothing, and assume the identity of Jill, a fictional younger sister visiting to help out on the farm. 

Confinement brings unforeseeable conflicts of personality, and almost immediately, their relationship begins to buckle under the day-to-day strain of impersonation, complicity, and apprehension. Alice, implicated in Barton’s desertion yet sensing she’s the only one to grasp its seriousness, grows more fault-finding and resentful as feelings of “caring about” splinter into “being responsible for.” Meanwhile, the battle-resistant Barton, holed up indoors and chafing at the irony of his great escape resulting in only a greater loss of freedom, finds himself embroiled in a battle with himself as he tries to simultaneously suppress and understand what both he and Alice perceive, but cannot find the words to talk about: his subtle, inner responsiveness to externally gender-identifying as a woman.

With its remote farmhouse setting; Alice trudging about in the mud in boots and trousers; and Barton-as-Jill secreted away indoors laboring over the cooking and ironing, it feels more intentional than coincidental that in falling so obligingly (yet acrimoniously) into a traditional gender role dynamic, Alice and Barton’s relationship comes to resemble that of Ellen and Jill (!) in D.H. Lawrence’s 1922 novella The Fox. A similarity reinforced by the Freudian emphasis on shotguns in both narratives, and the central conflict in each story being the intrusion of a third party—a fox/male character—whose attentions drive a fateful wedge between (and this is where I think '70s audiences were lost) two women.

The Sergeant (Oliver Reed at his charming-menacing best) and his buddy Stanley (Gavin Richards) make a nuisance of themselves once they discover the remote farmhouse is occupied by a "married crumpet" and her sister

In 2019 Glenda Jackson spoke on the topic of gender while starring on Broadway as King Lear: “When we’re born we teach babies….to be boys or girls. As we get older [she was 82 at the time] those absolute barriers of gender begin to crack.” She went on to observe how, having been just three years old at the start of WWII, she grew up in a world of women. Seeing women participate in every field of endeavor left her heedless of gender limitations. That is until the war ended, the men returned, and women were encouraged (strongly) to go back to assuming more traditional roles.

That the flexible quadrants of gender are a theme explored in the nearly 50-year-old The Triple Echo suggests that Glenda Jackson’s timely comments reflect what has been a career-long interest on her part in taking on roles that explore the entire spectrum of human experience. Whether they be queer identity, gender nonconformity, women’s autonomy, or sexual orientation, a considerable number of Jackson’s films have been about people and relationships that fall outside of the narrow confines of a gender binary paradigm:  Women in Love (1969), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Music Lovers (1971), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), and controversially, even her interpretation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in Hedda (1975). 

Michael Apted’s assured and nuanced The Triple Echo humanely explores a human reality...that long before there were terms like gender dysphoria, long before there was any understanding of assigned gender not always conforming to gender identity, there has been an unarticulated awareness that male-female / masculine-feminine are limited and inadequate qualifiers. That human beings are more complex than the simple roles they are assigned. And there have always been individuals who naturally resist being what the world tells them they must be. 

One of my favorite things about The Triple Echo is that the film refuses to disclose to the viewer any information about the characters that they themselves don't know. So Barton, in his youth, has no real understanding of what he's experiencing, while Alice picks up on things she herself doesn't have the words or sophistication to fully comprehend. The film's emphasis, that we must go on loving those we care about...even when we don't always understand them...is, to me, a profoundly sensitive perspective for a film to have.

I don't know how it performed in the UK, but considering Glenda Jackson’s popularity at the time and the opportunity the film posed to see her reunited with Women in Love co-star Oliver Reed, it's (somewhat) surprising The Triple Echo struggled to find an audience in the US. Today it remains one of Jackson’s least-familiar, least-seen titles, failing—at least to my knowledge—to even get a VHS release.  

Of course, it didn’t help that the poorly-marketed 1972 independent feature didn’t appear in most American markets until 1974, then hoping to ride the publicity coattails of Jackson’s recent Oscar win for A Touch of Class (1973). But by then, The Triple Echo came off as a late-in-the-cycle entry in the early-'70s trend in films exploring transgender and gender identity. Films that were either of the well-intentioned but-sensationalized variety: I Want What I Want (1972), or blatant exploitation: The Christine Jorgensen Story, Dinah East, and Myra Breckinridge--all released in 1970.

The audience for gender exploitation was likely unenthusiastic about Apted’s simple, arthouse approach. The nostalgia crowd was disappointed when the film's age-difference love story didn't turn into Britain's answer to The Summer of ‘42 (1971). And critics, left rudderless due to The Triple Echo arriving on the scene minus the guideposts of prior film festival wins determining its pedigree, didn't know what to make of a movie that was part love story, part unorthodox romantic triangle, part gender-identity character drama, and part nail-biting thriller.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Usually, when I say “Only in the ‘70s” about a film, it’s meant as an affectionate pejorative relating to the decade’s reputation for turning out offbeat, idiosyncratic films that could only have been made during that tiny window of time between the assembly line days of the studio system and the market-research era of the franchise blockbuster.

When I say The Triple Echo is the kind of movie that could only have been made in the ‘70s, I mean it as a badge of honor. With a small budget, minimal cast, and an intimate story that staunchly defies categorization; The Triple Echo feels like anything but sure-fire boxoffice hit material. But very much like a film Michael Apted wanted to make and a story he wanted to tell…market prospects be damned. And THAT is definitely something that could happen only in the ‘70s.

Critics in 1972 never tired of referencing how "unconvincing" Deacon is as a woman. In a rare instance of an informed contemporary mentality working in favor of an older film, to watch The Triple Echo today and catch yourself obsessing over a jawline or a hairdo (bad wigs, however, are fair game) or ideas of "pretty," is to confront how fragile and arbitrary our ideas of masculinity and femininity really are. 

I missed out on seeing The Triple Echo during its original run, finally catching it on TCM just a few short years ago after decades of having had it on my holy grail list of must-see, hard-to-find films. With Glenda Jackson starring, I knew I wasn’t likely to be disappointed, but I didn't expect to be so moved or impressed by a first directorial effort. 

Even as the story veers toward the melodramatic, culminating in the tragic, The Triple Echo maintains an emotional perceptiveness and authentic sense of time and place that give scenes the feel of having been culled from personal memory.

If director Michael Apted and screenwriter Robin Chapman reveal their filmmaking inexperience in a certain overstatement of symbolism (portents of doom abound), and an overreliance on ambiguity in characterization (Glenda Jackson’s complex, fully-inhabited performance tethers the more sketchily-drawn roles of Deacon and Reed); they display an uncommonly deft hand in managing the film’s many shifts in tone and in creating an accompanying atmosphere for the three distinct phases of the story.

In the film's first third, as Alice & Barton get to know one another, the look is sunshiny, and most scenes are set outdoors. The peaceful open spaces are punctuated by reminders of the war: the sight & sound of planes flying overhead, the carcasses of a downed airship overlooking Alice's farm like the eyes of TJ Eckelburg in The Great Gatsby.  

The fear of detention spawns a sense of confined imprisonment as emotional estrangement, and claustrophobic interiors characterize the second segment. The oppressively low ceilings and too-close walls are in stark contrast to what came before. The low-angle shot here not only calls attention to the lovers braced coldly with their backs to one another but also places Barton's lengthened hair and long painted nails in the forefront.

The third and final act, representing the completion of the triangle and the introduction of Sgt. Arthur's fateful dominance in the narrative, takes us back to the outdoors. But now the look is wintry, the atmosphere dark, stormy, and threatening.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What if who you think you're pretending to be is who you really are? 

There’s a scene early in The Triple Echo where Alice sees Barton out of his military uniform for the first time and comments on his looking so different: “I’m a master of disguise,”  he says. A throwback reference to an even earlier scene in which, after Alice remarks that he doesn’t look much like a farmer’s son, Barton complains of having been “made” into a soldier by the Army. 

So much of life is being who we have to be, what we're told to be, and what we're expected to be, it feels like a genuine stroke of luck if any of those align with who we actually are. 

Michael Apted has crafted a finely-observed film that, at times, feels like the most heartfelt fable about the subtle tyranny of identities assigned and roles assumed, 

With Glenda Jackson giving what I think is one of her best and most underrated performances, it may have taken me almost 50 years to see The Triple Echo, but I say in all sincerity that I know I'm able to appreciate it more today than I ever could in the '70s.

BONUS MATERIAL

The Triple Echo opened in Los Angeles without much fanfare on April 17, 1974 at the Music Hall Theater. 

In a move not uncommon in the days before home video and DVDs, The Triple Echo was re-released some four years later in September of 1978, this time at the bottom half of an arthouse double bill (paired with Chabrol’s Dirty Hands) and christened with the fuck-all, act-of-desperation title: Soldier in Skirts.  

Lotsa Larfs & Sex
It's difficult to imagine how anyone thought it a good idea to market
 Michael Apted's somber character drama as a proto-Bosom Buddies comedy.
Misconceived, misguided, and blatantly misleading.

The first thing I ever saw actor Brian Deacon in was John Schlesinger's 1983 HBO telefilm adaptation of Separate Tables with Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Before then I only knew of him as the husband of Rock Follies star and oft-parodied VO5 hairspray TV commercial pitchwoman Rula Lenska (the pair wed in 1977, divorced in 1987).

The Triple Echo is currently available for streaming through Amazon Prime Video.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

THE INCREDIBLE SARAH 1976

To a major extent, mid-‘70s Hollywood was a bit of a boys’ club sandbox overrun with buddy films and disaster movies in which women were required to do little more than support the dreams of the hero, or sit around waiting to be rescued. Jane Fonda, Karen Black, and Faye Dunaway divvied up the few plum, non-“clinging girlfriend” roles to be found (Liza Minnelli & Barbara Streisand being not-quite-human entities unto themselves); while Glenda Jackson remained in demand for parts requiring the kind of accessible, high-toned hauteur American actresses tend to look ridiculous trying to carry off outside of TV soap operas.

But even a two-time Oscar-winner like Jackson must have found it tough going, for in order to play something other than co-starring roles opposite then-bankable stars like George Segal and Walter Matthau —roles for which she was grossly overqualified—financing for her films had to come from unusual places: an independent patron of the arts (Ely Landau: The Maids), a cosmetics company (Brut: Hedda), and a magazine publisher (Reader’s Digest: The Incredible Sarah).

Readers Digest. I can’t even look at those words without picturing the stacks of unappealing-looking mini-magazines which seemed to grow like weeds in the corners of my grandmother’s living room. And don’t get me started on those volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed books. Condensed books…what was up with that?

But I digress. For a time in the 1970s, Reader’s Digest was in the movie business, producing a string of “Family Classics” (often musicals) based on works of literature. There was Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1973) and Huckleberry Finn (1974), and an adaptation of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop titled Mr. Quilp (1975). The British arm of Reader’s Digest deviated from G-rated kiddie fare and produced this PG-rated biographical drama about the life of French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Certainly, the notion of having Glenda Jackson, the greatest actress of the 20^th century, portraying Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress of the 19^th century, must have struck everyone as ideal. Indeed, in 1971 Ken Russell entertained the idea of making a Bernhardt bio-pic with Jackson after first-choice Barbra Streisand(!) failed to follow through. 

But alas, Glenda Jackson, in spite of having garnered an Oscar nomination the previous year for Hedda, was in a bit of a career slump, having not appeared in a hit film since 1973's A Touch of Class; a slump not reversed until House Calls in 1978. The modestly-budgeted The Incredible Sarah was released in November of 1976, just when the studios were going full bore (pun intended) with its saturation promotion of the high-profile Christmas releases of Streisand's A Star is Born remake, and Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong reboot.
With Bernhardt neither a household name nor a familiar face (a star of the stage, Bernhardt nevertheless made a few silents and talkies) and only lukewarm reviews to assist it, The Incredible Sarah came and went without much notice or fanfare.

Glenda Jackson as Sarah Bernhardt

Daniel Massey as  Victorien Sardou

John Castle as Aristides Damala

Douglas Wilmer as Adolphe Montigny

Bridget Armstrong as Marie

The Incredible Sarah has occupied a spot on my list of holy grail films (out-of-print or hard-to-find movies I’ve always wanted to see) for a whopping 40-years now. The initial San Francisco Bay Area run of The Incredible Sarah in 1976 was so brief; it seemed to disappear from theaters before I even knew it had opened. In the ensuing years, I’ve no recollection of it appearing on either broadcast television or cable TV, and its release on VHS in 1992 was one of the best-kept secrets in the video rental business.

So it was with no small degree of excitement when—that after all these years—I discovered it on YouTube just a month ago and was finally afforded the opportunity to watch personal fave Glenda Jackson in what was to be one of the last of her major “star” vehicles. Always a critical and Academy Award favorite, Jackson was never really a populist favorite in the States. Though TV audiences took to Jackson in the BBC via PBS broadcast of  the miniseries Elizabeth R, her biggest successes tended to come from being paired with likable, light comedy male co-stars capable of “softening” her somewhat remote, intellectual image.

Well, there’s no denying that merely seeing The Incredible Sarah after such a long period of anticipation is gratifying in and of itself, and certainly the remarkable Glenda Jackson doesn’t disappoint. However, no amount of fandom, expectancy, or nostalgia can make this wholly undistinguished, startlingly old-fashioned bio-pic into anything more than a fabulous Glenda Jackson showcase (she's had better) and well-intentioned, honorable misfire.

I don’t know much about the life of Sarah Bernhardt—which, under the circumstances proved a distinct and decided advantage. But I do know a thing or two about show biz biographical movie clichés; an awareness which turned large segments of The Incredible Sarah into a bordering-on-camp laundry list of hoary bio-pic tropes.

King Lear - 1866

The Incredible Sarah chronicles the life of acclaimed French actress Sarah Bernhardt (born Rosine Bernardt) between the years 1863 to 1890 (taking her from age 19 to roughly 45; something it helps to know since the only person to visibly age in this film is her illegitimate child). From her inauspicious beginnings at the Comédie Française through her gradual emergence as one of the principal players at the Odéon Theatre, Bernhardt is depicted as a headstrong individualist and rebel, drawn to the calling of acting simply because…well, that’s never quite explained beyond her stating it's “Something I have to do!”—which could well be applied to getting one’s eyebrows tweezed.

On her path to becoming hailed as an international star and earning the name “The Divine Sarah,” Bernhardt is briefly shown appearing in several of her classic roles: King Lear, Le Passant, Phaedra,  The Lady of the Camellias, & Joan of Arc. Meanwhile, her offstage life rivals her stage performances in theatricality and excess. There’s the aforementioned illegitimate child born of a Belgian prince; her household menagerie of animals; her habit of sleeping in a coffin; her many lovers; her interest in sculpting; her legendary temperament; her stage fright; and her unpropitious marriage to a handsome Greek attaché. Lest we get the impression Bernhardt’s life was one rosy romp of self-interest and accolades, we’re also shown how she selflessly turned the Odéon Theatre into an infirmary during the Franco-German War, and battled an unsympathetic public judgmental of her wicked, wicked ways. 

The Incredible Sarah ends on a high note—some 33-years before Bernhard’s death at age 78—with her triumphant portrayal of Joan of Arc. As the film faded to black, I was left with the dual sensations of feeling how much I really missed Glenda Jackson and wondering about the film (like Bacharach’s Alfie), what’s it all about?

Le Passant  - 1869

I was entertained throughout (how can one NOT be entertained watching Glenda Jackson?), but save for a scene in the theater converted into an infirmary, strangely unmoved by anything that transpired between the characters. I loved the elaborate costumes, hairstyles, ornate art direction, and, here and there, even a performance that wasn’t Jackson’s, but I never got a sense of the film having anything particular to say about its subject. I thought I'd certainly come away with at least more knowledge about Sarah Bernhardt's life than when I arrived, but given that the film begins with the disclaimer: “This motion picture is a free portrayal of events in her tempestuous early career,” can I even say that?

I’m too much of a fan of the freewheeling liberties of Ken Russell’s biographical films to hew to the notion that historical accuracy and chronological fealty equal a good bio-pic. That The Incredible Sarah plays fast and loose with the facts doesn’t trouble me so much as the fact it has (for me, anyway) no point of view, perspective, or motivation beyond Bernhardt being a notable person whose life deserves recording.

The closest thing I could glean, and perhaps this was more obvious in ’76, is that The Incredible Sarah, in being a film produced and written by women (Helen M. Strauss & Ruth Wolff, respectively) sought to present a notable historical female figure in a feminist light. And indeed, it is refreshing to see a woman deciding for herself what is important in her life and not having her womanhood or value as a person called into question because she chooses the career path. But this theory is undermined a bit by the script making Bernhardt's chief adversary a woman jealous of Sarah stealing her man.

On the whole, The Incredible Sarah ranks as the perfect kind of historical film to show in school history classes or something. As a stand-alone entertainment with no lessons to impart to impressionable minds, I’m afraid The Incredible Sarah  measured up as being a must-see vehicle for Glenda Jackson enthusiasts like myself, but an easy pass for the general film fan. 

Phaedra - 1879

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Liking Glenda Jackson as much as I do, it’s very rewarding to see her in a film where not only is she front and center (and given very little in the way of competition), but she’s photographed flatteringly and made to look movie-star glamorous in a multitude of sumptuous, Oscar-nominated costumes by Anthony Mendelson (Macbeth, Young Winston).

The film is handsomely mounted (its only other Oscar nomination came for Art Direction: Elliot Scott & Norman Reynolds) and it's something of a feast to see Jackson in every single scene, playing the classics, hamming it up, being funny...basically being given free rein in a film designed to showcase her talents. But alas, I’m aware of clinging to these particular joys—all centered around the film's star—because the very weak screenplay gives Jackson quite a lot to do, but not very much she can to sink her teeth into. When she's not reciting the words of the Masters, Jackson is saddled with some of the most mundane dialogue imaginable.

Simon Williams portrays Henri de Ligne, a Belgian prince with whom Bernhardt has a child out of wedlock

Directed by Richard Fleischer, whose skills run the gamut from the outstanding 10 Rillington Place-1971 to the laugh-a-minute vulgarity that is Mandingo-1975, The Incredible Sarah is so old-fashioned in its construction and execution, it feels as though it were made at least a decade earlier. 

Joan of Arc - 1890

PERFORMANCES

A film about the world’s greatest actress would be terribly embarrassing without an actress about whom those words could be uttered onscreen without inciting laughter, so the casting of Glenda Jackson is perfection on that score. Where things get a little dicey is that, for all her skill as an actress, Glenda Jackson's innate intelligence seems incapable of being tamped down. Coming across as the human personification of common sense, level-headedness, and reason, Jackson doesn't exactly convince when trying to depict Bernhardt’s rootless flamboyance and fiery nature. Jackson doesn’t have a frivolous bone in her body. And so while it’s fun when she gets to run amok in not one, but two rip-and-tear temper tantrum scenes, the effort in trying to appear irrational shows.

Perhaps counting on the plausible likelihood that not many people caught his Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated performance as Noel Coward in the 1968 Julie Andrews flop Star! (anther biopic about an actress few Americans were familiar with), Daniel Massey essentially repeats himself and gives the same performance. Massey and Jackson had previously co-starred in 1971's Mary, Queen of Scots

Much like the joyless Anthony Hopkins was a bust in his vulgar showman scenes in 1978's Magic, but ideal for the off-his-rocker stuff; sound-as-a-dollar Glenda Jackson is an ideal fit for Sarah Bernhardt the brilliant actress; but as an eccentric narcissist, she has both feet a little too firmly planted on the ground to make it work.  

Sarah Bernhardt relaxes in the coffin she traveled with

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 

The Incredible Sarah and the show business biofilm cliché checklist: 

Scene in which the artist conveniently declares her life’s ambition aloud (Funny Girl, Sparkle, The Loves of Isadora, Star!).

Scene depicting the artist’s unbridled, unsubstantiated self-confidence (Funny Girl, Sparkle, The Loves of Isadora, Star!)

Scene where artist makes amusingly disastrous performing stage debut (Funny Girl, The Loves of Isadora, Lady Sings the Blues, Love Me or Leave Me, Star!)

The confidant to whom the artist can give voice to her inner yearnings and provide plot exposition (Funny Lady, The Loves of Isadora, Lady Sings the Blues, Star!)
The bad marriage trope (Funny Girl, Star!, Sparkle, The Loves of Isadora) 

The so-called comic scene depicting Sarah Bernhardt's calamitous stage debut could have been
 lifted directly from an episode of That Girl

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I've watched The Incredible Sarah twice. The first time I was just too taken with the pleasure of at last seeing it to be able to access it with any objectivity. On the second go-round, its script flaws stood out a great deal more (events happen in biographical films because "they really happened"...screenwriters don't always concern themselves with making sure the events and character motivations fit a narrative logic. Real life is haphazard; I tend to like a little more structure in my drama. Even biographical drama), but I was happily surprised by how much the film is buoyed and made pleasurable by Glenda Jackson alone.

It isn't one of her best performances (as stated earlier, I was largely left unmoved) but it's a good one. Much better in my opinion than her Oscar-winning turn in A Touch of Class (1973). The Incredible Sarah didn't live up to my expectations, but I have to say, Glenda Jackson, even with weak material, is still the personification of incredible.

BONUS MATERIAL

The Incredible Sarah concerns itself with the actress' early career. Sarah Bernhardt was one of the first stage actors to appear in film. Here is a clip of the real Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet in her 1900 film debut. 
She made several other films and continued to tour and perform onstage even after the amputation of a leg in 1915. In addition to acting, she managed and directed her own theater company, sculpted, and published a novel and a memoir of questionable veracity. She passed away in 1922 at the age of 78.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

THE MUSIC LOVERS 1971

Before my recent essays on Mommie Dearest and Behind the Candelabra got me thinking about the form and function of the biographical movie as a genre, I don’t know that I’d ever given much thought as to what I personally look for in a biopic.

While I know I’m comfortable relinquishing a certain level of historical fidelity for the sake of drama and a filmmaker’s vision (for example, I don’t mind the glamorization and historical inaccuracies in 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde); I do find I lose patience with complete whitewash jobs that alter historical fact in an effort to sanitize the subject and adhere to a standardized Hollywood biofilm format (the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night & Day turned the life of the homosexual composer into just another conventional heterosexual love story).

I guess when I’m really out to learn something about the life of a historical figure, I tend to go to a documentary or a book; but when it comes to biographical films, I don’t mind if a filmmaker plays fast and loose with the “facts” if in the end, what they deliver is some kind of “truth.”

And by that I mean, rather than simply chronicling the events of an individual’s life, I prefer when the director and writer of a biopic find a way to use the life story of a public figure to say something broader about humanity, art, the creative process, cultural myths, or the pernicious lure of fame and the American success ethic. In such instances, I gladly surrender encyclopedic accuracy to creative interpretation.

Ken Russell claimed his film was not so much the story of Tchaikovsky as it
was a commentary on the destructive force of dreams on reality

If I’m going to invest time watching a fictional reenactment of a real-life narrative (something to which even the most meticulous biopic must ultimately lay claim), I’m of a mind to look to the filmmaker who is capable of creating order out of chaos; able to find poetry within the banal; and willing to unearth something universal and profound in the neutral, haphazard events which make up a human life. Especially a life deemed exceptional enough to biographize.
So often, biopics hide behind the “based on true events” excuse to justify the overuse of clichés, coincidence, choppy storytelling, and flat characterizations. Storytelling flaws that would never pass muster in the construction of a purely fictional screenplay. I prefer when biographical movies make an attempt at hewing out a unique dramatic thrust of a story while still sticking somewhat closely to real-life events. Good biographical films are those which I can enjoy as stand-alone narratives. Stories that compel and keep my interest independent of any foreknowledge I have of the famous personality or the alleged veracity of the events depicted.

Tchaikovsky Triumphant
What Price Success?

Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) is an excellent example of a biographical film transcending its subject material. The film works whether or not one has an interest in boxing or is unaware that Jake LaMotta was a real person. It's an emotionally and dramatically credible story buoyed by (but not reliant upon) being based on true events.

By way of contrast, Alan Parker's 1996 musical Evita (a project to which Ken Russell was briefly attached) has a fascinating and incredibly complex individual at its center, but the movie is so lacking in a point of view or perspective about its subject (due more perhaps to the flaws inherent in Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice's treatment), the entire film - which seems comprised exclusively of processions and marches - has no narrative thrust beyond "It actually happened!" historical regurgitation.

The one director whom I consider to be one of the screen’s most gifted fictional documentarians is Ken Russell, a director whose biopics lean to the wildly subjective, daringly interpretive, and highly stylized. His films and BBC TV plays about the lives of Rudolph Valentino, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler, Henri Gaudier, Isadora Duncan, and Claude Debussy, are splendid paradoxes: they are frustratingly fruitless sources of biographical fact, yet they're bountiful vessels of emotional honesty.

Richard Chamberlain as Peter IlyichTchaikovsky

Glenda Jackson as Antonina Milyukova

Christopher Gable as Count Anton Chiluvsky 

Izabella Telezynska as Madame Nadejda von Meck

Sabina Maydelle as Sasha Tchaikovsky

Ken Russell first became known to American audiences (this American audience, anyway) by way of his second film, the soporific 1967 Michael Caine spy thriller Billion Dollar Brain (his first feature film French Dressing – 1964, I’ve yet to see). While he indisputably hit his artistic stride with the poetic and well-received adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969), Ken Russell, the baby-faced enfant terrible of cinematic excess who scandalized sensibilities and drove Pauline Kael to distraction, didn’t really show his face until his fourth film, the controversial and polarizing The Music Lovers.

Based on the 1937 book Beloved Friend: The Story of Tchaikovsky and Nadejda von Meck, The Music Lovers is Ken Russell’s fever-dream vision of the life of the famed 19th-century Russian composer. And I’m not just using fever dream as an easy expression. At times The Music Lovers looks exactly like the kind of overheated dream one would have after falling asleep listening to Tchaikovsky while pulling an all-nighter studying for an exam on the composer.

Kenneth Colley as Modeste Tchaikovsky

Originally titled The Lonely Heart, the film’s full title: Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers clues us in that this is to be Ken Russell’s uniquely personal, subjectively emotional (some would say hysterical) look at the tortured life of the artist.

To the frenetic accompaniment of The Nutcracker’s “Dance of the Clowns,” the film’s first frames thrust us directly into the center of the joyous revelries of a Moscow winter carnival. This moment is important to savor, for it is one of the last times genuine happiness makes an appearance in the film outside of idealized images in impossible fantasies.

As he would do in his next film The Boy Friend (1971), Ken Russell uses the opening sequence of The Music Lovers to introduce all the film's major characters in context of their personalities and interrelationships – present and future – before we actually know who they are. This not only has the effect of heightening our visual alertness (we are asked to absorb and store narrative information we will draw upon later), but it invites us from the start to voluntarily surrender to what Russell will later demand: that we experience his film as pure sensation and emotion…just as one might experience Tchaikovsky’s compositions.

Born This Way
The Music Lovers presents Tchaikovsky's denial of his homosexuality as the source of his greatest torment. Our first glimpse of the composer, cavorting with his lover (Christopher Gable) at a winter fair, culminating in the pair collapsing drunk and contentedly in bed - is also the last time we ever see him happy

The full themes of The Music Lovers are revealed in the next sequence, which has all the individuals from the opening scene reassembled at the Moscow Conservatory on the occasion of Tchaikovsky’s debut of his Piano Concerto no.1 in B-flat Minor. Again utilizing a device employed to similar effect in The Boy Friend, Russell familiarizes us with the main players in his drama by granting us access to their fantasies and innermost desires. It is here that Tchaikovsky and each of his “loves” – his impassioned music; his sister Sasha, for whom he has a quasi-incestuous attachment; melancholy patron of the arts, Madame von Meck; the mentally unstable fantasist (and future wife of convenience) Nina; and his real but forbidden love, the foppish Count Chiluvsky – all reveal themselves to share a similar susceptibility and responsiveness to Romanticism and the Romantic Ideal.

The inherent unattainability of said ideal suggested by the extravagant-bordering-on-absurd visual extremes of each fantasy; its anguish reflected in the real-life self-contradiction that has nearly everyone in question falling desperately in love with precisely the person least capable of returning it.

Max Adrian as Nicholas Rubinstein

With desire charting the path of the conjoined destinies of these individuals, The Music Lovers takes the position that Tchaikovsky, a gay man tortured by his homosexuality and his inability to lead a life of emotional truth, poured all of his impassioned fantasies and romantic dreams into his music. In centering his film on an artist who struggled to create artistic truth while being untrue to himself, Russell provocatively posits whether an inauthentic life can ever produce authentic art.

Portrait of the Artist as a Babe
In photographing Tchaikovsky in a manner redolent of Hollywood's glamorized biographies of  historical figures, Ken Russell mocks the romantic myth of artists nobly suffering for their craft

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I didn’t see The Music Lovers when it was first released, but following on the heels of the comparatively restrained Women in Love, I can only imagine what a shock to the system Russell's horrorshow take on the life of Tchaikovsky was to 1970 audiences. After all these years I think The Music Lovers' brash imagery, feverish performances and bold disregard for conventional storytelling (and historical accuracy) still has the power to astonish. 

Phallic Frenzy
Ken Russell's signature penis-themed imagery appears in this fantasy sequence in which Modeste, Tchaikovsky's pragmatic brother, vanquishes the parasitic "music lovers" in the composer's life

In no way, shape, or form is this a movie for all tastes. And indeed, I would agree with those who say it is fairly valueless as biography (although it did serve to spark my interest in the composer and led me to seek out the more traditional – but arguably just as false – Russian film on Tchaikovsky released in 1972) .

However, speaking as a confirmed dreamer, fantasist, and head-in-the-clouds romantic, I can’t praise Ken Russell enough for dramatizing in The Music Lovers precisely the conundrum that has always intrigued me about the arts, creativity, and the role of fantasy in our lives.

A spirited inner life is the common byproduct when restrictions are placed on the free expression and development of one’s true nature. So by framing the film’s central conflict around Tchaikovsky’s well-founded inability to come to terms with his homosexuality (it was illegal in Russia) and subsequent need to suppress his natural romantic desires in order to pursue his art (something Richard Chamberlain knew a thing or two about); The Music Lovers effectively explores fantasy from both sides of the issue.

Fear of scandal and a denial of self inspires Tchaikovsky to shun the affections of his lover, preferring instead to hide behind his sham marriage and his long-distance infatuation with benefactress, Madame von Meck 

The beauty of Tchaikovsky’s music alone is evidence of the redemptive power of fantasy. But Russell, in holding the composer’s life in contrast to his art, asks us to contemplate how it is that the same dreamy nature capable of bringing forth "Swan Lake" and "The Nutcracker" could also foster such a propensity for self-deception and (in his unfeeling use of Nina as a shield against gossip and his own fears about himself) selfishness. Tchaikovsky's infatuation with a Romantic Ideal gave the world great music, but in his personal life, it marred his perception and inhibited his ability to connect at all with any of the "music lovers" in his life in a realistic or even feeling manner.   

Bad Romance
Following an established pattern, Nina works herself into a romantic delirium over
an unprepossessing Russian hussar she's never met (actor Ben Aris, who played Sally Simpson's proselytizing father in Ken Russell's Tommy).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It's really saying something to note that in a resolutely emotional movie about a man who wrote resolutely emotional music, the central relationship between Tchaikovsky and Antonina “Nina” Milyukova stands out as one of the most impassioned. Tchaikovsky, against the wishes of his family and in an effort to conform to societal pressure, did in fact impulsively marry a woman he barely knew, a young music student from his conservatory. Their marriage was disastrous, the composer remaining married (the better to deflect rumors of his homosexuality) but deserting his wife within weeks of their wedding.

As envisioned by Russell, Tchaikovsky marries out of rebellious self-denial and romantic self-delusion, while Nina (Jackson) is depicted as just another dreamy fantasist. A mentally and emotionally unstable woman given to reckless romantic infatuations who sets her sights on wooing the composer because of his fame and stature. (I personally reject the nymphomaniac label, even in Russell's vision, simply because I’m weary of it being the lazy go-to word used by men who don’t know what else to call an actively sexual woman.) 

Nina Meets Her Rival
Costume designer Shirley Russell uses color to emphasize the connection between
 Tchaikovsky's actual and illusory loves. Christopher Gable & Richard Chamberlain later co-starred in the 1976 musical The Slipper and the Rose 

Biographers don’t tend to devote much space to the marriage, but Russell depicts Nina, and Tchaikovsky's cruel treatment of her, as a symbol of the film's theme. She's a tragic figure representing the destructive side of reality avoidance, her mental and emotional deterioration a hysterical indictment of Tchaikovsky's weakness of character and the false promises held forth by his unabashedly romantic compositions. 

The Music Lovers' most controversial scene (of many, I assure you) is the honeymoon train journey which finds the visibly repulsed Tchaikovsky trapped in a tiny carriage car with his drunk, sexually rapacious bride. As the car jostles violently back and forth, Nina, now nude and unconscious, rolls about on the floor as Tchaikovsky literally climbs the walls in horror and disgust.

None of it should work (it's practically a burlesque of a gay man's reaction to seeing a vagina) but somehow it does. 

And that the sexually-conflicted composer should be portrayed by a sexually-conflicted actor (Richard Chamberlain came out in 2003 when he was 68 years old) adds heaps of unexpected subtext to the already over-the-top proceedings.

In this scene from Russell's Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen (Glenda Jackson) and the artist Loerke (Vladek Sheybal) engage in a bit of play-acting, assuming the roles of Nina and Tchaikovsky during their honeymoon journey on the Trans-Siberian Express (minus the nude rolling about on the floor part).

PERFORMANCES

Although my childhood is full of memories of my sister's major crush on Richard Chamberlain during his Dr. Kildare days, I can't say that I've actually seen him in very much. Certainly not enough to gauge how successful he was in his bid to shed his teen heartthrob image and be taken seriously as an actor. I do know that as leading men go, he's very easy on the eyes, and that I can find no fault with his performance here. Called upon to depict Tchaikovsky as a man of near-operatic heights of anguish and rapturous longing, Chamberlain, in perhaps his least decorative role ever, is more animated and vivid than I've ever seen him.

Nina Ends Her Days In An Insane Asylum

It's Glenda Jackson, already a personal favorite, who stands out most in my memory. Delivering an affecting performance that can also be as broad as a barn when required, she's just a marvel to behold. Her showier scenes got all the critical notice (and lambasting), but it's her smaller moments (like the range of emotions that play across her face when she meets Tchaikovsky for the first time) that make her Nina a rivetingly sympathetic, dynamic, ultimately pitiable character.

I don't have the space to pay tribute to them all, but the entire cast of The Music Lovers is uniformly top-notch. Fans of Ken Russell will recognize his familiar band of repertory players, each contributing invaluably to the whole.

Beloved Friend
In love with both the man and his music, wealthy widow Madame von Meck (here with her twin sons) supports Tchaikovsky for thirteen years and is content to love him from afar

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Ken Russell is known for being a visual director, and on that score, The Music Lovers doesn't disappoint. The lush imagery and sumptuous costumes are more than a match for Tchaikovsky's colorful compositions. But because Russell's films are such an assault on the senses, I sometimes think the soundness of the ideas behind his films get shortchanged.
My appreciation of The Music Lovers is rooted not in its status as biography, but in its thought-provoking themes examining the origins of artistic creativity and the heavy price that's often extracted.

When Richard Chamberlain came out as gay in his 2003 memoir Shattered Love, one of the things he was fond of saying during his media tour was that after a lifetime of living in fear, how liberating it was to finally be himself. Yet one of his strongest epiphanies was the realization that his being gay was the least interesting, most benign thing about him.

While I've no doubt of this being Chamberlain's reality, his observation fascinated me. It fascinated me because of its failure to recognize (or accept) that if one's sexuality prompts one to spend an entire life "in the closet" and engaged in the non-stop denial of one's true nature, it can hardly be called a benign issue because a lifetime of self-rejection HAS to shape personality, perception, and reality.
In the context of what Ken Russell explores in The Music Lovers, it's inconceivable to me that a life lived in total denial of who one actually is would fail to leave a mark on the soul of any sensitive individual...on the soul of an artist, most acutely.

In all its frenetic hysteria, The Music Lovers asks us to entertain the possibility that Peter Tchaikovsky, a romantic prohibited from freely expressing love as he would choose, was forced, because of his homosexuality, to channel all of his tortured emotions, suppressed pain, and unexpressed passion into his music. Russell doesn't use Tchaikovsky's homosexuality for shock value or fodder for gossip; he makes a case for the artist's socially-unacceptable sexuality being the very source of his creative genius. In Russell's vision, Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is neither benign nor unimportant...it is the defining aspect in the shaping of the man's character and the cause of his heartfelt romantic longing.

Leave it to Ken Russell - instead of just another biopic heralding the achievements of a famed composer, he constructed a sensual think-piece that invites me to contemplate the art as well as the artist.

BONUS MATERIAL
The reason for this film's windy full title: Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers, was so as not to be confused with the Russian film Tchaikovsky by Igor Talankin that came out that same year. (A 1970 production not released in the U.S. until 1972).

Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Tchaikovsky

This beautiful, more traditional recounting of the life of Tchaikovsky cost $20 million (to The Music Lovers' $3 million) was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, and is available for viewing on YouTube HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2016