VALENTINO 1977

"But if you've got the story, why do you want the truth?"

Though the question is asked of a newspaper reporter by a character in this, Ken Russell’s 11^th feature film, the above-quoted inquiry could well be one posed to movie audiences by any director daring (foolhardy?) enough to venture into the shark-infested waters of the biographical film.
Biopics and their dubious degrees of accuracy have, in all probability, been the topic of comment and controversy since as far back as Georges Halot's Execution of Joan of Arc (1898). Taken to task for their myth-making, fact-manipulation, and outright fabrication; biographical movies have always walked a tightrope straddling documentary and wholesale fiction. At their best, they humanize and give dimension to otherwise remote historical figures, presenting their subjects' lives and achievements in some kind of social or cultural context. At their worst, they’re misleading works of absolute fiction, pawning off hoary narrative clichés as truth by method of thumbtacking real names onto over-familiar narrative archetypes and hackneyed tropes.

Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino in Ken Russell's artful recreation of the 1921 silent,
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Entertainment industry figures, with their brand-name familiarity, built-in glamour, fame-idolatry, success-ethic traditionalism, and potential for soapy melodrama and scandalous sex; have always been popular choices for biopics. This in spite of the fact that they also court the potential for embarrassing impersonations, cheap-looking reenactments, actors looking absolutely nothing like the person they're portraying, and a public over-awareness of personal history that wreaks havoc with any desire to deviate from the facts.
But while an anachronistic, out-of-whole-cloth piece of movie fabrication like 1965's Harlow (which barely seems to take place on this planet, let alone the Hollywood of the 1930's) can be painful to watch, the truth is that a blatant disregard for historical accuracy doesn't automatically doom a biopic any more than just-the-facts-ma'am verisimilitude guarantees its success.

Rudolf Nureyev and Leslie Caron in a prototypically
stylized Ken Russell take on All Nazimova's 1921 silent film Camille

Biographical movies are a sub-genre unto themselves, and as such, unlike documentaries, their very nature presupposes and accommodates the application of a contrived dramatic structure (order, if you will) to otherwise haphazard real-life events. And while in many instances this only serves to make the already tenuous connection between the subjectivity of truth and the relative weightlessness of facts even more tangential; it at least provides filmmakers with the latitude to invest historical "truth" with a little creative ingenuity.

I've always held that the employment of a deliberate artistic sensibility is what accounts for the phenomenon which makes a brilliantly crafted, yet highly fictionalized and historically inaccurate film like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) somehow "feel" more fact-based and realistic than say, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid; an equally fictionalized film based on the lives of historic figures, which (due to its adherence to the conventions of the western "buddy picture") feels positively artificial.

If one of the main differences between a documentary and a biopic is that the documentary strives to take an "as is" approach while the biopic demands a distinct point of view; then I find I’m always willing to surrender a certain (flexible) degree of historical truth when a filmmaker has a creative and artistically valid reason to use the biographical film format to illuminate a broader human truth.

Rudolf Nureyev as Rudolph Valentino

Michelle Phillips as Natasha Rambova 

Leslie Caron as Alla Nazimova

Felicity Kendal as June Mathis

Seymour Cassell as George Ullman

In the interest of truth-in-advertising, the title of this film should really be Ken Russell’s Valentino. Making few allusions to historical accuracy beyond its costuming (the brilliant Shirley Russell) and art direction (Philip Harrison); Valentino bears Ken Russell's pyretic, idiosyncratic stamp on every eye-popping frame. Something which turns out to be a very good thing, indeed, since the script— penned by Russell and Mardik Martin (New York, New York)—so often allows the film's central enigma, Rudolph Valentino himself, to go MIA for long periods of time. Even when he's onscreen.

Silent film legend Rudolph Valentino, dubbed "The Great Lover" by his legions of female fans, seemed a shoo-in subject for the biopic treatment in the nostalgia-besotted '70s. But much in the way Fellini’s Casanova—released in the US about six months prior to Valentino—disappointed and alienated audiences by its almost perverse refusal to satisfy expectations (the public anticipated an extravagantly romantic roundelay about the famed 18^th century womanizer,  but what they got was an intensely anti-erotic meditation on the soul-killing effects of loveless sex); Ken Russell’s neutered, demythologizing approach to the legend of Valentino left audiences bewildered.

Valentino paying tribute to Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun for Nazimova's camera

As envisioned by Russell, Rudolph Valentino (Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, grappling with an Italian accent and surrendering somewhere around Transylvania) is a moral innocent who only dreams of owning an orange grove, victimized by Hollywood's venal greed and the grasping self-interests of the women drawn to him. Indeed, Victim of Romance, the name of the solo album released by Valentino co-star and former The Mamas & The Papas songstress Michelle Phillips a few months before the film's premiere (Tie-in…cha-ching!), would have made for a dandy Valentino subtitle.

When introduced, Rudolph Valentino makes living as a taxi-dancer for lonely society ladies, but lives by his own Old-World code of honor: “They buy my flattery and my time, but my love is not for sale!” He holds women in high regard (he answers a starlet’s penitent confession of sexual promiscuity with, "All women are meant to be loved.”), but his irresistibility to the opposite sex—combined with a tendency to surrender all-too-easily to his own romantic fancies—makes him an easy mark for users and manipulators. Which, in this film, turns out to be everybody...women, most fatefully. 

Leland Palmer as Marjorie Tain, Valentino's ever-inebriated exhibition dance partner

"Well, God help you, junior. If you ever have anything worth taking,
some bright bitch is gonna give you the ride of your life!"

The film depicts Valentino’s rise from tango dancer to matinee idol as a largely passive journey, the dashing and occasionally unintelligible ladies man buffeted along by fate, circumstance, and the dominant whims and ambitions of the women who cross his path. From discovery to stardom, two marriages, studio suspension, a bigamy scandal, artistic pretensions (we never learn if he even thinks of himself as talented), to his death at thirty-one; Valentino is seldom depicted as the catalyst for anything that happens to him.

Even his reputation as The Great Lover is chiefly a PR creation born of the effect his masculine beauty and physical grace has on a newly liberated female population, giddily exercising the prerogative of male objectification. In portraying the silent screen Latin Lover as but a passenger in the vehicle life, Valentino often suggests a Brilliantined Joe Dallesandro prototype: the androgynously beautiful male of enticingly ambiguous sexuality, possessed of just the right amount of charismatic vacuousness upon which one can freely project fantasies of desire.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers
Carol Kane as a silent screen siren who gives Valentino a leg-up in the movie business

Meanwhile, Valentino’s own desires are routinely presented as ineffectual, asexual, or latently homosexual. This leaves him only two dominant character traits: 1) His dream to have his own orange grove, and 2) A prickly, “he doth protest too much” sense of outrage whenever aspersions are cast on his masculinity. And indeed, speculation about the true nature of Valentino’s sexual orientation crops up so often in this movie it becomes the film's defining leitmotif.
I personally find it intriguing that Russell chose to depict Valentino as a man as elusive to himself as he is to his fans. A man certain of his sense of honor, but little else. The only problem with limiting so many of Valentino's most dynamic scenes to sequences of inflamed outbursts over having his masculinity impugned is that Valentino (at least as realized in Nureyev's haughty indignation) doesn't come across like an honorable man defending his name so much as an on-the-defensive closet-case (a la, Liberace) always a little too at-the-ready to fight and publicly proclaim his heterosexuality.

Is He or Isn't He?
Valentino teaches Nijinsky (Royal Ballet dancer Anthony Dowell) the tango. Nijinsky would have his own eponymous biographical film three years later

With the women in his life posited as the shapers of Rudolph Valentino’s destiny, Ken Russell is free to abandon the traditional rags-to-riches/disillusion-to-reclamation format of most biopics and instead takes a page from the Citizen Kane handbook: Valentino's life is told in flashback via the unreliable narrators who represent the most important women in his life.
The women: socialite Bianca de Saulles (Emily Bolton); screenwriter June Mathis (Kendal); actress Alla Nazimova (Caron); and designer/Nazimova protégée/ Valentino 2nd wife Natasha Rambova – nee Winifred Shaughnessy– (Phillips).  All have come to pay their final (in some instances, self-serving) respects to Valentino at the New York funeral home where his body lies in ostentatious display.

Each woman, in turn, is grilled by a motley phalanx of cartoonishly boorish “Noo Yawk” reporters straight out of The Front Page; the multi-character narration providing, if not exactly illuminating insight into the deceased, then an enlightening view of the deep chasm that can exist between a man and his public image. It also provides Russell ample opportunity to make several interesting (if relentlessly cynical) points about identity, gender, sex, image, art, commerce, and the fanaticism of fame-culture.

Linda Thorson as restauranter Billie Streeter & Emily Bolton as socialite Bianca de Saulles

Using the funeral home and the attendant public pandemonium surrounding Valentino's death as a framing device between flashbacks, this otherwise refreshing emphasis on the female perspective is dampened by the fact that, when contrasted with Valentino's genteel malleability and honest motives, the broad strokes with which some of these women are painted has them veering toward caricatures, or worse, grotesques.

Once the flashbacks have ended and the film fades out on the solemn image of Valentino's corpse lying on a slab in the morgue, only then does it dawn that Ken Russell has pulled off the audacious feat of making a movie about a world-renowned lover that is, in itself, thoroughly devoid of love or romance. You think back over the film and realize that at no time does Valentino ever realize any of his romantic dreams, or even successfully carry out a seduction. (Even the film's most explicit "love scene" is a masturbatory parody of fan-worship, with a star-struck actress realizing her dream of being alone with The Great Lover, yet only able to work herself into an orgasmic frenzy by ignoring the real, flesh-and-blood article and losing herself in solitary fantasy.)

Emotionally Isolated
Valentino and actress Lorna Sinclair (Penelope Milford) depicted 
as sexual strangers joined in isolated fantasy

If the difference between a documentary and a biographical film is the insertion of a point of view, then in the case of Valentino, Ken Russell's would appear to be using the life story of one of the film industry's earliest superstars to dismantle the myth of fame and celebrity-worship. Also, to maybe ask us to examine what difference exists, if any, between "the story" and the truth, and if in the end it really matters.

The heads of United Artists, MGM, and Paramount discuss 
how best they can profit from Valentino's death 

RECEPTION

Valentino was released amidst much publicity fanfare in October of 1977. Bolstered by a sexy poster which emphasized the erotic potential of the subject matter and the film debut of its lead (Nureyev IS Valentino!), it arrived at the tail-end of a spate of nostalgia-laced movies about the film industry: The Day of the Locust-‘75, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood-’76, The Last Tycoon- ’76, and Nickelodeon- ’76. Unfortunately, it also followed on the heels of several poorly-received nostalgia-laced Hollywood biopics—Gable & Lombard, Goodbye Norma Jean, W.C. Fields & Me - all 1976—a downturn in the trend that suggested perhaps audiences had had their fill of Marcel waves and art deco.

Budgeted at $5 million, Valentino was Russell’s most expensive film to date. And on a personal note, I was over the moon with anticipation. At this point in time, I was already a huge Ken Russell fan, though, discounting his BBC TV documentary on Isadora Duncan that aired on PBS, I had only seen three of his films: The Boy Friend, Tommy, and Lisztomania. Valentino was Russell’s follow-up to 1975s Lisztomania, a boxoffice flop that lost the director a bit of the Hollywood cachet he’d earned following the breakout success of Tommy.

I saw Valentino its opening weekend at the Royal Theater on Polk Street in San Francisco. The 100% male—read: gay—audience made me feel like I was in a porno theater. Advance publicity for Valentino suggested a return to the Ken Russell of Women in Love, Mahler, or Savage Messiah, but the audience I saw it with that day was wired for the camp overkill of Lisztomania. From the moment Nureyev opened his mouth and the film began its drag parade of unsubtle, highly-stylized performances, Valentino became a victim of its excesses.

Rudy, The Pink Powder Puff
Nightclub chorus girls sing a song lamenting the emasculation of the American male

REACTION

I was 19 and in film school when I saw Valentino (translated: very-self serious and pretentious) and I recall sitting in that theater feeling as though everyone around me had been sent some kind of prep notes on the movie that I’d failed to receive. Here I was taking it all in with deadly sober earnestness, while all around me people were cracking up at Nureyev’s uncertain acting, Phillips’ flat line readings, the curiously dubbed-sound of many of the voices, and the whiplash shifts from broad comedy to melodrama. Picking up on every line of bitchy dialogue and every glimmer of homoerotic subtext, the audience wasn't laughing AT Valentino so much as operating from a not wholly unsubstantiated assumption that Russell couldn't possibly be expecting us to take any of this seriously.

I was so thrown by the experience I left the theater not at all impressed with the film and returned the following week to find out if  my reaction had been unduly influenced by the audience (by then word of mouth had begun to spread and I had the place almost to myself).  I could have saved myself the money. I remained steadfast in my initial assessment of the impeccable, often breathtaking period detail and costuming; I appreciated the bitter satire and cynicism, and I honestly loved the larger points the film broached in its brutal evisceration of show business and Hollywood in particular. 

Valentino is blessed with a large and talented cast (Huntz Hall and Felicity Kendal are especially good).
But my favorite performance belongs to Leslie Caron. Playing actress Alla Nazimova
as a woman intoxicated by her own theatricality, Caron fits Russell's style to a T

But I had a better understanding of the source of all that audience derision. The movie just fails to gel as human drama (nor, given the pitch of the performances, opera). But not because of the camp or overkill (although I could have done without that prison scene). Valentino rates as flawed Ken Russell for me because in its 2-hours-plus running time, only two brief scenes—one with Leland Palmer, the other, Carol Kane—ever touched on recognizably human emotions in a way that drew me into the story.

Jennie Linden (Ursula in Russell's Women in Love) contributes a hilarious
cameo as Agnes Ayres, Valentino's desert love-interest in The Sheik

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Watching Valentino for the purpose of this essay was my first time seeing the film in nearly 40 years.
Has the film improved? Well, no. The same weaknesses still prevent it from being one I'd rank among Ken Russell's best.
Has my opinion of Valentino changed? Considerably.
The passing of so many years has made me more aware of how much Valentino is a product of its time. Its cold point of view reflecting the pervasive post-Watergate cynicism and revisionist nostalgia that influenced so many movies of the day (The Day of the Locust, New York New York). Its anti-eroticism, reflective of a late-'70s cultural disenchantment with the idyllic promise of the sexual revolution, falls in line with a spate of films whose themes challenged the notion of consequence-free hedonism (Saturday Night Fever, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and the aforementioned Fellini's Casanova). In 1977, I was far too callow for cynicism, and 19-year-olds, by nature, have only the faintest acquaintance with the meaning of consequences.

Perhaps it's my age or perhaps it's because Hollywood today is fresh out of ideas and only knows how to remake things; but Valentino, though far from perfect, feels like a much smarter film than I once gave it credit for. It's still an emotionally remote experience for me, but it clearly strives to be about much more than just the life of the late Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella (whew!). It's a film with a point of view, it's the result of a consistent creative vision, and...although it only intermittently succeeds in getting them across....it's a movie of ideas. Besides, sub-par Ken Russell is still head and shoulders over the best work of many directors I can think of.

Ken Russell makes an unbilled cameo as Rex Ingram, director of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tony-nominated actor Mark Baker plays Andrew, the beleaguered assistant director 

BONUS MATERIAL

Many of Valentino's films -  including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, and Camille, are available to watch on YouTube. 

By all accounts, the making of Valentino was an unpleasant experience for nearly all involved. To read about Nureyev's distrust of Russell, Russell's crumbling marriage, the mutual animosity between Phillips and Nureyev, how Russell came to appear in the film, and the story behind that deleted funeral scene plot twist---I suggest the following books:

Ken Russell's Films by Ken Hanke
Phallic Frenzy- Ken Russell & His Films  by Joseph Lanza


AUTOGRAPH FILES

Have absolutely no recollection of when I got this autograph of Carol Kane in 1978.
Worse, I asked her to sign the inside of a paperback copy of Harold Robbins' The Lonely Lady

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

WOMEN IN LOVE 1969

As a hormonal pre-teen whose nether regions went all atingle at the sight of Oliver Reed’s Bill Sikes waking up in Shani Wallis' bed in the 1968 kiddie musical Oliver!; no one wanted to see Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love more than I. More to the point: no 7^th grader with a wholesale unfamiliarity with either D. H. Lawrence or Ken Russell wanted to see Oliver Reed appearing full-frontal naked in a movie more than I.

But it was not to be.
For although my track record for persuading my mom to grant me permission to see age-inappropriate films on the basis of their “seriousness of content” was one both impressive and fruitful in one so young (my being both a shy and humorless 12-year-old got me into Bonnie & Clyde, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?); little did I know that my hopes for pulling the same stunt with Women in Love would be dashed thanks to my parents having seen the controversial film adaptation of Lawrence’s lesbian-themed novella The Fox (1967) a couple of years before. I was undone by the fact that the advertising campaigns for both The Fox and Women in Love downplayed the highbrow literary origins of these films in favor of stressing the inherently sensationalist virtues contained in their then taboo-shattering display of nudity and sexual frankness.

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen

Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich

Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen

Eleanor Bron as Hermione Roddice

That I had been able to wheedle my way into the “Recommended for Mature Audiences” films listed above is largely attributable to the fact that they all pitched themselves as important, self-serious motion pictures commenting on contemporary issues. On the other hand, Women in Love, whose marketing betrayed a perhaps well-founded lack of faith in America’s interest in or familiarity with D.H. Lawrence, banked on the lure of eroticism to offset the stuffy reputation of British imports by choosing to go the exploitation route. Like The Fox before it, which used the promise of female-female sex as its prime publicity hook, Women in Love moved its homoerotic nude wrestling scene front and center as the defining image and focus of its entire marketing campaign.

And while I’m certain all of this paid off handsomely at the boxoffice, closer to home (seeing as it only solidified my mother’s perception of D.H. Lawrence as a high-flown pornographer, and strengthened her resolve to keep me far away from any film bearing his name) that particular marketing strategy ultimately proved disastrous to my private campaign to get a look at Oliver's reed. Roughly nine years passed before Women in Love's rounds at the revival theaters and my suitable chronological age coincided.

The stylish (if not eccentric) mode of dress of the Brangwen sisters not only establishes them as modern, independent-thinking women at odds with their dreary, working-class surroundings, but assert Women in Love's subthemes of internal (emotion and instinct), external (nature and environment), and man-made (industry and art) conflict.

Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen are two emotionally restless sisters whose naturally colorful natures chafe at the drab-grey existence proffered by their working-class status as schoolteachers in the coal-mining town of Beldover in postwar England, 1921. Both women are dreamy loners unable/unwilling to fit in with their surroundings. Both are also, if not exactly looking for love, reluctant to duplicate the domestic desperation of their mother, and therefore curious and receptive to exploring the experience.

Gudrun (Jackson), the youngest, is a self-styled artist and free-spirit sensually attracted to power and passion. (And, it would seem, brutality. In one scene she is shown becoming excited by the sight of Gerald mistreating a horse. In another, stimulated by a story an artist [Loerke] relates about having to beat one of his female models in order for her to sit still for a painting.)

"I would give everything...everything, all you love...for a little companionship and intelligence."
Vladek Sheybal  as Herr Loerke, a homosexual artist (Richard Heffer as his lover) presents Gudrun with a possibility of platonic love

Ursula (Linden), more of a realist and more sensitive than her sister, nevertheless envisions fulfillment as something achievable only through the surrendering of oneself to an idealized vision of one-on-one domesticated bliss. Into these sisters' lives, as though summoned by mutual longing, arrive Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich; best friends of dissimilar emotional temperament who contribute to forming, in their coupling with the sisters, two contrasting yet complementary halves of a cyclical treatise on the conundrum that is passionate love vs. romantic love. The perpetual struggle between the sexes.

Woman in Love #1- Rupert & Ursula's loving relationship is often photographed in nature

Ursula finds romantic kinship—if little in the way of stability—with Rupert (Bates), a school inspector possessed of extravagantly quixotic theories about nature, life and love, all seeming to channel from a nascent awareness of his bisexuality. Meanwhile, Gudrun, perhaps out of want of stimulation or, as Rupert surmises, a lust for passion and greed for self-importance in love, is drawn to Gerald (Reed), the brutish, aristocratic son of the town’s coal industrialist. A shared quest for power, corrosively mixed with a need for both intimacy and independence, makes theirs a passionate, albeit combative, relationship more or less doomed from the start.

Woman in Love #2 - Gudrun & Gerald's doomed relationship is often photographed in dark surroundings

Intruding upon Ursula and Rupert’s self-perpetuating emotionalism and Gudrun and Gerald’s incessant power plays, are: Hermione (Bron), Rupert’s one-time love and the walking embodiment of orchestrated eroticism with none of the heat; and Rupert himself, whose unrequited love for the mulishly impassive Gerald encumbers his relationship with Ursula.

Men in Love - Rupert advances the possibility of an implicit, perfect love shared between two men

Many films have used the entwined relationships of two couples to explore the inconsistent, conflicting complexities of spiritual and physical love (my favorites being Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Closer), but Ken Russell’s Women in Love gets to the heart of the matter (so to speak) in a way that is as visually poetic as it is emotionally painful. It's one of the most intelligent and genuinely provocative films about love I've ever seen.

I was in my early 20s the first time I saw Women in Love, and had you asked me, I genuinely would have told you I'd understood it then. But it seems with each passing year, the film reveals itself to be about so much more than I'd initially thought, I'm certain what I'd gleaned from the film at such a young age was but the mere tip of the emotional iceberg Russell presents us with.
Women in Love is one of those rare films that seems to grow smarter in direct proportion to the amount of life experience one chalks up. So it would seem, although you couldn't have convinced me of it at the time, my mom was right in thinking I was too young for this. Not that I wouldn't have loved to have seen Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the buff, but Women in Love is far too mature in its themes for any of this to have made a whit of sense to me as an adolescent.
Sumptuously filmed, magnificently costumed (by Shirley Russell), and so exceptionally well-acted you can watch it again and again without ever unearthing all the delightful nuances in the actors’ performances, Women in Love is a thoughtful, surprisingly restrained film, and a pleasant departure from the operatic bombast of Russell’s later works.

Gudrun's desire for power and its liberating effects is poetically dramatized in a sequence in which her lyrical dancing tames and eventually overcomes a threatening-looking herd of highland cattle. (Amusingly, a herd which, when photographed from the front, share Gudrun's coloring and haircut.) 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

My favorite thing about Women in Love is how artfully it tackles the unwieldy topic of love. Especially the pain and emotional upheaval born of that overused word never seeming to mean the exact same thing to any two people at any one time. 
Obscured by illusion, distorted by need, thwarted by cowardice; the impulse to love may be innate and instinctual, but it’s also intensely confounding. Ken Russell contrasts images of nature with images of the encroaching industrialism of postwar England to dramatize the natural urges of the characters as being in conflict with their repressed, intellectual notions about love. Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert, and Gerald all do a great deal of thinking and talking about love, but none betray a  trace of genuinely having any idea of what love really is or what they want. 

As suggested by Women in Love's repeated use of the popular song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," the characters all harbor romantic illusions about love: its potential for fulfillment, its ability to heal wounds, the emotional void it can fill. Conflict arises out of whether or not the grasping need of desire is capable of giving way to the vulnerability and freedom love requires.

Love & Death:  In a pairing shot that many critics of the day thought too heavy-handed (which, of course, meant I absolutely loved it), the drowning death of the film's only romantically idyllic couple (Sharon Gurney & Christopher Gable) is contrasted with Ursula & Rupert's unsatisfying first tryst. A premonition of blighted love, a graphic representation of romantic ideologies at cross purposes; the women's poses can be interpreted as lovingly embracing or greedily clinging to the men, the men, unequivocally adopting gestures of disentanglement.


PERFORMANCES

While Ken Russell's operatic zest and Larry Kramer's graceful screenplay mercifully spare Women in Love from the kind of over-reverential airlessness common in most film adaptations of classic novels, I attribute the lion's share of the credit for the film's vibrancy to the talents of the amazing cast. 

In an era that required so many actresses to play the compliant love interest to counterculture antiheroes, Women in Love was a refreshing change of pace in presenting two women who have a say in what they want from life and love. Personal fave Glenda Jackson (looking quite smart in her blunt, Vidal Sassoon bob) emerged in this film as something of the "New Woman" of '70s cinema.

Blessed with a mellifluous voice and an articulate beauty that radiates strength, intellect, and fleshy sensuality, Jackson is Old Hollywood star quality without the lacquered veneer. Much in the same way I attribute Woody Allen with unearthing Diane Keaton, Ken Russell and Glenda Jackson are a pair forever locked together in my mind. Her performance as Gudrun Brangwen, certainly one of the more complex, emotionally paradoxical characters in literature, is almost wily. Throughout the film she wears the look of a woman in possession of a secret she dares you to find out. The quintessential Ken Russell heroine, Jackson won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and deservedly rose to stardom on the strength of this film. 

A real scene-stealer whose presence is very much missed when her character is required to recede into the background early on, is the ever-versatile Eleanor Bron as the pretentious Hermione: a potentially ridiculous individual made real and sympathetic by Bron's prodigious talent. Only after I'd read the book did I really come to appreciate the spot-on perfection of the self-enchanted sensual studiousness of Bron's performance.

Women in Love as a costume film/period piece, tightrope walks a space between stagy theatricality and naturalism that few but Russell—with his talent for finding natural locations that look like stage sets for an opera—could pull off. Alan Bates fits the film's romantic setting perfectly (because I find him to be so swoon-inducingly beautiful, I can’t honestly say I've ever been able to really evaluate his performance with much objectivity), and Jennie Linden is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Ursula.

Reed and Jackson bring such smoldering dynamic intensity to their roles that their scenes together always feel slightly dangerous. I can't think of another actress who could appear opposite Reed in a scene and leave you concerned for his safety. I think Reed's Gerald Crich is his finest screen performance. Employing his trademark whispers to great effect, he somehow manages to be brutish, refined, and heartbreakingly vulnerable all at the same time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Given your average ratio of anticipation to disappointment, it came as no small surprise to discover, after having waited so many years, Women in Love’s fabled nude wrestling scene more than lived up to its reputation. Satisfied with merely being sensually enraptured by the sight of two obscenely sexy actors wrestling in the altogether; I wasn't at all prepared for what a dramatically powerful and daring scene it is. Daring not in its exposure of flesh, but in its exploration of a subtextual, taboo attribute of a great many onscreen male relationships (and, I daresay, many real-life relationships as well).

I'm not sure who said it, but someone once made the keen observation that homophobia in men is not really rooted in a general distaste for male-on-male sexual contact, but rather in the fear of "What if I like it?"
Heterosexual men have established a social order in which they have left themselves few avenues allowing for the expression of male affection. In lieu of this, they have contrived a network of female-excluding, male-bonding rituals so convoluted and complex (sports culture, strip clubs, ass slapping, "bros before hoes" guy codes, homophobic locker room humor, bromance comedies, misogyny masked as promiscuity [the Romeo syndrome], etc.) you sometimes wish they'd just have sex with each other and get it over with. One can't help but feel that the world would be a less aggressive, insecure place if they did.

In Women in Love, Rupert and Gerald's friendship is really the most intimate, passionate, and loving relationship in the film, but Rupert uses words and lofty theories to mask his inability to fully confront his own sexual confusion, while Gerald is too emotionally remote to allow himself to address the issue at all. On the heels of the death of Gerald's sister and following Rupert's less-than-fulfilling consummation of his affair with Ursula, the two friends find themselves at a loss for how to "appropriately" comfort one another. So, as is the wont of repressed heterosexual males the world over, Rupert and Gerald resort to displays of physical aggression as a heterosexual means of expressing homosexual intimacy.

As the friendly combat gives way to a physical exhaustion matching their physical closeness, it's clear to Rupert that Gerald feels "something" akin to his own feelings. But before that ultimate intimacy can be broached, Gerald, in an act of willful misunderstanding, finds it necessary to break off what has been established between them before things have a chance of preceding any further. (Wrestling by firelight, the very natural state of their nudity is made vulgar and shameful by the intrusion of the modern electric light he abruptly switches on.)

As a fan of '70s movies, what makes this sequence particularly compelling for me is how it symbolically evokes the unaddressed subtext in all those post-feminism, male-centric buddy pictures of the decade. Films like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider—films in which women are shunted off to the sidelines—are all essentially male romances. In each film, women are present, even loved, but there's no getting past the fact that the deepest, most profoundly spiritual love occurs between the male characters. Women in Love's wrestling scene dramatizes the struggle men face when affection for another man is felt, and (at least in this instance), the societal and morality-imposed roles of "friend" are found to be inadequate.

It's an outstandingly courageous sequence whose confrontational frankness wrests Women in Love out of the past and centers it far and above what most mainstream filmmakers are willing to do even today. Who knew? A sequence I only expected to be a feast for the eyes proved to be food for thought as well.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Women in Love was promoted with the tagline—“The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way.” And while this might sound more like the tagline for 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, it does at least touch upon the theme of the inadequacy of classically “romantic” notions of love in a modern world, and the need for a kind of sexual evolution.

The Proper Way to Eat a Fig
Almost as scandalous as Women in Love's nudity was the inclusion of a scene (not in the book) where Rupert compares a fig to female genitalia. The words are taken from D.H. Lawrence's 1923 erotic poem, Figs, which can be read in its entirety, HERE

None of the characters in Women in Love are able to fully align what they presuppose about love (nor what is true to their natures) with their present realities. In an earlier post about Mike Nichols’ Closer, I wrote:
“The four protagonists fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.”

The same can be said for the characters in Women in Love. And although more than 70 years separate the creation of the two works (Patrick Marber's play, Closer, was written in 1997, D.H. Lawrence's novel was published in 1920) it intrigues me that after so many years and so much human progress, the basic cosmic riddle that is love remains essentially and eternally unanswered.

Undomesticated
Rupert - "But I wanted a man friend eternal...as you are eternal."
Ursula - "You can't have it because it's impossible."
Rupert - "I don't believe that."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014