THE TOWERING INFERNO 1974

"Did you leave a cigarette burning?"

Here in L.A., one of our tallest downtown skyscrapers has an attraction that allows visitors to ride a slide from its 70^th to 69^th floor: an enclosed, apparent glass slide attached to the outside of the building. In other words, one gets to pay for the privilege of crapping one's pants 1,000 feet in the air.

But back in the '70s, those of us in search of less first-hand high-rise thrills were happy to content ourselves with the vicarious thrills of The Towering Inferno: producer Irwin Allen's $14 million follow-up to his wildly successful The Poseidon Adventure (1972). It was 1974, and the disaster film craze was in full swing. October saw the release of Airport '75 ("The stewardess is flying the plane!"); November gave us Earthquake ("In Sensurround!"), and we saw the year out with the big  December Christmas release, The Towering Inferno.

Everything about The Towering Inferno was a one-upmanship of the standard disaster film. It was adapted from not one, but two novels (The Tower by Richard Martin Stern & The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson); it boasted two directors (John Guillermin for the acting, Irwin Allen for the action); and was such a massively expensive undertaking that it brought about the historic collaboration of Warner Bros. and 20^th Century-Fox (successfully circumventing a replay of the "Dueling Harlows" situation of 1965 when competing studios raced to release two films about actress Jean Harlow at the same time). The Towering Inferno was to be Hollywood's heavily-hyped holiday season release, promising to be the ultimate "Big, Bigger, Biggest!" cherry atop the disaster film catastrophe cake.

And, as it turns out, The Towering Inferno—which garnered eight Academy Award nominations and became one of the year's highest-grossing films—did indeed represent the genre at its peak. Its sheer scope, star-wattage, and pull-out-the-stops excesses signifying perhaps the most to which the genre could ever reasonably aspire. Its ambitious scale and overall professional (albeit, old-fashioned) competency standing as something of a bellwether for the genre's eventual decline into oversaturation, mediocrity, and unintentional self-parody.

"It's out of control and it's coming your way!"

Truer words were never spoken. On the evening of the gala dedication ceremony for The Glass Tower—San Francisco's newest skyscraper and the tallest building in the world—an electrical fire breaks out in a utility room (Building developer: "You're not familiar with the many modern safety systems we have designed into this building"); faster than you can say "Titanic," all hell breaks loose…literally. To quote the film's ad copy, "One tiny spark becomes a night of blazing suspense" as 300 well-heeled revelers in highly flammable '70s synthetics become trapped on the building's top floor with nothing but Maureen McGovern for entertainment, and ever-diminishing options available for escape. 

What to do? What to do?

Panic at the Disco

Well, what The Towering Inferno does (and very well, thank you) is to let this open-flame potboiler play out in a manner not dissimilar to that of an old Busby Berkeley musical. The tried-and-true pattern for those films was to introduce the players, hastily establish their superficial-to-inconsequential interrelationships and conflicts, then spend the rest of the movie interspersing the formulaic narrative complications and resolutions between musical numbers of intensifying extravagance and excess. A little plot, a musical number...a little more plot, a slightly bigger musical number, etc.; …all leading to a big, splashy finale featuring multitudes of Goldwyn Girls until, finally, all ends well with a romantic clinch at fade-out.

The Towering Inferno follows this pattern pretty closely…only with explosions, falls from great heights, and gruesome, fiery deaths taking the place of musical production numbers. The result is a disaster film clocking in at over 2 ½ hours that, while occasionally getting bogged down in technical dialogue and repetition (eliminate all the footage of firefighters climbing stairs, and this movie would be about 60 minutes), moves at a surprisingly brisk and exciting pace.

Since the title already clues us in that the building is going to go up like a matchstick, the film doesn't waste any time trying to build false suspense by pretending to be about anything else. We're introduced to the setting, The Glass Tower: a near-literal imposing erection jutting phallically from the testicular San Francisco hills. A building whose façade is shimmering gold and whose interior is an eye-strain symphony of '70s game-show orange. Residents occupy the floors above the 81^st, and lower floors are devoted to commercial tenants (including the building's developer, Duncan Enterprises—they of the Starship Enterprise interior design and bedroom-equipped executive offices). With the "where" established, The Towering Inferno moves on to introducing the "who" by means of cinema shorthand: aka clichés.

Paul Newman as Doug Roberts - "The Architect"

First, we get the hero architect (Newman). We know he's the hero because while everyone else wears suits and ties, he's the lone maverick in orange and suede. Cut from the same iconoclastic mold as those confrontational individualists in the Winston cigarette ads of the day ("I don't smoke to be like everybody else" was typical ad copy), Newman and his trademark squint plays a sun-bronzed Thoreau ready to say goodbye to his lucrative corporate career so he can live the simple life in Mendocino County so he can "Sleep like a winner."

Faye Dunaway as Susan Franklin, "The Girlfriend"

The curvaceous speedbump preventing Newman from beating as hasty a retreat to the good life is magazine editor Faye Dunaway. The movie poster identifies her as "the girlfriend," and that's precisely the breadth, scope, and function of her role in the film. Randy Paul Newman wants to runaway with Dunaway to a place where their hypothetical children "…can run around and grow and be free." But post-afternoon delight, the career-minded Dunaway informs him that she's just been offered a much longed-for promotion ("That's nice…," is his invalidating response). Newman wants her to be with him (and do what? we ask ourselves), but Dunaway, perhaps anticipating what lies in store for her in Network, is not keen to give her executive promotion the kiss-off so soon. Guess which one of the two isn't placed in the position of having to make a decision?

William Holden as James Duncan "The Builder"

The tempter to Newman's antagonist is boss William Holden. He tries to persuade Newman to stay so that together they can build bigger and better firetraps—I mean, skyscrapers…all over the world. But Holden is a man of questionable integrity with dollar signs in his eyes. Something we can all easily observe for ourselves thanks to his ginormous eyeglasses.

Steve McQueen as Michael O'Hallorhan "The Fire Chief"

Once things start to heat up, good guy fireman Steve McQueen arrives on the scene as the film's moral mentor and finger-wagger. His duty is to deliver a lot of common-sense, life-saving fire safety advice to the audience, scold the corporate bottom-liners, and serve as the occasional big prick to Newman's vulnerable, exposed, quivering conscience.

Richard Chamberlain as Roger Simmons "The Son-In-Law"

The villain of the piece is electrical contractor Richard Chamberlain. The big bad guy tipoff being that within minutes of his introduction, he delivers a Neely O'Hara-ish speech about not needing God or anybody else's help, and how he didn't get through life on a pass because of his good cheekbones and damn classy looks. (Although, in truth, Chamberlain's snare-drum-tight face has been pulled so taut, his exceptional cheekbones genuinely look in danger of cutting straight through the flesh.) Chamberlain's snakish character is written as such an unrelentingly rotten ol' meanie; at any moment, one expects him to materialize in a cape and top hat, twirling a mustache.

Susan Blakely as Patty Simmons "The Wife"

To make him seem even meaner, Chamberlain is given a Good Woman (Susan Blakely); a beautiful but unaccountably loyal spouse given to hurt looks, aqueous glances, and a knack for saying precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. That she also happens to be the boss's daughter adds a backstory of guile and purpose-fucking to Chamberlain's already slimy resume.

Now, we come to the supporting characters. The ones who exist primarily to drum up additional human interest, boost the potential body count, and attract the ancillary demographics necessary to make a movie this costly into a hit. 

O.J. Simpson as Jernigan "The Murderer"...oops! I mean "The Security Man"

For ethnic appeal and to draw the athletic supporters, there's football player, would-be Hertz pitchman, and future felon O.J. Simpson as the tower's chief of security. On the plus side, at least he's not one of those noble, self-sacrificing, first-to-die Black characters Hollywood holds so dear. On the minus, the man gives a performance of kindling-level woodenness. 

Jennifer Jones as Lisolette Mueller "The Widow"
Fred Astaire as Harlee Claiborne "The Con Man"

For the classic Hollywood fans, we have Golden Years love interests, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones as an adorable, twinkly-wrinkly couple. He's a fraud bonds salesman, so Astaire gets to mine the charming chicanery of Airport's Ada Quonset (and, like Helen Hayes in that film, win himself an Oscar nomination in the process). Playing a good-hearted widow with lots of dough, Oscar-winner Jennifer Jones, last seen on movie screens embarrassing herself in the youth-flick exploitationer Angel, Angel, Down We Go (1969), gets to mine the selfless sympathy factor of The Poseidon Adventure's Belle Rosen (Shelley Winters). 

Robert Wagner as Dan Bigelow "The Publicity Man"
Susan Flannery as Lorrie "The Secretary"

And what would a disaster film be without a dose of sex=death guilt retribution? Overemployed non-entity Robert Wagner plays an executive who goes to great (read: fatal) pains to conceal the far from earth-shattering fact that he's boffing his secretary (Days of Our Lives star Susan Flannery). The high degree of secrecy these two engage in doesn't make much sense. They turn off their phones, lie to co-workers, and do not tell anyone where they are. Why? Neither appears to be married, it's the sexual revolution '70s, and Wagner's company obliges by outfitting his office with a big ol', tackily decorated bedroom. It would make more sense for this couple to dispense with all the needless extracurricular subterfuge and simply put their sexual overtime on their time cards.

Rounding out The Towering Inferno's parade of potentially soon-to-be-incinerated stars is the equally-innocuous Robert Vaughn (far right) as a senator, and, balancing a tower of her own, Irwin Allen's paramour of 14 years (and soon to be Mrs. Allen) actress Sheila Mathews as the mayor's way-too-many-close-ups-for-the-size-of-her-role wife.

Did I mention there are also children and a cat? Yes, children and animals are as inevitable in disaster movies as Oscar-bait theme songs (this film's "We May Never Love Like This Again" actually hooked the prize). As the ubiquitous pet in need of rescue, we have Elke, the cat. And as what appear to be the only children in the entire building, there's Bobby Brady (Mike Lookinland) and a little girl who has trouble not looking into the camera lens (Carlena Gower). 

As a side note, I have to say I'm personally indebted to that little camera-staring girl. Had Jennifer Jones not been obliged to hoist that tyke around on her hip in take after take for weeks upon end, the late Miss Jones wouldn't have developed the chronic lower back problems that necessitated her seeking out my services as a personal trainer in the '90s. Jones' back ultimately improved, and I got the opportunity to briefly know one of my favorite movie stars. So…thanks, kid!

Once the cast and conflicts are assembled—honorable mention going to the two buddy cops and Carlos, the bartender who never takes a break (Sanford & Sons' Gregory Sierra)—it's just a matter of rolling out the catastrophes and conflagrations. Something The Towering Inferno manages rather spectacularly and as regularly as clockwork.

The bulk of The Towering Inferno is comprised of variations on the following:

1. Hey! There's a fire!

2. Deny, deny, deny.

3. Get those people outta there!

4. No, not that way!
5. Boom!

6. Is it me, or is it really hot in here?

7. Climb, climb, climb!

8. Whoops! There goes the stairwell/elevator/helicopter/breeches buoy.
9. Faye Dunaway consoling terrified guests (i.e., extras) by ensuring their heads are turned well away and not sharing any of her close-ups. 

"There, there...I won't let that nasty old cameraman get at you." 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

"For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like." 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 

Amended: If you like disaster movies, The Towering Inferno is one of the best examples of the genre you're likely to find. Thank you, Miss Brodie.

If asked to pick the disaster movie I get the biggest kick out of, The Poseidon Adventure gets my vote for pure entertainment and camp value—it's like the Valley of the Dolls of disaster films. But when it comes to genuine drama, breathtaking stunts, spectacular effects, and the kind of larger-than-life scale that makes you feel like a kid oohing and ahhing over the sheer magnitude of the undertaking; The Towering Inferno really delivers the goods. 

Seeing it now, it's a good deal talkier, tin-eared, and over-infatuated with the detailed minutiae of firefighting than I remembered, but its clear-cut objective is so simple there's almost a purity to it. It simply wants to be one of the biggest, most exciting, star-studded, thrill-a-minute adventure spectacles ever committed to film. And it succeeds!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

In the cynical, serious, often dark, frequently downright bizarre atmosphere of New Hollywood '70s cinema, you have no idea what a breath of fresh air these mindless disaster movies were. They were Hollywood at its most formulaic and old-fashioned, and that's precisely what I loved about them. 

Being a San Francisco kid (teen, actually), I was especially excited about the release of The Towering Inferno because news of its production came out about a year after the completion of the controversial Transamerica Pyramid, then, at 48 stories, the tallest building in the city. 

The San Francisco skyline was changing—The Embarcadero also had a 45-story high-rise and more on the way—and there was great concern as to the soundness of so many tall buildings in a city as earthquake-prone as S.F. (I remember a local radio station promoted itself with the slogan "The city that waits to die listens to...." Yikes! That always bothered the hell out of me).

Like many films that achieve success by striking just the right chord of anxiety at the right time, The Towering Inferno had the feel of immediacy about it. A feeling I latched onto and ran with.

I was so taken with this movie I made a point of making sure I'd read BOTH novels before the film came out; I tacked up homemade posters promoting the movie on the bulletin board in my high school's library; I bought every movie magazine that had even the most minor article or photo about it: and when I walked home from school, I always went the route that took me by the movie theater with the advance posters and lobby cards on display.

The Towering Inferno had its West Coast premiere at San Francisco's Alexandria Theater on Thursday, December 19th, and a friend and I desperately wanted to go to gawk from the sidelines (Lights! Music! Stars! Celebrities! Television! Radio!), but that idea was nixed by our parents. We eventually saw The Towering Inferno during its opening weekend and were absolutely floored. Even then, there was no mistaking it for a great film or anything, but it was one of those eye-popping "event" movie experiences I'll never forget. I saw the film at least four times over that Christmas holiday, and for many years after, I kept the souvenir program I'd purchased at the first screening.

PERFORMANCES
When people get prickly over criticism of their favorite disaster movies, a typical defense is that no one goes to these movies to see great acting. Well, that's not altogether true. You may not go expecting Sarah Bernhardt-level emoting, but you do rely on a certain level of competent credibility in the performances to heighten the experience and draw you into the narrative. In the same way that believable stunts and convincing special effects enhance a film's thrill, actors capable of making sketchily drawn characters seem real enough to care about are invaluable assets. If you don't think so, take a look at Irwin Allen's The Swarm sometime.

For my money, Faye Dunaway stands out as the most overqualified for her role, Steve McQueen the most compelling, and Paul Newman is just a pleasure to look at...period. But by and large, I think everyone in the film acquits themselves nicely, with Academy Award-nominated Fred Astaire being a sentimental favorite.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
As big a fan of the genre as I was in the '70s, disaster movies hold a curious place for me now. When I'm not enjoying them purely for their camp and/or nostalgia value, I'm struck by how quickly they went from being entertaining action/adventure films to being these somewhat morbid "body count" spectacles. Latter films in the played-out genre seemed to exist solely to showcase the means, methods, and number of elaborately-staged deaths. 

On a purely personal, subjective note, one of my favorite things about The Towering Inferno is its setting. The tower itself is genuinely impressive, what with all those flames shooting out of it at dazzlingly photogenic angles. And the interior decor is so hideous, it's actually something of a pleasure to see it all go up in flames. The glam fan in me loves that this high-rise catastrophe takes place during a ritzy formal function. The result: the film is a virtual symphony of billowing chiffon, feather boas, clunky platform disco shoes, and towering hair sculptures.

Given a nothing role, Faye Dunaway and her legendary bone structure (and that
amazing dress) still effortlessly managed to upstage everything else

From a film buff's perspective, it's also a great deal of fun seeing if you catch and count which stars in the film have worked with each other in the past (hint: Love is a Many Splendored Thing) or would again in the future (hint: Airport '79).
The Towering Inferno endures for me as the last of the genre to be sincere enough to play it straight and attempt to balance human drama with spectacular action.

Clip from "The Towering Inferno"  1974

BONUS MATERIAL

The Towering Inferno - 1974

Angel, Angel, Down We Go -1969

A regular reader of this blog (Thanks, Wille!) brought to my attention that the gown Jennifer Jones wears in The Towering Inferno (top image) bears a resemblance to an outfit she wears in 1969's Angel, Angel, Down We Go (bottom image). Jones' Towering Inferno gown was designed by longtime Irwin Allen costume designer Paul Zastupnevich. The outfit she wears in the lower photo is actually an evening pantsuit with a tunic top designed by five-time Oscar-nominated costume designer Renie (pronounced Renay... wouldn't you know it?). You can see costume sketches for The Towering Inferno by clicking on the link to The Irwin Allen News Network below.

The internet offers a wealth of sources for those interested in reading about the production, the rivalries, and all manner of behind-the-scenes trivia regarding The Towering Inferno.

The Towering Inferno Archive
The Irwin Allen News Network

Gossip: Paul Newman Meets Steve McQueen

Poseidon's Underworld: The Towering Inferno

The film was so popular a student drew from it
 for audition material in Alan Parker's Fame (1980)

Burn, Baby, Burn
Gotta love that this movie inspired the 1976 disco classic Disco Inferno by The Trammps

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 20016

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