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Guide | Film Listing

Ken Russell Films

Ken Russell has been pilloried and dismissed for many years. Of course, he seemed to court it. His appearance in a notorious series of Celebrity Big Brother (the one dominated by the Jade Goody-Shilpa Shetty race row) and his ongoing attempts to seemingly parody his glory years with straight-to-video movies shot in his back garden — The Fall of the Louse of Usher, Revenge of The Elephant Man — confirmed, as if we hadn’t expect it, that he was growing old disgracefully. But what was also further clouded was the towering artistic achievement of the two most relentlessly inventive periods of his career: 1964-69 on television, and 1969-75 on the big screen.

The first brought us a series of films under the prestigious BBC arts programme banners, Monitor and Omnibus. Russell’s take on the lives and works of composers — Bartok (1964), The Debussy Film (1965), Song of Summer: Frederick Delius (1968) — were like nothing seen on television before. Abandoning the stuffy, pedagogical principles of ‘Reithianism’, they were unashamedly visual, sensual and emotive. Today they remain in the company of The War Game and Cathy Come Home as the ‘film classics’ of sixties British television.

Graduating to the cinema, Russell pushed his vision onto a broader canvas, with lavisher budgets and fewer restrictions. This was arguably the beginning of his downfall — shock tactics were trowelled on with less and less subtlety. But in the six-year period from 1969, Russell exhibited a tireless artistic energy on a par with Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Jean-Luc Godard, and we are left with a half-dozen classics: Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970), The Boy Friend (1971), Savage Messiah (1972), Mahler (1974) and Tommy (1975).

But The Devils (1971) — his controversial, riotous, much-censored account of naked nun hysteria in 17th Century France — is in a class of its own. It may be that Russell never really recovered from it; it couldn’t be wiped from his record even if he’d wanted it to be. The Devils represents Russell at the height of his powers — and at the depths of his obnoxiousness. It is technically brilliant but almost utterly unrestrained. It is artfully composed yet extremely badly behaved. Its long awaited DVD appearance early next year will stand perhaps as the most fitting tribute to its brilliantly unhinged creator. < show less

Recommended Films directed by Ken Russell

1971, Ken Russell, DVD

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RRP: £19.99
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The Devils

Ken Russell's controversial film based on the exorcisms of Loudun, The Devils sees Cardinal Riche...

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1975, Ken Russell, DVD

£14.49

RRP: £14.99

Lisztomania

'The erotic, exotic electrifying rock fantasy... It out-Tommy's TOMMY.' Ken Russell portrays t...

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1969, Ken Russell, DVD

£5.99

RRP: £12.99
Save £7

Women in Love

Russell's groundbreaking and memorable adaptation of Lawrence's novel. Excellent period detail an...

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Ken Russell Film Listing

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The Music Lovers

1970, Ken Russell, DVD

'The story of the marriage between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac,' said Ken Russell of his film about Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky. Richard Chamberlain takes the lead as the closet homosexual haunted by the past and present. In order to...

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The Devils

1971, Ken Russell, DVD

Ken Russell's controversial film based on the exorcisms of Loudun, The Devils sees Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) and his entourage seeking to take control of 17th century France - but first they need to get rid of the promiscuous and divi...

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Mahler

1974, Ken Russell, DVD

Ken Russell's stunning symbolic portrait of the life of one of the great composers, Gustav Mahler, here played by Robert Powell, as he reminisces on his life, in particular his turbulent relationship with his wife Alma and his conversion from Juda...

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Tommy

1975, Ken Russell, DVD

Classic 70s rock opera with an all-star cast, written by The Who's Pete Townshend and re-imagined for the screen by Ken Russell. Its story is of a deaf, dumb and blind kid (who sure plays a mean pinball), who is stricken with hysteria as a result ...

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Aria (Special Edition)

1988, Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Charles Sturridge, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Franc Roddam, Julien Temple, Bill Bryden, DVD

An ambitious operatic portmanteau film, featuring ten classic arias imaginatively reinterpreted by ten very different directors. From a body-building Armide, to Tristian and Isolde in modern day Las Vegas and Verdi embroiled in a Californian sex f...

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Women in Love

1969, Ken Russell, DVD

Russell's groundbreaking and memorable adaptation of Lawrence's novel. Excellent period detail and famously featuring Reed and Bates's naked fireside wrestling scene.

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Gothic

1986, Ken Russell, DVD

Ken Russell's homage to Byron, Shelley and co, relating to the events of one dark night in July 1816, when Lord Byron's houseguests Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori, both fuelled by gothic novels, pornography, lust, alcohol and laudanum, conceived 'F...

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Valentino

1977, Ken Russell, DVD

Controversial British director Ken Russell's film stars ballet-dancer-turned actor Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino, the adored silent screen actor of the early Hollywood age. The film begins at his funeral in 1926 and, using flashbacks, backtracks to ...

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Billion Dollar Brain

1967, Ken Russell, DVD

This instalment in the fashionably anti-Bond Harry Palmer series was directed by none other than the enfant terrible himself, two years before he made a characteristic cinematic splash with Women in Love. But this is refreshingly free from the exc...

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Lisztomania

1975, Ken Russell, DVD

'The erotic, exotic electrifying rock fantasy... It out-Tommy's TOMMY.' Ken Russell portrays the flamboyant composer Liszt as the first classical pop star in this fantasy on his life. The Who's Roger Daltrey (who appeared in Russell's Tommy in ...

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Crimes of Passion

1984, Ken Russell, DVD

A man trapped in a stale marriage seeks solace with China Blue, a mistress of sexual power games, who is the alter ego of a beautiful woman terrified of intimacy. A tormented Reverend who wants to save her soul joins the couple in a bizarre menage...

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