Reviews

Very moving stories with a great sense of authenticity. A deceptive simplicity imbues these films with a profound sense of lived experience. The unfussy but inspired approach to ordinary lives is timeless and quietly immersive. The superb original stories by Lewis Grassic Gibbon have been lovingly respected, unlike modern filmed adaptations of literary works.

'Clay' is a haunting evocation of lives possessed by the demanding Spirit of an ancient soil, and captures the last glimmerings of peasant crofting in the relentless round of their inescapably repetitive days, servile to the land; 'Smeddum' is a robust comedy in which an unsentimentally practical mother's deep love is misunderstood by all her children except the one who scandalously ran away with an older married man; 'Greenden' portrays the tragic isolation of a neglected wife amidst alien surroundings; each of the stories also portrays the tight-knit agricultural community of this area of Scotland in a long-vanished era.

Made when the BBC set the standard for quality broadcasting.

P What struck me in Minsky's meditation on Gorbachev and his place in history, is the sense of Soviet leaders being, like Tolstoy's Olympian view of Napoleon, mere flotsam and jetsam, tossed aloft by the unpredictable moods of history's impersonal and oceanic forces. Gorbachev repeatedly finds himself, under the director's insistent probing, entirely unable to address his hero status outside Russia, which is the same foreign perception that was to deny him a State Funeral.

P An air of defeat and a sense of inescapable guilt hovers over his refusal to address the tragic dilemmas he failed in office to resolve. 'We all make mistakes' is his only concession to Minsky's disappointed hero-worship. He even tells an anecdote about Stalin that presents that monster as only fallible, when excesses were perpetrated in his name. He also takes a tolerant view of Yeltsin, despite his admitted alcoholic follies, saying, 'He was who he was.' The reminiscences of his impoverished youth during Stalin's Terror make light of the arbitrary cruelties of the time, as when telling of an Uncle's arrest and torture on charges eventually dismissed as groundless: Upon his Uncle's return to the family, it was seen that his hands had been smashed; the KGB had wantonly slammed a door on them. Gorbachev's dismissive comment on this relative's unjust fate emerges from the fatalistic heart of the Russian Serf, 'What did he want with Trotskyism?' he chuckles.

P Yet Gorbachev had, instilled in him from his mother, the sentimental poetry and song of the Russian and Ukranian people, and he frequently breaks out into recitation and song during the film. Such humane traits are equally revealing of the individual as his callous ones. The Russia that produced Gorbachev did not create a Gandhi, but an affable and cultured individual who was ultimately incapable of breaking the wild and dangerous steed of Soviet Power to his political Will, and who actually lived to regret that he had not been more ruthless when in power. He says, 'I failed'. He actually muses whether he should have cracked down more harshly on rebellions in the Soviet Empire or was unwise and weak in not destroying Yeltsin. It was in fact Yeltsin who turned decisively against Communism, while Gorbachev insists to Mansky that he himself wanted to rebuild a reformed Soviet Union. He is indeed a loyal Marxist-Leninist, chiding Mansky for asking why he has not bought the house he is being filmed in, saying that he was granted this state dacha only for his lifetime, '- - - and that is right'. Evidently, he still approved of the Marxist tenet that 'All property is theft'.

P Only in the individualist West can Gorbachev be seen as some kind of hero for his espousal of the moderate reforming doctrines of Glasnost and Perestroika; in Russia he is largely seen as a failure and a leader weak to the point of betraying his People because of those reforms, and this despite having also striven to be the capably ruthless dictator necessary to rule Soviet Russia and it's Empire: Under his rule, as we know, the Chernobyl nuclear facility exploded, after military experiments were approved, and this disaster was concealed; citizens demanding independence in the Baltic states died; soldiers wielding shovels brutally suppressed protesters in Tbilisi; Soviet tanks killed peaceful demonstrators in Baku. Yet the old Gorbachev fears he should have been even more implacable!

P I think this film reveals that Gorbachev himself shares that profoundly Russian and collective view of the necessities of power. He is seen here, in his powerless, sentimental and ironic old age, as the last representative of that totalitarian System he once Presided over, only to see its destruction, and his own fall from power. We watch this tottering colossus, overweight and with mobility problems, crumbling before our eyes, like his dreams, as he sedulously avoids addressing Mensky's attempt to confront Putin's ruthless irridentism and Tsarist pretensions.

P Gorbachev is that tragic and irreconcilable Chekhovian rift that exists between East and West, and that is a wound running deep into the Russian Soul. His life has little that can serve as a useful example to his deluded Western admirers. He remains just another chilly monument to Russian exceptionalism. The symbolism of the snow-capped monuments to forgotten Soviet apparatchiki, in the graveyard where he goes, near the film's end, to visit his beloved wife Raisa's resting place, is a powerful summation of the hermetic and alien spiritual world he was part of.

P A gnomic oracle of an alien and vanished world, Gorbachev is beyond any easy Western understanding. The lyrics he tenderly sings several times during this film, of the Russian river that, after freezing over, will thaw and see the Spring once more, while the life of man must freeze forever, and 'cannot come again', reveals his fatalistic acceptance of the oblivion he sees overtaking his memory. That humility, at least, is worthy of our respect and awe. But there remains only one, impersonal, monument here: The vast and unchanging face of Russia, blank and featureless as the snow.

P The Moon face of a sick old man gazes silently down on the shroud of memory, where all the bodies lie.

This film was in 1942 a timely piece of what we might call 'propaganda for the Good' and in the face of the well-produced but disturbing Nazi film propaganda emanating from Germany was deemed worthy of being filmed in the then expensive and rare Technicolor system. Just in 1940 alone Goebbel's Reichsfilmkammer influenced and supported the release of many films of loathsome import but of consummate technical virtuosity, notably 'Der Ewige Jude' and 'Jud Süß', interspersed with brutally gung-ho military documentaries, escapist pap and the sort of stridently hero-worshipping biopic of genuine German cultural icons intended to be taken as vindications of the romanticised Hitler of 'Triumph of the Will'.

The lavish period drama produced in 1942 at the Denham Studios by Lord Rank's G.H.W. Productions Ltd., to demonstrate that British culture was in no way inferior to Nazi perversions of Germanic 'kultur', was 'The Great Mr Handel'. The film is essentially a bildungsroman of Handel's struggles in later life to rise above adversity through his Lutheran faith, and by means of the religious genre of the oratorio. We see him leave behind what is portrayed as the vanity of his secular operas and the petty politics of aristocratic society and dedicate himself to this more democratic and thoroughly Christian mode of artistic expression.

Essentially a moral drama of redemption through good works, as in his crucial support for Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital, and religious devotion, as triumphantly shown in his movingly portrayed creation of 'Messiah' while in extremely poor health, the film presents Christian values and glorifies an Oratorio which had become in Britain an institution, being continuously performed since that time by professional and amateur resources alike. 'Messiah' was loved and cherished throughout Britain and was regarded as one of our most valued and established traditions.

The British film industry could hardly have spent it's money more wisely in the interest of representing to British people and to the world certain moral and humane values that were sustaining the country in it's time of trial. Though the Blitz was smashing up London, Coventry and other great cities in terror raids, this fine film, superbly produced in all departments, rose above the hellish wreckage, like the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, with a sense of imperishable hope.

Among the many felicities of this film are the conceit of the window facing Handel's writing desk becoming filled by the intensity of his vision, as in a theatre of the ideal. The authentic trader's cries of Old London which intersperse the street scenes outside the door of 25 Brook Street, where Handel lived, and which were still recalled by Londoners of the 1940s, would have served to remind wartime audiences of a depth of shared popular history, thus acknowledging and accepting that high art and folk art are spiritual neighbours; there is nothing pompous about this film other than the contemptible nature of the aristocratic society portrayed in all it's arrogance and shallowness.

But perhaps the bravest and the subtlest example of a 'Propaganda for the Good' in this film is the frank and open treatment of an obvious German as a fine and decent human being. The point is made in an opening scene, when Handel has to defend himself from a xenophobic English boor who resents his foreignness, 'You are only English by an accident of birth; while I am English by an Act of Parliament', he ripostes. This film, made at the height of Nazi ferrocity against civilisation, insists upon remembering a better German.

By remembering the civilised past, hope for the future is kept alive in time of war. It was fitting that this humane view was held up in opposition to the miasma of Evil that reeked from the Nazi super-productions, in which apalling murder and mayhem were extolled as civic virtues. However, Nazi propaganda films are now, thankfully, only of interest to historical specialists, whereas 'Messiah' is still today a moving and uplifting experience, which continues to be appreciated by anyone who enjoys the music of Handel, and admires the composer's struggles in adversity to complete what is regarded by many as his finest work.

I hope this review can at least somewhat redress the too often condescending views of this fine film.

Director Ralph Nelson must have welcomed this project as blessed relief from the horrors of his 'Soldier Blue' of the previous year. Following that film - still heavily censored in versions for the US market to avoid showing the appalling genocide of the Native Americans at the notorious Sand Creek massacre of 1864 - we have this gentle, charming, colourful and funny children's film - tuneful, too, with even a young Dana making a winsome appearance. And it's all set in the Irish Republic of a simpler time.

I say gentle, although the brutish stepfather has to be pretty nasty to motivate the flight of his unfortunate charges; and there is also something really sinister lurking behind Ron Moody's brilliantly ridiculous disguises as the wicked Uncle, dead set on murdering the runaway brother and his little sister, who want to live with their kindly Irish Gran, but who will be the heirs of a fortune their Uncle covets for himself, and will inherit if these children can be removed from the succession. However, although he is put to great trouble and many amusing mishaps in his relentless wicked pursuit of these innocents, he just can't do the dirty deed in the end, so he's a big softy really.

The technical side receives the full Hollywood treatment and the film, while not as polished as big-bucks Disney productions, is quite enjoyable. But be warned: It's considered too naive for modern tastes!

A rip-roaringly good yarn, and an interesting gloss on Civil War history that shows food rather than glory, honour or empty triumph as the most important thing, being a forceful reminder that survival is all anyone wanted at the end of this terrible conflict.

A shocking small scene with the Union officer commanding in the field, when he effects his escape, from capture by the Confederate troops, by grabbing a black woman for a human shield, is very telling. Just previously, before the enemy trap was sprung, he had been asking this woman, who was refusing to inform on the whereabouts of the Confederate troops, why a slave like her supported this Southern army. His manner at the time seemed to indicate an ulterior and very unsavoury reason for his interest in this woman, rather than any urge to propagandise the putative Yanqui mission to free the slaves. This scene encapsulates the hypocrisy which the conduct of the war against the Secession States - and the later cynical implementation of the peacetime 'reconstruction' - had exposed.

The boasted 'honour' of the south is itself exposed by the savage mistreatment of prisoners - one of whom Kelly is, losing a finger when tortured to make him collaborate - and the completely ungentlemanly boorishness with which his tormentor treats a lady friend. By contrast, our Mexican-domiciled Texas cattleman, Alvarez Kelly, demonstrates genteel charm and practical self-sacrifice in rescuing this war-weary damsel from her uncongenial soldier-beau and his collapsing Secessionist cause.

Author John H. Lenihan compares the film to 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly', in that both films "offer no consolation in their vivid deglamorization of war. The heroes, or antiheroes, of both films pursue selfish pecuniary ventures as a conscious alternative to becoming committed in a pointless destructive war". (Thanks to Wikipedia for this detail).

A kind of reconciliation of the two sides finally proceeds as the cattle herd is delivered to starving Richmond, under siege by General Grant's forces, as during the historical 'Beefstake Raid' of 1864, and the deliberate stampede of the stolen herd, that targets and breaks through the Union lines, Alvarez - caught in a careless moment of selfless humanity - rescues a Confederate officer at peril of his own life.

And there it is: An epic of essential individual humanity and redemption, distilled out of the obscene conditions of a Civil War whose pretensions had been besmirched and degraded in the blood and muck of mutual destruction. The film's message was particularly well received in late 1960's America.

President Lincoln savoured this Confederate 'Beefstake Raid' very much, as a voiceover during the final shot reports, saying that" This is the slickest piece of cattle-stealing I ever heard of". What a disaster for the South that the complex and magnanimous Lincoln did not live to preside over Reconstruction.

The grave at the beginning seems too big for a man. It yawns unfilled even after the man Brad Ellison came to town to kill dies. The grave is bigger than just another revenge shooting.

After the gunfight, Ellison is invited to meet John Forbes, the town magnate, a man crippled, dying and desperate to find his missing brother and intended beneficiary of his will, in order to keep his legacy out of the hands of an unscrupulous business partner, so that this wealth may do good in the world. One wonders if this criminal partner was responsible for John Forbes's being in a wheelchair, and in failing health, although such is never stated. The man's predicament does stir a flicker of humanity in the gun-for-hire, and Forbes then offers him a way to escape his life of killing by effectively resurrecting the lost brother, offering him the price of the proverbial 'Ranch in Oregon' that all gunfighters yearn to retire to.

Later we realise that the ominous grave, that greeted Brad on his road to this fateful town, will come to hold all those who attempt to resurrect Edward Forbes from the oblivion into which he has chosen to cast his own identity. So many, in fact, that Edward Forbes, eventually resurrected from his assumed identity, and buried - as it were - in the (magically filmed) Mexican countryside, observes that there is no more room in that quiet grave for him, and thereupon decides to end all the killing by surrendering his anonymity and going home to his dying brother.

It turns out that his brother's business partner has been hiring guns to dispose of this threat to being able to grab the valuable inheritance from it's rightful beneficiary. Possibly the gun Brad kills at the outset of the drama was one of these? Certainly, the friend he makes of Miles Lang, and whose life he saves during his quest, is only the longest-surviving emissary of Death to seek such unholy riches.

Once our gunfighter relinquishes his arms in a growing realisation of just who he is dealing with - actually an unexpected and Christ-like figure who is an inspiration to his adopted People - and becomes a true moral hero, this false friend Miles is disposed of.

Thereafter, in a poignant final scene, the reformed gunslinger sees a path to that 'Ranch in Oregon' opening before him - - - 'Or in Mexico' says the departing Priest, inviting Ellison to stay and do some good in this land, himself.

And so the career of a fast gun is reformed, and a good and decent man appears in his place. 'Oh Death where is thy sting?' as the vanished Padre might intone over that now closing grave, that so troubled the killer's conscience. A sublime Western.

Acres of widescreen that only seem to distance and diminish the drama, with an overblown music score by Richard Rodney Bennett, this film shows no real interest in the talented, brilliant and finally half-mad Lady of the title, either. She is portrayed as a ridiculous, impulsive grotesque, a child-woman, although the Lady herself was a talented, tragic misfit, whose uncompromising individuality offended the hypocritically decadent high society into which she was born.

It was only after Byron caddishly jilted her that she began to go to pieces. Unfortunately, Bolt - as both writer and director - makes the fatal dramatic error of portraying her from the very outset as a mentally disturbed child: she is shown in an early scene being medicated with opium by her mother, which is made to appear a necessary medication to control her congenitally erratic and undisciplined behaviour. And Bolt the writer's portrait goes unchallenged by his wife, Sarah Miles as Lady Caroline, or by director Robert Bolt as the indulgent husband who makes a fool of her by mistaking scenery-chewing overacting as a career-defining performance; 'both' these Robert Bolts conspire to create a ludicrous caricature of an immature idiot who would have repulsed the real Byron - bad and dangerous, but not mad - from their first acquaintance. She comes across as just unhinged. There is no real character there to develop, and no dramatic interest whatsoever in such a superficial and sensational presentation.

There is no sign of the intelligent and cultured woman she actually was, whose conversation and writing were informed by the literary movements of the time. There is no sign in her relationship with Richard Chamberlain's poseur poet of anything beyond a sort of schoolgirlish infatuation, no different from any others in the mobs of squealing female fans that crowd around him. Yet she had already been the confident paramour of many eminent men. She did have 'anger management' problems, but these arose from a strong character regularly beaten by her sadistic husband and disappointed and shamed by his own extra-marital affairs. (There are also more examples of this equally empty portrayal of husband Melbourne, to be noted later.) But in such a staggeringly stupid fantasy her rages appear merely the tantrums of a childish, immature girl, and do not seem to arise from any real sense of mature self-worth and injured pride. There is no great passion here, only a mean and paltry puppet put on show - the unfortunate actress Sarah Miles, manipulated by an ambitious husband who was unwisely wedded to the sort of grandiose pretensions that only his erstwhile film-making partner David Lean could get away with.

The silly character as portrayed in the film is only besotted with the deplorably vulgar pretty-boy Byron we are given here, and is never allowed to confront and engage with the seductive challenge of his alter ego Childe Harold; indeed, when Byron is reading in public to an audience entirely composed of unaccompanied young women - surely an impossible scenario at that date? - the lush orchestral score intrudes, actually substituting for the reading, and making an irrelevance of Byron and his great work, turning the poet into no more than a sex symbol for Caro to gaze at cow-eyed, just the same as all the other dim 'groupies.' It is absurd, seeing the great Byron declaiming his verses in this way, with their enthralling words supposedly capturing Caro's devotion, when the poet is reduced to only a pretty pouting pose and a mouth opening and shutting inarticulately, like a fish in a bowl - all to the soaring strings of the orchestra! Bathos can go no further: the film is an epic of bathos.

Her long-suffering husband William Lamb is also ridiculously portrayed as a failed politician, while in fact he twice became Prime Minister of Great Britain later in his career. He was also well-educated, and would have well appreciated that Byron's work had a satiric vein that was modelled on the work of Alexander Pope, yet is shown in one scene lecturing his wife on how radically opposed Byron's 'decadent' Romantic style was to Pope's Augustan wit and restraint; in actuality he would have known that Byron's style was pithy and Classical in contrast to that of the actual 'Romantic' poets, like Keats and Shelley. The real politician's fine Parliamentary speeches as spoken in one scene are not only irrelevant to the drama but impossible to imagine coming from the mind of the dullard Melbourne given us by Bolt. The real Melbourne's unsavoury side - as above mentioned - is also left out, ensuring that this character is altogether bland, trivial, stupid and poorly realised. Melbourne was a far more intelligent and complex character than Bolt bothers to portray, despite including too many irrelevant scenes showing his life in politics. An attempt to establish Caroline's own life in the literary circles of the time would have been far more apropos.

And when at the beginning of the big romance between Caro and the idol she is shown kissing expressly because he hunts her down in the corridor scene during the ball, when she leaves because she is fighting her instincts, afraid of 'falling' in the eyes of her husband and society, and because he is dangerous and transgressive and dominating, this very much diminishes a character who in reality unashamedly 'stalked' Byron - in our terms - fully conscious and completely unconflicted in her motives. She is indeed shown pursuing him earlier disguised as a rather sexless boy, but even these scenes are drained of the sort of necessary transgressive power seen in Visconti's Death in Venice. And all passion has already been exhausted by the aforementioned orchestral mooning at Byron posing Byronically while miming unheard poetry. Bolt's reversal of the power-play between the two lovers fatally damages the strong and charismatic character which alone makes Lady Caroline an interesting person. It eviscerates the proto-feminist and turns her into a ridiculous, brittle period doll.

There is no intense intimacy in this film - no spark of life. Everything is showy and over-the-top and unreal. The script and direction is generally unfocused and splashy, missing every target on the Panavision wall. There are over-elaborated and irrelevant walk-on cameos for big-name actors Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. What a pity the roles of Melbourne and Byron were not built up instead, and in such a way as to support the development of the titular heroine's role, instead of competing for our attention. But all we get is more violins and tears and screaming and distracting extras milling around aimlessly in a widescreen wasteland.

Lady Caroline's sudden death of a 'broken heart' - and out in a raging storm under the moon even! - is vulgar, jejeune, ridiculous tosh. Even when the 'pathetic fallacy' was an accepted metaphorical stroke, it was never proposed that the protagonist could die of it! But here Bolt makes his inflated symbol the actual agency of his character's demise: the whole creaking picture is a mechanical artifice cranked out by a talented scripwriter completely out of his depth in the director's chair, and distracted from the extensive re-writing he would have had to do on one of David Lean's polished epics.

The ugly reality of a bottle of sherry a day to drown the despair and disappointment of her life was an infinitely sadder and dramatic ending than this bathos. The unfairly and too often maligned Ken Russell's bio-pics actually never sink to such superficial disregard for their subjects. Nor, for all their much-criticised alleged excesses, are Russell's films ever this lumpen and misshapen. Bolt's screenplay and direction are all over the place, failing to focus sufficiently on the titular heroine, except insofar as his poor wife's increasingly clownish makeup obtrudes upon our attention, distracting us from taking the character seriously as any possible resemblance to a believable human being. Sarah Miles drops in the final death scene like a puppet. Bolt just lets go of the strings, giving up at last on any semblance of a living person.

He threw in the towel for good as a director, as well, leaving that arena more bruised and battered by the experience than his Byron was after his early bare-knuckle fight against a professional bruiser. The poet is shown desperately ducking and diving to avoid being overwhelmed. Perhaps Bolt realised instinctively that he was himself way out of his depth, Unluckily for him, he didn't come out of the engagement with any more glory or profit than Byron. And worse, he lost the girl - he and his leading lady divorced barely two years after the wheels came off this misfiring vehicle for her career.

Even a child with a toy theatre of cut-outs could have done no worse.

Utter tosh.

I cannot agree with the refrain of 'gratuitous' and 'sensational' and 'vulgar' that sounds depressingly throughout too many reviews of Ken Russell films; at his best there is a great deal of organising and artful design and discipline in Russell's films. His choice to externalise inner states is a pure and brilliantly conceived aesthetic strategy that begs for more of cinema to exploit such possibilities; Russell is one of those real filmmakers who have broken away from the dramatic structure of the live stage, in order to liberate the kinetic energy of pure cinematic art. I have never understood why Russell's vivid and persuasive 'dreams' - perhaps more helpfully viewed as psychotomimetic episodes - are not as aesthetically acceptable as Fellini's, say, or the kind of radical creative deconstruction practiced by Godard.

In 'The Music Lovers' the world is turned inside-out to show character's inner mental workings - not in the narrative manner of the traditional stage, but by using to the maximum the too-often neglected potential of cinema. This is a radical application of the artistic necessity of ensuring that 'form follows function' and as such is unexceptionable, and indeed praiseworthy. The film is thereby brilliantly enabled to involve us directly with the inner turmoil which is the dynamic of the persons in the film.

Is it true to life? Better ask, Is it a biography of the man who was the composer Tchaikovsky? The answer is then obviously: No. But that conclusion only serves to avoid discovering what the film is actually trying to do. It is of course a journey into the loneliness of a man set apart by the burden of genius, and by the haunting childhood tragedy of his mother's death from an incurable disease. This is an important aspect of the great composer's life, and as such Russell gets as close to such intimate detail as - I venture to suggest - would be possible even for any scholarly study; perhaps closer, in terms of our imaginative and emotional identification. And, one should add, the lonely martyrdom of the unfortunate Nina, locked in a loveless marriage as the mere social convenience of an homosexual forced into denial by an intolerant society, is equally effectively and movingly evoked as an intimate part of the composer's tragedy. That tragedy ultimately also involves inflicting deep harm on his sister and his sensitive aristocratic Muse through his moral dishonesty - not to mention his cruelty towards his real lover, the sad and sincere Count Anton Chiluvsky, who had a right to expect better.

Furthermore, although not a mere plodding hagiography of secular sainthood, the film is nevertheless beautifully dressed, designed and photographed, and frankly manages to appear as lavish and sweeping a romance as David Lean's honestly - i.m.h.o. - rather grandiose and pompous epics 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'Doctor Zhivago.' Indeed Ken's brilliant evocation of 'Old Russia on-the-cheap' is a masterclass in effective mise-en-scene, and reveals a grasp of the essence of filmmaking that is not dependent on an obscenely big budget or empty epic gestures: everything on screen has an irresistible presence and force.

I'd even dare to suggest that the scenes with Madame Nadedja von Meck at times reach the sort of understated grandeur of Visconti.

The clever script by novelist Melvyn Bragg also provides a strong narrative spine that supports Ken Russell's unconventional interpretation well. The same is true of the care with which the actual music of Tchaikovsky is chosen and employed as a setting to authenticate the achievement of the composer, the spectacle of whose dysfunctional and tragic life only convinces us the more of his heroism, rising as it does like a glorious musical monument above all the misery and disaster.

The final 'Borodino cannon' bloodbath is generally derided, even by those who otherwise praise the film. That much maligned cannon scene, accompanied on soundtrack by the rackety 1812 Festival Overture, is surely an obvious reproach to the composer for trivialising the tragedy and horror of Napoleon's military invasion of Russia, in a piece of popular rabble-rousing generally adjudged (while undeniably rousing) as unworthy of the sensitive and subtle musician Tchaikovsky truly was. It was just another of the disastrous poses of macho virility he resorted to in order to mask his true nature. It seems appropriate, then, to show all the heads being blown off in this surreal finale, since that was the sort of shocking reality faced by those who fought at the Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest battle of all Napoleon's campaigns; moreover, this - very stylised and not the least bit gratuitous - massacre is meant to represent the very real hurt and insult done to, and sometimes by, those who variously encouraged or were appalled by this vulgar showmanship. The shallowness, hypocrisy and crude triumphalism of the piece was entirely unworthy of the composer, and therefore this parodic cannonade is entirely fitting as a final cinematic comment by Russell, who's film is after all about the importance of honesty and integrity. The major fact of Tchaikovsky's personal life was his tragic failure to reconcile his nature and his life: that failure to be true to himself killed him; in this interpretation, killed him more certainly than any scandal of his homosexuality. He himself loathed the Overture, writing to his friend and patron Madame Nadedja von Meck that it was '- - - very loud and noisy and completely without artistic merit, obviously written without warmth or love.'

Everyone with taste views the 1812 as just a guilty pleasure, to be enjoyed in all its noisy, vulgar splendour. For poor Tchaikovsky himself, in stark contrast, the bombastic military virility of that circus-like spectacle - it has been mocked, parodied and further debased many times since - became merely a further torment racking his conflicted soul.

Russel reveals that soul in searing images of naked emotion. Perhaps that is what is unforgiveable to the modern critical mind - not physical nakedness, which they see as a cultural liberation; but it is the spiritual and emotional nakedness of human beings that offends their prim intellectualism. Russell is firmly in the anti-intellectual camp of D.H. Lawrence - which of course is why his Lawrence adaptations work so well. Russell, like Lawrence, is serious about sex. How he ever came to be called prurient and vulgar can only be explained by the bourgeoise vulgarity of his carping critics.

Russell's honesty in presenting so forcefully and uncompromisingly the horror and incipient madness roiling beneath Tchaikovsky's polite society pose, as the premier Court Composer to the Tsar, is in marked and refreshing contrast to the sort of typical film biography that is only a kind of secular hagiography drained of all life and passion. The film's final petrification of Tchaikovsky, posed in action as the showman conductor of the '1812' sets a stiff memorial effigy upon a plinth and thus pointedly contrasts this sudden stasis with the previous living dynamism; indeed it parodies the traditional 'apotheosis' of traditional bio-pics. The frail mortal Russell has given us does great honour to the composer, who earned his legacy through hard work - and the daily grind of composing, contrary to what most critics have claimed, is realistically shown - and that terrible personal angst which made his life so unhappy, and very likely drove him to seek the same death by cholera of the mother whom the traumatised child he remained yearned for all the rest of his life.

That Russell should be pilloried for so effectively and profoundly evoking the sacrifice upon which the composer's achievements were built, is a great injustice. Russell's critics remind me of the mediocre but successful Rubinstein's vicious parody of the young Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto, as presented by the director - perhaps as a conscious riposte to his own detractors? Even the late and much-respected Roger Ebert in a very negative review notoriously dismissed Ken Russell's 'The Music Lovers' in a peevish and ill-considered manner not befitting the serious critic he was.

Russell was a brilliant film-maker - this is not often enough said - , and when smaller talents dismiss him as going 'over the top' they only remind us that, in British English, this phrase also refers to those soldiers who put themselves in the line of fire by leaving the trenches when commanded: the cry of 'Over the top!' would historically see lines of troops clamber out of their trenches and march slowly into a hail of Spandau shells. Ken was never one to flinch from critically murderous assaults or vicious sniping from his enemies. He expressed himself bravely and sincerely, so that though he eventually succumbed to his critical wounds and was forced to quit the movie field, he has left such deeds of artistic glory as are to be wondered at and admired.

There are some on here - IMDB - determined to rubbish what they see as nothing but brainless Fascist propaganda. They're just desperate to boost the ideologically contrived Leftist western 'High Noon' (which is nevertheless a very fine film, of course, from it's own particular perspective). One reviewer here is even determined to puncture the grandeur of the final shoot-out in 'Rio Bravo', by asserting in authoritative tones that 'I can assure you also that dynamite bars don't blow off when hit by a bullet.'

Well, sorry , but dynamite sticks - they're not bars - are in actual fact extremely unstable. This is a characteristic of dynamite that Hawks and his writers efficiently indicate when Chance yells at Stumpy to get away quickly from the wagon he has chosen as a firing position, as the old man hasn't realised what lurks under the tarpaulin covering: a load of dynamite. One stray bullet could send the old-timer sky-high! He makes a hasty hobble to vamoose, but suddenly runs back and staggers away with a large case of useful extra armaments.

This of itself provides sufficient dramatic logic for the 'explosive-skeet-shooting' scene that finally disposes of the villains, and plausibility is helped along by means of the clear indication in close-ups that no fuses have yet been fitted to these sticks, so that Stumpy must be fully aware of an alternative method of detonation, And indeed he is, and the others quickly catch on. We are enabled to rapidly gather during this fast-developing but clearly motivated scene that an unusual and decisive turn of events is unfolding. From that structural perspective alone the 'dynamite can't be detonated by a bullet' view is exposed as not only irrelevant but just plain ignorant.

Such a view is also ignorant of the laws of chemistry and physics which have for long forbidden the use of dynamite for military purposes, having regard to the fact of it's extreme instability in such an environment rendering it more dangerous to your side than to the enemy. Even the professional demolition and mining uses of dynamite are subject to the most demanding controls, for that reason.

In any case, an action-man like Hawks would be extremely unlikely not to have direct experience, with his second-unit, of the management and cinematic possibilities of explosives!

Really the only question the scene raises is regarding the prowess of the shooters present; but of course all of these characters are already introduced to us as men who are long experienced in trusting their lives to the hair-trigger speed and pin-point accuracy demanded to survive as a gunfighter in an often lawless West.

Well you can call that prowess myth or legend or history, but being an incredible crack-shot remains as essential to the Western genre as levitating chinese fighters in kung-fu movies; and anyway Hawks has a sufficient eye for pleasingly humanising detail to show the ageing Chance needing a second shot before successfully detonating one of the sticks Stumpy throws towards the baddies' by now burning redoubt.

In fact this terrific scene usefully encapsulates precisely why this film is so satisfying, and so admired: style, and superb technique. The final shoot-out is resolved like a celebratory firework display, a clever contrivance true to the artifice of the Western genre and providing a glorious resolution for the long-suffering characters.

Hawks clinches his magnificent film with the persuasiveness of dynamite.

Gallic glamour shipwrecks on the inclement shores of Gormleigh's saucy postcard British smut. An exhilerating cinematic romp sees Tati, Godard, and Truffaut mercilessly replayed in the style of Carry On and Benny Hill, all to the accompaniment of the wistful spirit of composer Georges Delerue. Ken Russell's now notorious love of both cinematic art and wilful vulgarity declares itself in his first feature after TV as his unbridled genius explodes like a firework display, as the ambitious flares of his doomed Titanic talent was sunk by the iceberg of Anglo-Saxon critical disdain, and ignored by the S.S. Californian of British cultural inertia.

If he'd been the child of a more generous land and a sunnier clime, he'd have been as feted as a Fellini for the ripeness of this heady vintage. Surprisingly, in 1996 the Blackpool filmmaker Peter Chelsom succeeded, to some critical acclaim, in sparking desperate English seaside eccentricity with mercurial Gallicism in his 'Funny Bones.'

Ken Russell's mad caper celebrates the sad and seedy sexuality of grotesquely formal English satyrs and a vulgar and inflated misconception of Gallic glamour - literally in the insanely brilliant sequence of the destruction of the life-size promotional dolls announcing the arrival of the French sex-bomb at this English Cannes-In the-Rain, and that sequence of the top-hatted councilmen cavorting in Victorian bathing costumes like a clumsy male chorus line around an ersatz Bardot.

The whole spectacle is the wild fantasy of a repressed and gormless deckchair attendant, who imagines himself as the Entertainments Manager putting the decayed and old-fashioned seaside town of Gormleigh on the international cultural map - yet while he envisions a chic annual film festival with attendant foreign sex-goddess, Mr Mayor is caught feverishly winding the handles of ancient peepshow viewers for the stale titillations of past generations. The gulf between reality and fantasy provides at once the comedy and the tragedy of this end-of-the-pier show to end all end-of-the-pier shows.

Not polished as a performance, but certainly, like the brilliantly filmed opening cycle-ride of the busy deckchair attendant, a seat-of-the-pants ride of bewildering, breathless energy and reckless, plunging abandon. Then municipal and historical tableaux of the most stiff and stunning absurdity in their unconscious English parody of French history show us two nations united in mutual incomprehension, with clumsy farce their goofy child: Loving laughter can hide a grim despair, and Russell's misshapen movie expresses all his frustration and impatience with the uncongenial conditions of his own new cinematic career. The riotous dismantling of the cinema, as it is wildly enacted in one of the film's high points, reveals what was to become Ken Russell's signature bad boy attitude to the sclerotic British cultural establishment.

Ken was looked down on after he left the court of the BBC: But he is the serious Jester to our antic Lords, and the rebel against all the causes that betray us. He's even less likely to please in today's poisonous po-faced PC atmosphere, than he was to capture the affections of the superficial trendy swingers of the early sixties. Both are equally self-absorbed types.

This black-and-white film freezes out any technicolor psychedelia, and strips it's humanity naked and exposes it to the blast of the storm at the end, with the soaked and laughing principal trio emerging from the sea possibly as tragically as 'Jules et Jim' and their mutual love were drenched in their regrets even in the sunny South of France.

There is something hysterical and savage in what is on the surface this light souffle of tomfoolery, and this cartoonish universe is a satire on insouciance. Ken Russell as a director for the big screen was never taken seriously in Britain because he was always such an earnest filmmaker, and our dominant English sensibility resents barbed humour and unseemly enthusiasm, which embarasses it's cool reluctance to follow where the artist drives, and the critic's patronising attitude towards ambitious flights of imagination is to clip their wings, and bring the artist down to earth.

I like Russell's dangerous air of improvisation: To me, it makes his performance all the more thrilling, because he fully commits his imagination. His films are immediate and powerfully engaging. This long-neglected early gem is all of that. He just pours everything into his camera and then shakes it up: French Dressing.