The essential question to ask when looking over the career of a filmmaker known for causing trouble and upsetting social norms is how they deal with such enfant terrible behavior in their later years. In Ken Russell's case, age didn't mellow the mad genius but a series of increasingly dwindling budgets ultimately drove him into relative obscurity. He continued working past 1993, but his work beyond that point either doesn't feature any nudity or were barely released—has anyone seen Fall of the Louse of Usher?
In the first part of our look at Russell's long career, we saw his disdain for religion and love of phallic symbols shine through much of his work. Rather than relax into old age however, Russell goes even madder in the back half of his career. While it became more and more difficult for him to secure financing for his films later in life, he always managed to make the most of what he had. Re-watching The Lair of the White Worm the other night, I'm blown away by what he did with only $2.5 million.
There is an undeniable cheapness on display throughout these eleven films that comes close to being their undoing, but his ability to do so much with so little really kept him afloat in his later years. While not all of these films are terribly memorable, there are some diamonds in the rough here from his final two adaptations of D.H. Lawrence novels to his wildly controversial 1991 film Whore. Time's a wastin', let's get to it...
Crimes of Passion (1984)
While Russell's films had always flirted with and depicted the world's second oldest profession, his obsession with portraying and often humanizingprostitutes really became a running theme in the second half of his career. Like his musician and artist biopics dominated his work in the 60s and 70s, street walkers are a common theme throughout his films of the 80s and 90s. The first is this thriller starring Kathleen Turner, determined to prove once again that she was a sex symbol following her amazing performance in Body Heat, and subsequent rejection by Adrian Lyne for the lead role in 9½ Weeks.
Anyone in doubt about Turner's sex appeal, however, was likely silenced by her incredibly sexy performance here as Joanna Crane, a woman leading a double life working for a fashion designer by day and as a prostitute at night, using the name China Blue. Her secret is uncovered by a private investigator named Grady (John Laughlin), with whom she soon begins a torrid affair, giving us Turner's body bathed in some of Russell's signature neon lighting.
One actor never afraid to ham it up is Anthony Perkins, who plays a sexually deviantstreet-corner preacher named Payne, who poses a threat to Joanna due to his mental instability and the fact that his weapon of choice is a sharpened metal vibrator he calls "Superman."He also has a healthy appetite for peep shows and amyl nitrate, and here he enjoys both while Janice Renneydances...
The film would also lead to a battle between Russell and the MPAA, who initially slapped the film with a restrictive X rating, onewith which distributor New World Pictures refused torelease the film. The theatrical cut runs a full 12 minutes shorter than Russell's director's cut and IMDb actually has an extensive breakdown of the content cut to secure the R-rating. Russell would return soon enough to the world of street walkers and controversies with the ratings board, but firstRussell returnsto his other comfort zone: horror.
Gothic (1986)
Following some detours into the world of music videos—including a mullet-tastic Elton John's best song and video of the 80s, "Nikita"—Russell was back on the big screen with this 1986 reimagining of the real trip taken by Percy and Mary Shelley, along with Mary's cousin Claire Clairmont to Lord Byron's Swiss estate. He assembled quite a cast with Gabriel Byrne playing Byron, Julian Sands andthe lateNatasha Richardson as the Shelleys, and then newcomer Myriam Cyr as Claire. Keep your eyes peeled for a hilariously hammy young Timothy Spall as well.
The film is vintage Russell from the period setting that embraces the filth and grime of the period, to his impeccable recreations of several famousNeoclassicist paintings including Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," which was recreated for the film's poster...
All manner of bizarre stuff begins to befall the two couples, much of it serving as the future inspiration for Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," but all of it uniquely grounded in Russell's aesthetic. Take a scene 55 minutes in where Myriam Cyr lures Julian Sands over to look at her breasts as she sits on a pool table...
As he takes a closer look, however, Myriam not only gives him the crazy eyes, she really gives him the crazy eyes...
This is the stuff the Ken Russell fans go nuts over, but you can see why this might be a bit much to your average filmgoer looking to spend some time in the company of Byron and Shelley. Myriam also gets covered in muck near the end of the film, once again showing off her body...
Aria (1987)
Russell based his segment in this anthology film from ten different directors around "Nessun Dorma" the famous aria from thethird act of Puccini's operaTurandot—though he didn't borrow any aspects of that opera's story. Instead, we're treated to a typical Russell feast for the eyes as the lovely Linzi Drew(above) lays on an operating table following a car accident and imagines that the doctors stitching her back together are servants adorning her with jewels.
It's far and away the most abstract segment of the film, with Russell running artsy circles around such contemporaries as Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Nicolas Roeg, and even his American counterpart, Robert Altman. The result is simultaneously of a piece with the rest of Russell's work, yet one that sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the surrounding segments.
Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Russell returns to the world of horror with this 1988 film, the closest he ever came to making a vampire film, based loosely on Bram Stoker's novel of the same name and starring a pre-fameHugh Grant and Peter Capaldi. Set in modern day England, the tale concerns a Scottish archaeologist (Capaldi) who discovers an enormous skull—which will turn out to be from a giant slain worm—on the estate of Grant's family, who is famous for having slain a giant worm some years ago.
Amanda Donohoe doesn't enter the film until about twenty minutes in, but from the time she comes on as Lady Sylvia Marsh, she proceeds to steal the show from everyone else on screen. This is a world class camp performance, up there with Gina Gershon in Showgirlsand Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. She struts on to the scene and becomes the most dynamic screen presence of all, elevating the rather ridiculous material to the level of high art.
Amanda Donohoe's costumes are amazing, probably the highlight of the movie, and credit must go to costume designer Michael Jeffery for dressing her so incredibly well! She's also got a go for broke attitude that really helps to sell Russell's lunacy, as when she fellates a giant worm dildo in a dream sequence, while nuns are impaled all around her...
The film's third act pulls out all the stops with Donohoe offering up poor virginal Catherine Oxenberg as a sacrifice to her worm god Dionin...
And because it wouldn't be a Ken Russell movie without someone strapping on a giant dildo...
The film is a camp spectacular, one that never quite took hold among the cult audiences. Sure the film has its supporters, but Lady Sylvia Marsh deserves to reside alongside other revered anti-religious feminist icons. It's a once-in-a-lifetime performance surrounded by a fairly mediocre movie with some detached performances, terrible ADR, laughably bad effects, and a shocking twist ending that makes absolutely no sense when you think about it for more than five seconds.
The Rainbow (1989)
Russell returned to D.H. Lawrence twenty years after his career breakthrough Women in Lovewith this tale of the coming of age of Ursula Brangwen (Sammi Davis) whowas played byJennie Linden's in the aforementioned Lawrence adaptation. The film is basically a sexed up Merchant/Ivory production, something not unlike Howard's End directed by Russ Meyer, and Russell considered it to be his best film. In the technical sense, he's quite right as this is Russell at his most classical, his most restrained. This is sort of the older, wiser filmmaker many grow into, but it's more of an anomaly on his resume than a bold new career direction.
Sammi Davis and the returning Amanda Donohoe spend a lot of time naked together in the film, whether it's stripping down and running outside...
Or getting massaged by the fire...
Or making out, outside...
The women are clearly very comfortable with one another.This would also be Russell's penultimate pairing with his greatest and longest running muse, Glenda Jackson, whose last on screen credit came in Russell's TV Movie The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, appropriately enough a composer biopic. Here she plays the mother to her character from Women in Love, an interesting insider tidbit for those familiar with Lawrence's work.
Whore (1991)
Sold to audiences as the anti-Pretty Woman, this would be Russell's first and only pairing with another famous Russell, Theresa Russell (then wife to fellow Brit troublemaker Nicolas Roeg); though both had worked, albeit separately, on Aria. The Russells came together for one of the most buzzed about films of the early 90s, so controversial before its own release that it earned the tagline, "If You're Afraid to Say It... Just See It."
Working on a minuscule one million dollar budget, Russell was given carte blanche to go for broke and earn one of the newly created NC-17 ratings. This is not unlike the same leeway Paul Verhoeven would be given four years later with Showgirls, though that film's budget is astronomical by comparison. Whore is based, though very loosely, ona play/monologue by David Hines titled "Bondage,"itself based on a conversation Hines had once had with a street walker while he was driving a taxi cab. Hines is credited as the film's screenwriter, though he has complained publicly that Russell excluded him from the filmmaking process almost entirely.
Theresa Russell plays Liz, a woman driven from one controlling man to the next throughout her adult life, finally ending up as a prostitute. She speaks directly to the camera throughout the film, moving in and out of portions of her life, even stopping off at a strip club where she watches Stephanie Blakeentertain a patron...
She tells us about the good times with her pimp Blake (Benjamin Mouton), whom she is now trying to escape, and we get a look at the lavish lifestyle he's offering her to work for him, like his indoor waterfall...
She begins selling herself to mostly wealthy older men, many of whom end up as easy marks for Blake to come and exploit later...
The film performed terribly at the box office, failing to even earn back its modest one million dollar budget, though it did much better on home video and pay-per-view. As you can tell from the terrible quality of the clips we have, the film is desperately in need of some digital TLC. Worse films than this have gotten 4k restorations lately, someone get on this.
Lady Chatterley (1992)
Russell returned to television after the poor box office performance of Whore, and after a coupleof dalliances into other worlds, he returned once more to D.H. Lawrence. It would have seemed odd, considering that he was the preeminent adaptor of Lawrence's work, had Russell not eventually gotten around to adapting the author's most famous work. Having worked with both her mother Vanessa Redgrave (on The Devils) and older sister Natasha Richardson (onGothic), it only makes sense that Russell would cast Joely Richardson as the title character.
By removing the possessive "Lover" from the book's title, Russell puts Lady Chatterley back at the center of this telling of the story. A young Sean Bean co-stars as Oliver Mellors, the stable hand who becomes Lady Chatterley's lover after her husband is paralyzed during the war. The miniseries, spread as it was across four episodes and nearly four hours, gave Russell more time to focus on the characters, particularly Lady Chatterley herself as she suffers rejection from her paralyzed husband after seductively dancing into his bedroom fully nude...
She begins to doubt her own beauty, her own reason for living, and reconciles all of this by checking herself out in the mirror, like any woman questioning her own sex appeal might...
Later as she and Mellors get more intimate with one another, they go for a nude frolic in the tall grass...
Now, it's hard to say if this is as sexy and erotic as Just Jaeckin's 1981 adaptation for Cannon starring Sylvia Kristel, but it's definitely the sexiest one to air on television. Time has certainly been kinder to Russell's adaptation and his runs more than twice the length of Jaeckin's, so it's not difficult to get more out of Russell's version.
Ken Russellwould have nearly 20 more directorial credits to his name before his death in 2011, but as I mentioned in the intro, they're either skinless or impossible to find. It's sad that he died before the era of directors getting a career renaissance thanks to financing from the various streaming platforms, as he no doubt would've been a big fan of the creative freedom some of his contemporaries are currently enjoying.
However, he left behind a film legacy which will live long after him. Whether you come to his movies for the nudity, or the nudity is just a happy by-product of discovering Russell's films, you can be sure that as long as there are young film nerds going through puberty, Ken Russell's films will always be in fashion.
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look" Series
Ken Russell: Part One
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Park Chan-wook
Robert Altman: Act I
Robert Altman: Act II
Adrian Lyne
Martin Scorsese
Jane Campion
Bob Fosse
Dario Argento
Wes Craven
Tobe Hooper
Todd Haynes
Danny Boyle
Stanley Kubrick
Paul Thomas Anderson
David Lynch
Brian De Palma
Paul Schrader
Paul Verhoeven
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Header Footer images via IMDb
Gothic non-nude image via IMDb
Lair of the White Worm non-nude image via IMDb
The Rainbow non-nude image via IMDb
Whore non-nude image via IMDb
Lady Chatterley non-nude image via IMDb
