A SKIN-depth Look at the Manic Sexuality of Ken Russell's Films: Part One 1969-1980

The maddest mad genius in all of British filmmaking, Ken Russell carved a unique and meandering pathto success on his own terms.One can tell within five minutes of any one of his films that they're watching a Ken Russell production thanks in no small part to the director's singular style. Religious (and sacrilegious) imagery, phallic symbolism, ornate production and costume design, and frantic camerawork abound in all of his films.

Not unlike another director we've covered recently, Robert Altman, Russell's directorial career began in television where he spentnearly a decade honing his craft before making his feature film debut with French Dressing in 1964. Not quite the genre chameleon that Altman was, Russell did share Altman's penchant for prolificness, often churning out more than one film in a calendar year—1971 alone saw him release The Music Lovers, The Devils, and The Boy Friend.

Absolutely none of this is to mention Russell's gleeful, subversive, and near constant use of nudity, both male and female. It's telling that perhaps his most famous nude scene is the naked fireside wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love, one of the most brazenly homoerotic sequences ever filmed. Shockingly, Russell never moves thehomoeroticism to the realm of text, keeping it all subtextual and uncharacteristically restrained.

However, Ken Russell was far fromthe most subtle filmmaker of all time, often pointedly and brazenly courting controversy by adapting works no one would dare or infusing classic tales with very modern sexual subtext. His manic and mad brand of filmmaking most certainly wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but Russell had a knack forgiving audiences enamored with his work exactly what they wanted.

Thanks to his numerous BBC documentaries and early works, we're not going to start at the beginning, but the sheer number of movies he made with nudity has necessitated a two-parter. This week we'll cover his work up to 1980 and in two weeks we'll deal with everything after 1980. But for now, let's head back to the film that put Ken Russell on the map.

Women in Love(1969)

Russell's third feature film, an adaptation of the saucy novel by D.H. Lawrence, remains one of his most famous and revered works.The film marks the beginning ofRussell'slong working relationship with both Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson, who play loversGerald Crich andGudrun Brangwen. Jennie Linden plays Jackson's younger sister Ursula, forming the titular pair of amorous females who search for love and satisfaction in an age dominated by the rather chaste musings of authors like Jane Austen.

Russell—with no little help from Lawrence's source material—shatters the notion of chastity being the foremost virtue of the era, showing audiences that their forebears were just as horned up and sex crazy as we are today. It was the perfect film for the year it was released, as free love took over the puritanical United States and we took more than a few lessons from these saucy British socialites. The film takes a bit oftime before getting to the female nudity—both Reed and co-star Alan Bates would go nude before any woman strips off a stitch of clothing—but once it gets going, there's no stopping it.

Forty minutes in, we get our first female nudity as Sharon Gurneystrips down to go skinny dipping at the Crich's annual picnic, crouching with her lover in the tall grass so as not to be seen by polite society...

They are soon joined by both sisters, though only Jennie Linden shows any skin as her breasts peek out of the water while she floats alongside Jackson...

Glenda Jackson, in her first Oscar winning performance, finally strips down at the 83 minute mark, showing off her perky pair for Oliver Reed before the two get down to business...

Women in Love would sadlyearn Russell his one and only Oscar nomination, for Best Director, though his status as an enfant terrible never really jived with the Academy's tastes. Ironically enough, he was competing against Robert Altman for M*A*S*H, though both men would lose to Patton's Franklin J. Schaffner. Many Oscar voters surely figured that Russell would get another shot at Oscar glory, but unlike Altman, this was his one and only invitation to the ball.

The Music Lovers (1971)

Music was a theme that ran throughout Russell's careerand, for a time, he was the premiere director of musician and artist biopics. His first non-documentary film about a musician was this abstract, nearly dialogue free look at the life ofTchaikovsky, played here by Richard Chamberlain, and his wife Antonina Miliukova, played by Glenda Jackson. Russell described the film as "the story of the marriage between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac."

Chamberlain was living as a closeted gay man at the time, in much the same way as Tchaikovsky himself, which adds another layer of complexity to the proceedings, one that Russell was most assuredly aware of when he cast the actor. Though filled with all manner of sexual imagery, there's only one nude scene proper in the film itself. An hour and two minutes in, Chamberlain and Jackson get drunk on a train and Jackson ends up rolling around naked on the floor...

Nowhere near as sexy as the nude scenes he created for Women in Love, but the sexualcontent of this film isn't nearly as orgiastic. Speaking of which...

The Devils(1971)

Not only the most controversial film of Russell's career, his second of three films released in 1971 remains one of the most controversial—and as a result, under seen—films ever made. Based loosely on both Aldous Huxley's 1952 work "The Devils of Loudun" and John Whiting's 1960 stage adaptation of said book, The Devils is another in a long line of films that came under fire for the way it portrayed the Church (capital C). At the center of the film is yet another tour de force performance from Oliver Reed asFather Urbain Grandier, a licentious 17th century priest presiding overthe town of Loudon and its church,where the nuns have become afflicted with a form of sexual hysteria.

The equally corrupt Cardinal Richelieu orders the church to remove Grandier from his post, but this proves easier said than done, particularly once themalicious Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave)has her sexual advances rejected by Grandier, causing her to claim that Grandier is the one responsible for the nuns' hysteria. The church puts Grandier on trial, railroading him and burning him to death despite the fact that one of the elders of the church knows he is innocent.

The condemnation of the church's politics has never been more pointed than it is in Russell's film, though you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to tell you about it. Mostly all anyone remembers about The Devils are the scenes of various nuns lustily dry humping a statue of Jesus. This was Russell's stock in trade, however, going to outrageous extremes to prove his point, though he often ends up unintentionally obscuring said point through the extremities on display.

The role of Sister Jeanne, played by Vanessa Redgrave, was originally offered to Glenda Jackson, who turned it down because she was tired of playing sexually neurotic leads in Ken Russell movies. I am sad to report that we don't have any good quality video from The Devils, as even nearly fifty years after its release, the film is notoriously difficult to obtain in a pristine copy. There's plenty of nudity in the film's middle portion as the nuns—played by such Russell regulars as Georgina Hale—succumb to their madness. Sadly these stills will have to suffice...

The film also features a brief topless scene from the lovely Gemma Jones, whose affair with Grandier is what sets off Sister Jeanne's plot for vengeance...

I've been saying this for well over a decade now, but either Criterion or BFI really need to get on the ball and give us a full, restored, uncut version of this masterpiece on home video. It's long overdue at this point and I hope I live long enough to see the film get the release it so richly deserves.

Savage Messiah (1972)

Following his first foray into the world of musicals with the G-rated Twiggy vehicleThe Boy Friend, Russell plunged back into the artist biopic world with this film based on the very short life of early 20th century artist and sculptorHenri Gaudier. Based on the book of the same name by H.S. Ede, the film centers around the wild sexual affairs Gaudier had with such women as Gosh Boyle, played here by the vision of perfection, a young Helen Mirren...

Gaudier was married at the time to a much older woman, butwomen like Boyle served as both his muse and his lover. At the hour and fourteen minute mark, we get the film's most famous scene where Mirren wanders fully nude through the house wondering if her beauty is still enough to inspire the artist...

I would say so.

Mahler(1974)

By the time Russell got to his next biopic on the life of composer Gustav Mahler—played here by Robert Powell, who wouldgo on to play the title role in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth—his restraint was fading fast. The film is very similar in structure to The Music Lovers, as the framing device finds Mahler and his wife Alma (Georgina Hale) taking a train ride together, giving way to flashback vignettes from the composer's life. Unlike his Tchaikovsky biopic, however, which favored much more subtle symbolism and played the subtext, Mahler is a fever dream of a tale, always keeping the audience off-kilter as it moves through key portions of the composer's life.

Georgina Hale's performance as Alma Mahler is one of the film's high points, a role she would reprise for a bizarre cameo in the following year's Lisztomania. Hale more or less took up the business of being Russell's muse during this period, with the director lovingly shooting her nude scenes in much the same way he did for The Devils. Again, due to the poor mismanagement of Russell's catalog, we have no clips from the film on the site, but rather some stills of Hale's nude scenes in the film...

Lisztomania (1975)

Subtext now completely out the window, Russell released two films starring The Who's Roger Daltrey in 1975. While the Daltrey-starring adaptation of the band's rock opera Tommy is a mostly skinless affair with Daltrey given little to do beyond parading around shirtless, their other collaboration was an absolute bonkers bacchanalia of sex and gigantic phalluses...

It's difficult to call Lisztomania a biopic about composer Franz Liszt because there's next to nothing in the film in the way of actual historical accuracy. The Pope, played here by former Beatle Ringo Starr, calls Liszt into action when a plan is uncovered in Germany wherein they are using Wagner's music to conquer the world. Wagner, reincarnated as a Frankenstein/Hitler hybrid, is unleashed begins using an electrical guitar/sub-machine gun to kill thousands of innocent people. This sets up the ultimate showdown of good versus evil, Catholicism versus fascism, love versus hate.

Those looking for any semblance of historical accuracy are sure to be immediately turned off by the film—that giant dick scene above occurs in the film's opening minutes. Those looking for something closer to Amadeus with more sex, nudity, and giant phalluses are sure to get their fancies tickled by Russell's most brazen provocation this side of The Devils. In the film's opening, Liszt is caught in the act withMarie d'Agoult, played by Fiona Lewis, by her husband and a sword fight breaks out that culminates in this rather suggestive use of a candle by Ms. Lewis...

Not five minutes later, the notorious lothario gets an up close and personal introduction to the feminine wiles of Anulka Dziubinska...

Also, keep your eyes peeled for another actress whose big break came in that same year's Rocky Horror Picture Show when the Pope catches Liszt in bed with redheaded beauty Nell Campbell...

Roger Daltrey may not be the world's most preternaturally talented actor, but he helps make Russell's case for composers being the rock stars of their day by taking that to quite literal extremes. This is another Russell film in dire need of some TLC and I sincerely hope a specialty house comes along to rescue this insane film from obscurity.

Valentino(1977)

Russell took 1976 off to work on this biopic of silent movie superstar Rudolph Valentino, casting another famous Rudolf (ballet dancer Nureyev) in the title role. The resulting Valentino is perhaps one of Russell's weakest efforts, thanks in no small part to a Citizen Kane-inspired framing device that has a throng of reporters and admirers attempting to decode the secrets of Valentino's life following his untimely 1926 death.

The film's first flashback features what is perhaps the most erotic scene in the film as Valentino and renowned dancerVaslav Nijinsky share a pas de deux in an empty ballroom. It's a scene teeming with sexual tension, something which Russell strangely skirts in all of Valentino's various rendezvous with women throughout the rest of the film. While it would surely have upset purists had he done more than insinuate any sort of relationship between the two, one wonders why a director known for "going there" holds back with this scene.

The Mamas and The Papas vocalist Michelle Phillips plays legendary silent screen starNatasha Rambova, Valentino's co-star in his most famous film, The Sheik. She seduces Valentino with Salome's infamous dance of the seven veils, showing off every square inch of her naked body during their extended off-screen seduction...

It is a shockingly gratuitous nude scene from such a well-known woman, though it never necessarily feels exploitative. Perhaps its because Nureyev is every bit as starkers as she is, contributing to an equal opportunity sexuality not on display in many other heterosexual directors' work. The film's best nude scene, however, comes courtesy of the sensationally stacked Penelope Milford, who is bedded by Valentino an hour and twenty five minutes in, with the buxom babe baring every square inch of her nude body...

There is an incredible fidelity throughout the film to recreating Valentino’s work, and like Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, it has come to be a defining account of a great silent movie artist. Specialty house Kino Lorber released an immaculate looking Blu-ray of the film in 2016 that makes the absence of his greater films in the same format all the more egregious. If you're a Russell completist, however, it's just about the best transfer imaginable and gives the films exquisite costume and production design the richnessthey deserve.

Altered States (1980)

Ken Russell famously remarked thathe was the 27th choiceto direct Paddy Chayefsky's adaptation of his own book, Altered States, stating that Warner Brothers only hired him after 26 other directors had passed on the project. One of the strangest, most twisted trips into the human psyche ever made, Altered States holds up today thanks to top notch work from two of our greatest storytellers (Russell and Chayefsky).

In his big screen debut, William Hurt plays Eddie Jessup, a Harvard-employed scientist studying the effects of sensory depravation on the human mind. Several years later, Jessup is now a full professor at the school, and dissatisfied with the unfinished state of his work, he resumes his old experiments, this time aided by the use of what is now known as Ayahuasca. All manner of bizarre hallucinations follow, many of them religious in nature, despite Jessup himself not being a religious man.

Shit really hits the fan when he regresses into a primal form, emerging from the sensory depravation tank as some sort of feral half man, half ape. Honestly, my descriptions of it do it no favors, this is a film that simply must be seen to be believed. Russell employs nudity sparingly here, the only female skin coming to us courtesy of Blair Brown who plays Hurt's wife. She appears nude in one of his hallucinations, leading him to believe that she might be the key to re-grounding him and bringing him back to normal...

Like most of Russell's films of the time, it is chockablock with religious imagery and all manner of crazy editing, employing a prototypical use of cgi to create some of the third act's effects. It's a head trip, one you won't ever forget once you see it, and a fittting way to bring the first portion of our look at Russell's career to a close.

Join us again in two weeks when we close out our look at Russell's work, covering everything from 1984 on.

Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look" Series

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

-----------

Header images via IMDb

Women in Love non-nude image via IMDb

The Music Lovers non-nude image via IMDb

The Devils non-nude image via IMDb

Savage Messiah non-nude image via IMDb

Mahler non-nude image via IMDb

Lisztomania non-nude image via IMDb

Valentino non-nude image via IMDb

Altered States non-nude image via IMDb