Nights at the Villa Deodati #2: Phantasmagoria

I saw GOTHIC at the Cameo Cinema on its first release in 1986. I went alone. I watched alone — I don’t remember another soul being there, though I suppose there must have been somebody else in the audience. If Messrs. Golan & Globus had witnessed that matinée, they might have thought twice about bankrolling Ivan Passer’s HAUNTED SUMMER, which violated the law discovered by his fellow Czech filmmaker Milos Forman on VALMONT: “Never make a movie that somebody else has just made.”

In HAUNTED SUMMER, screenwriter Lewis John Carlino “solved” the problem of the fact that nothing much is known to have actually happened during the summer when Mary Shelley hatched the idea for Frankenstein by writing a historically faithful script in which nothing much happens. In GOTHIC, Stephen Volk, a writer who has shown an admirable devotion to the fantastique throughout his distinguished career, tackles the same problem in a number of ways —

1. He folds into the story the characters’ backstories, so that dramatic events from their pasts can inform the action. Byron’s incestuous love for his sister and, crucially, the death of Mary’s first baby, are introduced via dialogue, some of it a bit awkwardly expository, and then can be played out in the ensuing psychodrama. Whatever the merits of the execution, the idea is a masterstroke, creating a human drama behind the authorial act which is our prime reason for being here — it’s unbelievable that the other movies on the subject neglect to do this.
2. He also incorporates glimpses of the characters’ tragic futures, seen in psychedelic visions. This is also much more satisfying than HAUNTED SUMMER’s wrap-up, where a flurry of tragic deaths is dispensed with in a few titles at the end, leaving the odd impression that we’ve been watching the wrong scenes from the protagonists’ lives.
3. By plunging the audience into the drug-induced paranoia of a frenzied laudanum party, Volk concocts a supernatural plotline in which a kind of séance seemingly unleashes all manner of hellspawn. I don’t think this is fully developed in narrative terms, perhaps because the barely-glimpsed monster is given short shrift compared to all the onscreen psychotronics, but it certainly gives rise to lots of good images.

Russell was returning to British cinema after an interesting American adventure which self-destructed with the barely-released CRIMES OF PASSION, from which the MPPAA cut around 40 mins (“They cut everything to do with art,” observed Ken.) I now look rather affectionately upon this penultimate phase of his career — I still can’t get on with the home video works that followed it, but I’ll speak up on behalf of LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, SALOME’S LAST DANCE, and GOTHIC. Not so keen on THE RAINBOW, alas.

Russell was also giving interviews in which he extolled the virtues of the fast forward, saying he’d enjoyed RUMBLE FISH but that he’d watched it at double speed, which improved it. GOTHIC feels a bit like the script is on fast-forward, as if Russell couldn’t wait to get to the leaches and severed heads, and couldn’t be bothered allowing any of the characters to start breathing as human beings. A talented cast, plus Julian Sands, are left gasping for air with unformed lungs like poor Mary’s premature baby. They are ~

1. The late, lamented Natasha Richardson. Her decision to give Mary a Scottish accent is surprising — Mary spent maybe a year and a half in Scotland, max. But alone among the cast she establishes a baseline of credibility — she doesn’t get space to develop it, but she’s always believable, even when required to disgorge implausible amounts of exposition.
2. Julian Sands. Sands is good in some stuff. Not here. His Percy Bysshe Shelley alternates between acting as if he’s SHOUTING, while speaking at normal volume, and drawing the edges of his mouth as far back as possible, like a monkey in a wind tunnel, or a man attempting to eat a Wagon Wheel biscuit in one go. He’s supposed to become hysterical, but he’s already hysterical, and in the wrong sense of the word. Bysshe Bash Bosh.
3. Gabriel Byrne. Naturally Byronic, but unimpressive stripped to the waist, incipient moobs aquiver. Suffers a bit from having Every Famous Thing Byron Ever Said as dialogue. Next to Sands he sounds like a genius though.
4. Timothy Spall. Knows he’s in a Ken Russell film, so is playing it like Murray Melvin in THE DEVILS, but an MM who has been mysteriously inflated with methane.
5. Myriam Cyr. The least-known one, and the most memorable, with her huge eyeballs. One of a harem of Russell lovelies who only made one indelible impression (Alita Naughton, Imogen Millais-Scott). Her sparse other credits include FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND and FRANKENSTEIN AND ME. The woman’s clearly obsessed.

Every version of this story seems to feature one surprise unknown. In HAUNTED SUMMER it was Philip Anglim, whom we’d never seen before. At his first closeup, Fiona cruelly and hilariously remarked “No.” She was already smitten with Stoltz as Shelley. Later she admitted Anglim was pretty damn good. The best of the Byronic batch, actually.

“You’re not allowed to criticise the score,” said Fiona, a Thomas Dolby fan from way back. After five minutes, she was criticising it, or at any rate saying “The score is a disaster.” When the movie is prematurely hysterical, the score is a particular problem. Russell has lost his patience as a filmmaker, and patience is a form of courage — believing you can make the audience wait for something. So the movie isn’t scary, despite throwing everything at us. It’s frequently freaky, though.

The last act is where it all kicks in and starts working. Since the visual stuff works better than the talking headcases, it would be easy to give Russell all the credit, but he was careful to praise Volk’s script for the fact that it served up delicious images, more valuable than words. So Russell’s hectic tempo is responsible for some of the apparent writing flaws, and Volk’s visceral writing deserves some of the credit for the film’s feast of imagery. Mary Shelley in a timewarp, glimpsing the future, encapsulates the premise of FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND in five minutes better than that movie manages in its whole runtime.

My favourite images —

Ken recreates his beloved Busby Berkeley’s Lullaby of Broadway sequence, only with a skull instead of Wini Shaw.

A bit of T & eye. Not frightening. But bizarre. (see top)

A simple closeup, utterly beautiful and more haunting than anything else we’ve seen.

To Russell, the cardinal sin was to bore, and on that basis, GOTHIC wins the Battle of the Byrons. But read on…

Self-Portrait of the Artist

Those early BBC arts drama-documentaries directed by Ken Russell really are something. One almost hesitates to sing their praises in the UK since for years the perceived wisdom has been that they’re Mad Ken’s best work, that he went into decline (a) as soon as he started making feature films (b) as soon as he’d made THE MUSIC LOVERS (c) after he had his nervous breakdown and lost his catholic faith making THE DEVILS (d) after he went to America or, for all I know, (e) when he went on Celebrity Big Brother.

First into the Panasonic was Always on Sunday, AKA Henri Rousseau, Sunday Painter, scripted by Russell himself with regular collaborator Melvyn Bragg. In the very early films KR made for the BBC’s flagship arts show, Monitor, he was not allowed to show the artists except as a pair of hands, painting or conducting or whatever. Russell kept fighting for the right to use fully-fledged dramatic techniques, and by the time of his Rousseau movie he’d more or less won — the film is a combination of narrated passages (Oliver Reed intones Bragg’s commentary) and mini-scenes involving actors. Beautifully, Rousseau is portrayed as a Yorkshireman, seemingly to suggest his simple honesty.

Alfred Jarry gets pataphysical.

Like a lot of Russell biopics, it’s in part a self-portrait, with Rousseau/Russell the misunderstood artist whose work is ridiculed during his lifetime. Poor Ken couldn’t have known how true this would be. Just wait till he dies — hopefully some decades from now — there’ll be a national outpouring of grief to rival the Princess Diana farce and the Valentino funeral rolled into one.  “Unappreciated” barely begins to describe the Russell oeuvre, which has been trashed, mocked, condemned as obscene, censored (“They took out anything that had to do with Art,” said Ken of the MPAA’s evisceration of CRIMES OF PASSION, whose Beardsley and Hokusai prints were the first to go) and banned outright (the zealots of the Strauss estate are still suppressing The Dance of the Seven Veils).

“Eh, ‘e’s a grand animal, a lovely animal, you are, a real… oh lovely one… Aaaaarrr! look out, he’s coming to get yer! Arrrrr! ha ha ha!”

A more iconoclastic production, Isadora, The Biggest Dancer in the World, features Vivian Pickles (Harold’s mom in HAROLD AND MAUDE, and if you’ve seen that film you can picture this performance) as the champion of free expression, and leaves one a little uncertain whether Ken has any respect for his subject at all. It’s a problem critics frequently had with his 1970s composer films. In fact, Russell adores Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Liszt, but he blows their idiosyncrasies up to such a massive scale that he can come off as mocking or hostile. He isn’t really.

The film begins with a fast montage of the scandals and disasters in Isadora’s life, moving at Mack Sennett speed and changing style and tone with dizzying abandon. Here’s how Ken initially presents the death of her children in a car accident —

This opening is the equivalent of the newsreel in CITIZEN KANE, a frequent structural touchstone for Russell. The grotesque events treated as black farce in the opening are revisited more tenderly in the ensuing film. Although Isadora is frequently ridiculous — “In my heart I’ve been a communist all my life — I’m a queen of communism!” — I think Ken sympathises with her eccentricity, impracticality and inappropriateness. How could he not?

Ken obviously benefitted from his apprenticeship at the BBC. In producer Huw Weldon he had an authority figure whom he could rebel against and respect at the same time. Russell-haters will feel that the limited budgets and b&w photography of these films also kept him grounded, kept his outrageous visions within respectable boundaries. That may be true, but it wasn’t a stable, sustainable situation. Russell’s nature ensured his transformation into a gaudy butterfly of the cinema.

TVs Culture Show has placed a blue plaque at Ken’s birthplace, but I’m holding out for a fifty-foot-high marble statue in the Lake District. Might I suggest this pose?

US customers:

Ken Russell at the BBC