Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films

437 Pages·2007·4.95 MB·English

by  Joseph Lanza

Ken Russell has made some of the most daring, disturbing, and beautifully
photographed films of all time. Drawing from a wealth of historic and literary
references, Russell’s subjects are astounding: deranged Ursuline nuns in a 17th-
century French province, the inner demons of Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, the
sexual angst of Tchaikovsky, the emotionally drained life of Rudolph Valentino,
the messianism of a pinball wizard, the fury of lesbian vampires, the
introspections of prostitutes. Russell’s movies offer not just brazen sensationalism
but food for thought; they horrify yet inspire. And through it all, Russell
maintains a simultaneously impish and intellectual sense of humor.

The first full biography of the director, Phallic Frenzy is far from a dry, film-by-
film analysis. It shows how Russell’s real life has often been as engaging and
vibrant as his film scenarios. Here you’ll learn how Alan Bates and Oliver Reed
compared their penis sizes for the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love; how
Russell disfigured Paddy Chayefsky’s script for Altered States by having the
actors holler out the lines as fast as possible, accompanied by spewed food and
streams of spittle; and how Russell was slated to direct Evita, starring Liza
Minnelli, and the “creative differences” that ensued. A madcap tale full of wild
ideas, surreal situations, and a cavalcade of colorful personalities, Phallic Frenzy
is as thrilling a ride as any Ken Russell film.

Joseph La nza specializes in speculative nonfiction with subjects ranging from
popular music to futuristic architecture. He is perhaps best known for his book
Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other
Moodsong; his other books include Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy,
and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg, which the British Film Institute called the
best book on the filmmaker; Vanilla Pop: Sweet Sounds from Frankie Avalon to
ABBA, which Publishers Weekly called “surprisingly flavorful”; and Gravity:
Tilted Perspectives on Rocket Ships, Rollercoasters, Earthquakes, and Angel
Food, which the Los Angeles Times called “brilliant” and “exhilarating.”

Jack et photos

FRONT: detail of the poster from Salome’s Last Dance, provided through the
courtesy of Lionsgate

BACK: courtesy of Ken Russell
BACK: courtesy of Ken Russell

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lanza, Joseph.
Phallic frenzy : Ken Russell and his films / Joseph Lanza.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-669-5
ISBN-10: 1-55652-669-5
1. Russell, Ken, 1927- 2. Motion picture producers and directors—Great Britain—Biography. I.
Title.

PN1998.3.R88L36 2007
791.4302’33092—dc22
[B]
2007003480

© 2007 by Joseph Lanza
All rights reserved
First edition
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-669-5
ISBN-10: 1-55652-669-5
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
1 Pinocchio’s Pecker
2 The Lair of the Black Mamba
3 The Lost Lamour
4 Music for a Mental Breakdown
5 Catholic Space Cadets
6 Pathographer’s Progress
7 Art with a Capital T
8 Heaven, Hell, and a Waterfall
9 Cold Days in Purgatory
10 Blowing Bubbles
11 Songs of Superman
12 A Bundle of Tortured Nerves
13 Sacrilegious Bitch! The Devils: Part One
14 Sanctimonious Whores! The Devils: Part Two
15 Naughty, Bawdy Bodies
16 The Coffin and the Codpiece
17 Mahler Sieg Heil!
18 A Sadomasochistic Sesame Street
19 Orpheus Extending
20 Valentino and His Double
21 Waiting for Dracula
22 Faust Freaks
23 Operatic Punks
24 The Deco Dildo
25 Prometheus Ungagged
26 Salome’s Salami
27 The Serpent in the Rainbow
28 Moll Flounders
29 From White Worms to Blue Balls
30 The Loch Ness Trickster
Source Notes
Works of Ken Russell
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My warmest thanks to David Litofsky, Leonard Pollack, and Barry Sandler for their
help, encouragement, supplies, and conversations through this ordeal by fire.
I would also like to thank the following friends, associates, and institutions for
their generosity, assistance, encouragement, and resources: Iain Fisher, Paul Jensen,
Thomas Kenny, Jim Meehan, savagemessiah.com, Jay Schwartz, TopFoto, the
Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, New York), and the Museum of Television
and Radio (New York City).
Thanks to my editor, Yuval Taylor.
And my special thanks to Ken Russell for his help, inspiration, permissions, and
for sending me a homemade copy of Hot Pants.
1
PINOCCHIO’S PECKER

Ken Russell’s phallic frenzy always reverts to two events in his youth, both of which
occurred in cinemas. The first happened when he went to see The Secret of the Loch,
a very British film from the early 1930s about a Scottish town all in a twist when the
legendary Loch Ness monster appears. Russell recalls in his memoirs that it was a
plucked chicken with a prominent beak, but it was actually an iguana, enlarged with
primitive special effects to suggest a Behemoth. Little Kenny took one look at this
terrifying creature’s jutting head with its dangling, testicular neck skin and bolted out
of the theater.
“He’s a lovely monster, isn’t he, Ken Russell?”
—Michael Powell

The follow-up trauma happened in his early teens, when he went to see Walt
Disney’s Pinocchio. He elaborates in his autobiography: “I had never enjoyed a film
more. And as I watched Pinocchio’s stiff little pointed nose grow and grow, so my
enjoyment grew with it. And so did my willie. Something else was moving around my
crotch. It was a man’s hand. I couldn’t believe it. How had it got there? And why? I
became aware of a shadowy presence in the next seat.”
Cringing at the forbidden delights this groping Geppetto offered, Russell fled the
theater once again and stayed away from cinemas for a spell. But the sensations of
danger and forbidden joy lingered to inform much of his life and art. In Russell’s
surrealistic interpretative mind, the creature in the movie, the mysterious stranger’s
groping paws, and the doll’s growing nose formed one vast dragon that he, like a
mythical Siegfried caught in a Freudian nightmare, has time and again attempted to
subdue, slay, and even seduce. His childhood memories suggest the landmark
impressionistic study Leonardo da Vinci, in which Sigmund Freud traced da Vinci’s
artistic gifts to the artist’s own recollection of being an infant in a cradle and having a
vulture swoop down to spank his lips with its tail. Russell’s creative life is, similarly,
the product of what Freud calls a “disfigured reminiscence,” rife with exciting
conflicts between the horrific and the erotic, the neurotic and the visionary, the puerile
and the profound.
When he finally picked up a movie camera sometime in the 1950s, Russell set out
to explore his mind’s watery depths. His search has continued for over four decades,
with his “willie” the thematic maypole. Around it, he has wrapped stories of love,
hate, death, religion, politics, and the fragile role of art in a world where commerce
and mass media co-opt and castrate the creative spirit at every juncture.
“All of Russell’s work,” the New York Times’ Stephen Farber wrote in the early
1970s, “his BBC documentaries and his feature films, reveal a terror of mental and
physical disintegration. In his films, death has a shocking, visceral immediacy; his
career can be seen as a continuing struggle to find an imaginative vision that will be
powerful enough to ward off the terrible stench of decomposing flesh.” Russell
appears to try to take control of this threatening natural order by making it appear
fake, transforming the primordial ooze into gaudy, glossy objects from discount
stores, and making alienation so alienating that he can purposely induce snickers
instead of sobs.
Even though most critics consider Women in Love one of the tamer of Russell’s
works, which accounts for its 1969 Best Director Oscar nomination and a Best Actress
Oscar for Glenda Jackson, many of its subjects have haunted subsequent Russell
projects. Lawrence’s story is perfect for summarizing Russell’s courtships and
inevitable conflicts between the sexes; his conflicted sympathies with homosexual
relationships; his so-called love of nature and his phobias about its slimier side; his
desire to tell a serious story while simultaneously slipping into farce; his love of art
and his penchant for destroying art’s mystique; his battle between visceral, irrational
sensations and the more intellectual approach to life that Lawrence once derided as
“sex in the head”; and spells of anger, pessimism, and even nihilism that belie his
frustrated love of life. All of these themes contain a welter of contradictions that
inspire rather than handicap his narratives: a kind of bizarro world where nothing is
what it seems and where the director’s passions and neuroses are a vital part of his
stories.
The Devils, Russell’s most controversial and harshest work, takes these themes
further. It casts Oliver Reed as a womanizing priest who gets his comeuppance when
an adoring mother superior (Vanessa Redgrave) exacts revenge for his rejection by
accusing him of rape. She feigns demonic possession, submits to a public exorcism (a
euphemism for a public enema), and inspires her nuns to use a giant crucifix for their
orifice-plugging orgies. But the colorful depravity, much of which was censored out
and only recently restored, has the effect of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, capturing in
its excess a religious allegory about lost souls and eternal hell. Also, in the spirit of
Aldous Huxley’s novel on which it’s based, The Devils links religious corruption to
sexual repression and the lust for political power—all executed in an often-schizoid
directing style that mixes spiritual depravity with physical comedy.
The deaf, dumb, and blind boy in Tommy might be sexless, but he’s still
threatened with syringes, fire hoses, and an array of invasive instruments. When
submitting to mind-altering drugs, Tommy Walker (Roger Daltrey) envisions his
death: a skeleton with a snake writhing out from his pelvis. Even amid the film’s
carnival atmosphere, exaggerated acting, and childlike, flighty atmosphere, Tommy
conveys an underlying terror, particularly with the subject of child abuse lording over
the otherwise cartoonish proceedings. Russell might simplify the movie’s message by
saying it’s about the death of innocence and the triumph of commerce, but something
about Tommy suggests that the shimmering and often-campy world of artifice offers
another kind of mysticism. The film’s fans tend to remember Ann-Margret’s flashy
jewelry and makeup, the vibrant colors of the pinball arcade, the maniacal acting, the
garish costumes and choreographed hysteria, and the final crowd scene full of
drugged-out and menacing 1970s youth. Such images and sounds overwhelm the
rather anticli-mactic ending, when Tommy finds redemption by diving back into the
waters where he was conceived.
The New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who hated The Devils for what he called its
“clanking, silly, melodramatic effects,” paid Tommy a backhanded compliment,
begrudgingly admitting it’s “the movie that proves that there are times when too much
may be just about right, when overindulgence approaches art. . . . Tommy is to movies
what a juke box is to furniture. It is not something you’d want to live with every day
but it’s kind of fun when you go out.”
In Lisztomania, Daltrey returns as the lothario composer Franz Liszt, who attracts
screaming fans and struts like a sex idol on the stage. He smiles during one dreamlike
interlude as his trouser snake rises to twelve feet, but he screams all the way to the
penile guillotine, paying the price for his Faustian pact with a power-hungry princess
who promises him fame in return for his soul. “Russell’s gimmicks may be crazily
burlesque,” Jack Kroll wrote in Newsweek, “but they burlesque historical truth. Liszt
was the first great international superstar, lionized by a public that was already
marshaling itself into what has become the mass audience of today’s mass culture.”
Valentino, an underrated masterpiece for which even Russell has expressed
feelings ranging from disdain to ambivalence, casts Rudolf Nureyev as the silent
screen’s Latin lover. But instead of the dark, mysterious, and relentlessly erotic screen
image, Valentino emerges as a combination buffoon and Hollywood martyr. In one
grueling scene, “the Sheik” spends a night in the slammer. A sadistic prison guard,
apparently curious and jealous about “the eighth great wonder of the world” Valentino
supposedly has between his legs, forces the star to urinate in his pants while a gaggle
of whores and drunks and a snaggle-toothed masturbator torment him more. Russell
films this scene in an apparent fit of inspired anger; fortunately, he fought off the