TOMMY
Directed and Written by KEN RUSSELL
One thing is sure: there has never been a movie musical quite like Tommy, a weird, crazy, wonderfully excessive version of The Who's rock opera. Ken Russell is a film maker (Women in Love, The Devils) who glories in the kind of heightened visual absurdity that Tommy both invites and requires. Russell is also among the boldest of contemporary film makers. He fears nothing, including being bad, and he has often been. He is bad occasionally here, but it does not matter, finally. His unceasing visual imagination gives the movie an exhilarating boldness, a rush of real excitement. Tommy stirs a memory of a lyric from an old Jerry Lee Lewis song: it shakes your nerves and it rattles your brain.
As must be clear by now, Russell is hardly interested in traditional narrative film making. He is not concerned with the usual standards of good taste either, except to mock and outrage them. His biographies of artists (Song of Summer, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah) display a sumptuously cavalier disregard for facts. It is fantasy that matters to Russell, fantasy most often on a highly charged, even colossal order. In comparison with such fever dreams as The Devils, Tommy is fairly restrained stuff, including sequences that are among the best work Russell has ever done.
This first attempt at a "rock opera" was composed by Peter Townshend of The Who and performed by the group on a record album released in 1969. Tommy was closer to oratorio than opera, but the most serious thing about the entire piece was the lofty label that was pinned on it. Tommy was just strong rock 'n' roll, sometimes raunchy, sometimes highfalutin. The Who even wound up performing it at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, an appearance that was less an honor than a shrewd piece of promotion. Tommy has not only endured since then; it has flourished.
Shaky Totem. What is best in this movie version is Ken Russell's attempt to comment upon and satirize a culture where a shaky totem like Tommy could attract such worshipful respect. Tommy shares with traditional operas a foolish libretto, this one having to do with a deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes a pinball champion, a culture hero and a new messiah. Townshend wavered crazily between satire, science fiction and sanctimony; Russell mocks the very seriousness of the piece itself by focusing on, then extending it. The movie is entirely sung; there is no dialogue. But there are several added narrative fillips and some lavish production numbers whose very excess is their own meaning.
Russell's tone is expansive and abrasive. His maniacal invention comes to full flower like an orchid in a hothouse. When Tommy (The Who's Roger Daitrey) meets the Pinball Wizard (Elton John) in a championship match, Russell mounts it on a gilded stage before thousands of fans. The Wizard looks like a character from the other side of an electronic looking glass. Shirt full of glitter, several pairs of suspenders holding up his pants, he perches in front of his pinball machine on seven-story platform shoes, singing Pinball Wizard ("That deaf, dumb and blind kid/ Sure plays a mean pinball"). Tommy defeats him, and our last sight of the Wizard is only of his shoes, upended, borne off through the contemptuous crowd.