Tommy Rocks In

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.

Russell also adds a scene of sardonic electronic nightmare, and another of distinctly contemporary celebration. Tommy's mother (Ann-Margret) watches her television set actually spew forth the waste from all its commercials. Baked beans, soapsuds, melted chocolate gush like a lava flow, and, like any good contemporary consumer, she grovels in the mixture. The religious celebration is a faith healing held at the altar of a very modern goddess, Marilyn Monroe. As the crippled faithful rush to receive Communion and touch her effigy --a statue in the image of the famous skirt elevation from The Seven-Year Itch --Eric Clapton, in a priest's raiment, sings Eyesight for the Blind.

If, after even such scenes as these, the movie ultimately fails, it is because all of Russell's invention exposes but does not defeat the daffy banality of Tommy itself. Russell must have known that to mount Tommy as a satire on its own roots would still not increase its stature. Still, he took the best, and perhaps the only course. The movie is splendid to look at, all in gaudy picture-postcard colors. It is acted with appropriate verve by all, including Tina Turner as a down and dirty Acid Queen, an amusingly scrofulous Oliver Reed as Tommy's stepfather, and Jack Nicholson playing a physician who represents a bit of high-class lowlife.

The success of a bit of recycled nostalgia like That's Entertainment prompted a lot of people to ask "Why don't they make good musicals any more?" Well, Tommy is one, although not at all designed to please the taste of folks who wish for the spangled gentility of the '30s and '40s. It is worth keeping in mind that a half-century from now, grandchildren will be looking at Tommy and its inevitable successors, enjoying all the extravagance and wondering about the good old days. Right now Tommy is entertainment, Tommy is the new musical, and it will stand.

qed Jay Cocks

Ken Russell's first reaction to The Who's recording of Tommy was "Rubbish." But Producer Robert Stigwood, who had bought the rights to the rock opera from Composer Pete Townshend, persisted. It took over a year for Russell to come up with his own more satirical version of Tommy's pinball odyssey, and then there was another problem. A lover of classical music, Ken Russell knew nothing about pop. "I didn't know who Eric Clapton or Elton John was." It was not long before Russell, 47, discovered that pop singers like Roger Daltrey were typecast for his gothic style.

Because Russell hates studios, the cast and crew worked mainly on location. Several parts of England are still bruised from the encounter. In South-sea, he was filming on an old pier that caught fire. Calmly, he moved his crew ashore and kept the cameras rolling on an embarrassed fire brigade trying to put out the blaze with antiquated equipment. In Portsmouth, Russell won permission to film the Marilyn Monroe idolatry scene in the Royal Marines' chapel, but when the commandant saw the worshipers, he tried to stop the production. Russell had hired 200 handicapped extras. "They're the happiest people you could hope to meet," he explained. "They loved being in the movie."

So did Ann-Margret. "I like to be stretched," she said. "Ken not only stretched me; he put me through the wringer." Wearing a knit jumpsuit, she had to dance around a smashed TV set as the room filled with soapsuds. "But the room filled up so fast I couldn't see anything. There was Ken shouting closer, closer, and I bumped into the TV." Rushed to the hospital for 23 stitches in her hand, Ann-Margret noticed only belatedly that her jumpsuit had shrunk to half size.

Demode Chic. The jumpsuit, like most of the clothes in Russell's movies, was designed by his wife Shirley. She also collects thrift-shop gear, and Russell pictures are immediately recognizable by their raffish, demode chic. Aesthetics aside, this practice also keeps down wardrobe costs. "I'd heard Russell was difficult to work with, went over the budget, that kind of thing," says Producer Stigwood, "but it isn't true." Tommy's budget of $3.5 million was probably more money than Russell had seen in some time. His last movies, The Boy Friend, The Music Lovers and Savage Messiah, were flops for a while, Mahler had trouble finding a distributor, reportedly because of a unique piece of Russelliana: a scene showing Cosima Wagner, the master's fascist widow, goose-stepping over Catholic Convert Mahler.

Tommy, which is Russell's biggest success since Women in Love, has not been touched by its distributor, Columbia Pictures. "It was the most difficult movie I ever had to make," was Russell's verdict on Tommy; he prefers movies about classical composers. Tommy, however, has left its mark on Russell. In his next film, Lisztomania, he has cast Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt and Ringo Starr as the Pope.

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