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TOMMY 1975
In 1975, a full six years before the existence of MTV and two years before Saturday Night Fever propelled disco to the forefront of pop culture, director Ken Russell (who had previously trained his by-then trademark grandiloquent eye almost exclusively on the lives of classical composers), created what was essentially a 2-hour music video. Part Scopitone cheese-fest, surrealist fever-dream, theater of the absurd, and post-60s drug-addled freak-out; Ken Russell’s 100% assault on the senses was the self-proclaimed rock-opera, Tommy.
Ann-Margret as Nora Walker
1/10
Oliver Reed as Frank Hobbs
Roger Daltrey as Tommy Walker
Not since that atheist genius of stylish nihilism, Roman Polanski, was assigned to the darkly cynical Rosemary's Baby has there been a more perfect match of director and subject. Ken Russell's theatrically baroque, visual-heavy style was ideally suited to a tale of such broad-strokes bombast as Tommy. Marketed as an experience as much as a movie, Tommy boasted rock-concert-decibel-level sound (the five-speaker Quintaphonic sound system that rattled movie theater rafters every bit as much as Earthquake's Sensurround); a story told entirely in song and music; and a mind-blowing, only-in-the-70s cast of pop/rock musicians and movie stars. But best of all, Tommy had at its helm a director who was a master of just the sort of bizarre, over-the-top weirdness rock music demanded. Tommy was poised as a 70s happening, and it didn't disappoint in the least. Personally, I was impressed as hell by the film's phenomenal and offbeat casting choices.
2/10
Jack Nicholson as The Doctor
Tina Turner as The Acid Queen
Elton John as The Pinball Wizard
Significantly retooled from the 1969 double-album by The Who, Tommy is a quasi-spiritual parable about a boy (Barry Winch) rendered hysterically deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing the murder of his father (Robert Powell) at the hands of his mother's lover (Oliver Reed).
3/10
Witness to the Murder Seriously, who wouldn't be rendered deaf, dumb, and blind by this?
While shared guilt tears at the fibers of the marriage of Nora (Ann-Margret) and Frank (Reed) - Nora in particular grapples with remorse over what she has done - the now grown Tommy (Daltrey) retreats further and further into himself, inhabiting a vivid inner world which serves to shield him from the trauma of well-intentioned cure attempts and instances of parental neglect and familial abuse. As a result of his experiences, Tommy develops a nearsupernatural talent for pinball and is hailed as a pop culture prodigy. For Nora, instant wealth and fame serve to superficially cushion the pain of the responsibility she feels for Tommy's afflictions, but when her actions bring about his an “accidental” fall through a plate-glass mirror, the miraculous restoration of his senses changes the course of her life. Tommy instantly becomes a worldwide spiritual messiah, but finds the world of redemption by way of material acquisition to be just another form of spiritual prison.
I Am The Light
For a treatise on fame-addiction, pop-spirituality, drugs, child abuse, and family dysfunction, five seasons of “Oprah” couldn't accomplish what Ken Russell does in two hours. In song, yet! Classical music fan Russell, known to some as the King of Overkill, meets his match with Rock & Roll, which appears to have inspired him in ways few were prepared for in 1975. Always a director able to capture memorably vivid tableaux, Russell fills Tommy with bizarre and outright weird images and setpieces which, to this day, retain every bit of their ability to startle.
4/10
Nora & Captain Walker Tommy is credited to three cinematographers, I'm not sure who is responsible for this image, but it is one of my favorites in a film loaded with favorites
Tommy is chock full of sphere and globe motifs, religious iconography, inside jokes and Freudian symbolism. For a high school film geek like me, all this heavy-handed pretension was like manna.
Robert Powell as Captain Walker
Looking at the film now, it’s hard for me to take it as seriously as I did way back when, but what does persist and becomes clearer with each viewing is the obvious artistry on display and how much sheer outrageous fun it is to watch. So many movies today are all spectacle, with nary an idea in their heads. Ken Russell movies are so crammed full of ideas and subthemes that it frequently takes repeat viewings to even catch them all. Oh, and there's plenty of spectacle to spare, too.
5/10
Modern Family
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM If Tommy were a western, it would be a western with Indians, covered wagons, the cavalry, and stagecoaches; were it a war film, it would have air strikes, tanks, battalions and explosions every fifteen minutes. In short, Tommy is so much fun because it has too much of everything. The music is exhilarating (and loud) and the visuals are, in turns, brash, vulgar and ingenious. Most movies have at least one setpiece scene; Tommy is ALL setpiece scenes. Under any other circumstances I would say this would be a recipe for a somewhat overwhelming viewing experience. But Ken Russell’s operatic ambition and vastness of scope is so gleefully grandiose and overreaching, I find Tommy to be just irresistible cinema.
Show Biz The "Pinball Wizard" sequence, featuring The Who and Elton John is combat as rock concert
6/10
Satire Organized religion and fame culture is skewered in a jaw-dropping sequence set in a church worshiping Marilyn Monroe
Surrealism Tommy in a landscape of giant pinballs and flaming pinball machines
PERFORMANCES The title role may belong to Roger Daltrey but the film belongs to Ann-Margret. As Tommy’s troubled mother (understatement), Ann-Margret seems to sense that this is the role of a lifetime and attacks it with a commitment and ferocity that comes from a place very real. Her performance is so compelling that she pulls off the Herculean feat of anchoring the entire film (which could have easily slid into campiness) in a kind of emotional truth.
7/10
Tommy was Ann-Margret's first Best Actress Oscar nomination. In 1971 she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Carnal Knowledge, a film in which she played opposite Tommy's romantically smitten physician, Jack Nicholson
THE STUFF OF FANTASY The pairing of the director of The Devils with the actress who stole an entire film from under Elvis Presley's nose was bound to produce a few sparks, but no one was prepared for the cinematic conflagration that was the “Champagne” musical number; popularly known as “The beans sequence.” A song written expressly for the film, it communicates Nora's profound guilt, which has been compounded by the riches and comfort that has come to her by way of Tommy's pinball success. In an attempt to blot out Tommy's image from both her mind and the television screen, which alternates close-ups of Tommy's staring, blameless eyes, with insipid commercials for baked beans, soap suds, and chocolate, Nora gets plastered. Everything comes to an emotional and and visual head when Nora hallucinates the television set vomiting its material goods into her pristine white bedroom.
8/10
If you really want to see an actor going all out, nerves exposed and raw, you need look no further than Ann-Margret’s Technicolor nervous breakdown in Tommy. Audacious isn't even the word. understandably, this scene was all critics could talk about when the film was released. Even today it stands as an example of virtuoso looniness of the most outrageous kind.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS It’s fascinating to me that a film propelled by wall-to-wall rock music is also one so visually stimulating, I can well imagine someone could watch it without sound and still find it to be an exciting and compelling motion picture. Ken Russell has a silent filmmaker’s grasp of the visual rhythms of dramatic storytelling, and while he's always been a director known for letting images do the talking, Tommy is for me the closest of his films to achieve pure cinema.
Tommy's Primary Color Triad of Trauma (The Acid Queen, Uncle Ernie, and Cousin Kevin)
As a teen, the only records I owned were movie soundtrack albums (the film-geek thing), so, rather remarkably, Tommy was my introduction to rock music. Purists of course would say that Tommy is to Rock what Dreamgirls is to R & B , but independent of questions pertaining to whether The Who's concept album conceit is the real thing or not, my love for this score eventually led to my expanding my record collection to include real-life, nonmovie music of all stripes. How fitting then to be indoctrinated into the musical world of soaring theatrics, broad emotionalism, and specious spirituality by a film director whose entire career was built on those very things.
AUTOGRAPH FILES
9/10
Ann-Margret sent this photo and this accompanying note in 1976 following a letter I wrote gushing about her performance in Tommy. Do celebrities even do this now, or are you immediately placed on a "stalker" list?
Copyright © Ken Anderson About Ken Anderson LA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For
10/10