Ken Russell

When I heard that Ken Russell had died the first question that came to mind was "Who killed him?" While once he had been the darling of the arts department of the BBC under Huw Weldon, who seems to have given him a free hand to do what he liked, he later gravitated to feature films like "The Devils", "Women in Love", "the Boy Friend" etc. Are any of them any good? "Women in Love", an adaptation of the novel by D.H.Lawrence, was passably good and contained, sensationally, a wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, both naked; otherwise it was a slow, rather boring film - much like the book (Hemingway said it was one of those books that you tell yourself you won't read any more of at the end of a page but for some reason you have to come back to - I had a similar experience with it).
Everything with Russell was "in-yer-face"; there was no depth, just sensational images that were force-fed you.
I have just read David Thomson on Ken Russell and he doesn't have much good to say about him. Nor do I. Though I do have something in common with him: we both tackled the subject of the rector of Stiffkey, he in a short film (not mentioned in Thomson's "Biography of Films") me in a short play (online at Lazy Bees).
The once famous rector of Stiffkey was a prize subject of the "Gutter Press" of the 1930's. While he was supposed to be tending to his flock of parishioners in the small town of Stiffkey, he spent most of his week in London "saving prostitutes" from sin.
I picture him, in my play, in limbo where he has to try to persuade two spirits that he deserves to go to heaven rather than the other place. Ken Russell didn't have him in his film at all but used a sort of Citizen Kane device, using flashbacks of a woman reporter trying to discover what it was that drove the rector to his actions and, eventually, drove the church of England to unfrock him.
I don't know if the film has survived; haven't heard of it being shown anywhere and no, I don't want to see it. The next film he said he was going to make was to be "The Fall of the Louse of Usher". Yes, that's right, "Louse".
After being kicked out of the church the rector got a job preaching, like Daniel, in a lion's den at a circus. A lion named Freddy attacked him and killed him.