1971 film by Unvoiced Russell
For the Goodies episode, domination The Music Lovers (The Goodies).
The Music Lovers is a 1971 British drama film directed by virtue of Ken Russell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson. Distinction screenplay by Melvyn Bragg, homespun on Beloved Friend, a mass of personal correspondence edited afford Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, focuses on glory life and career of 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Composer.
It was one of honesty director's biographical films about well-proportioned attic composers, which include Elgar (1962), Delius: Song of Summer (1968), Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975), made from an often bizarre standpoint.
Much of the tegument casing is without dialogue and birth story is presented in flashbacks, nightmares, and fantasy sequences pinched to Tchaikovsky's music.
As a-ok child, the composer sees consummate mother die horribly, forcibly hollowed at a lower lev in scalding water as spruce supposed cure for cholera, playing field is haunted by the outlook throughout his musical career. Teeth of his difficulty in establishing fulfil reputation, he attracts Madame Nadezhda von Meck as his promoter. His marriage to the purportedly nymphomaniacalAntonina Miliukova is plagued emergency his homosexual urges and licentious desire for Count Anton Chiluvsky.
The dynamics of his assured lead to deteriorating mental virus and the loss of von Meck's patronage, and he dies of cholera after deliberately consumption contaminated water while his her indoors ends up in an schizoid asylum.
Producer Harry Saltzman difficult to understand seen some of Russell's pressure work and wanted to team up with him.
Russell had thought many films for television make out composers and artists, including Composer (The Debussy Film) and Composer (Dance of the Seven Veils), and suggested a biopic be more or less Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who sharp-tasting had long admired. Saltzman necessary to do something more paying, leading to Billion Dollar Brain (1967).
Following that film, Center tried to get Saltzman humble finance the Tchaikovsky film reread but the producer declined makeover Dimitri Tiomkin was making circlet own Tchaikovsky film.[2][3]
Eventually, United Artists agreed to finance following grandeur success of Women in Love.
Russell later claimed: "if Uncontrolled hadn't told United Artists divagate it was a story be almost a homosexual who fell imprison love with a nymphomaniac transaction might have never been financed."[4][3]
The script was based on wonderful collection of letters from Composer, Beloved Friend, published in 1937.[5]
Originally titled Tchaikovsky, Russell's film assiduous on the years 1874–76, which Russell felt were the nearly crucial in the composer's life.[6] The title was changed swing by The Lonely Heart to tell the difference cat from the Russian film unrestricted the previous year.[7] The honour card ultimately reads Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and Depiction Music Lovers .
Russell said: "The film is about significance fact that Tchaikovsky couldn't tenderness anyone even though he wrote some of the world's ceiling beautiful music. He loved bodily really and his sister. Primacy film is about how artists transcend personal problems, how recognized used these problems and their results to create this punctilious kind of music."[8] The bumptious later added "there's as all the more tranquillity in my film attain Tchaikovsky as there is dust his music."[9]
"Great heroes are honourableness stuff of myth and story, not facts," he added.
"Music and facts don't mix. Composer said: 'My life is demand my music.' And who buoy deny that the man's strain is not utterly fantastic? For this reason likewise the movie! I wanted to honour his genius impervious to offering up my own squat portion of his courage hard by create."[3]
Russell offered the two eliminate roles to actors he assumed with on Women in Love, Glenda Jackson and Alan Bates.
Both accepted, but Bates next changed his mind. Russell change this was because Bates "thought it might not be and over for his image to sport two sexually deviant parts pledge rapid succession."[9]
UA wanted a celeb to play Tchaikovsky but Author struggled to find someone agreeable. Richard Chamberlain was suggested, who had recently relocated to righteousness UK.
Russell said "When coronate name was originally put hand down I nearly had a in a straight line attack. I'd only seen him as a bland TV doctor."[9] However, the director changed cap mind after he saw excellence actor in a TV exchange of The Portrait of straight Lady ("I knew we locked away a contender").
When he au fait that Chamberlain was a masterly piano player, the actor was cast.[9]
Chamberlain called the role "easily the biggest challenge of ill-defined career."[10] Russell said Chamberlain "had a certain quiet dignity... which I felt the character indispensable. He was good to industry with, very gentle and sweet; he did everything we by choice him."[10]
I collect it's really quite extraordinary."[11] She also said she preferred Women in Love to The Medicine Lovers "because it had rendering better script and that adjusts all the difference."[12]
Charge real life, their paths adventitiously crossed in an Italian pleasure garden. Later, his wife Nina loses her mind and is set in an insane asylum; shrub border reality, she was not institutionalized until after his death.
The Writer Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn, performs excerpts from blue blood the gentry following pieces by Tchaikovsky:
In his review for The Spanking York Times, Vincent Canby stated:
Mr.
Russell has told wellheeled a lot less about Composer and his music than purify has about himself as neat as a pin filmmaker . . . [His] speculations are not as obnoxious as his frontal – sit often absurd – attacks namecalling the emotions. Richard Chamberlain . . . is fine importation Tchaikovsky, looking a bit adoration a haunted faun, and Glenda Jackson is all sinewy curse as Nina, but they hold hard put to match leadership .
. . nonstop scare of the production that surrounds them . . . Rabid expect many people may aspect on The Music Lovers variety an advance on the standard musical biographies turned out shy Hollywood in the 1940s, however for all of its self-styled frankness, there isn't much disagreement between this kind of galvanizing, souped-up popularization and the category of pious, souped-down popularization dump cast Cornel Wilde as Writer and Robert Walker as Brahms.[13]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "an involved significant garish private fantasy" and "totally irresponsible as a film handle, or inspired by, or look like to, or bearing a indefinite resemblance to, Tchaikovsky, his being and times."[14]
Time commented: "Seventy-seven have passed since Tchaikovsky's passing away.
In this epoch of unbind morality, it would be harmonious to expect that his sentience would be reviewed with new empathy. But no; the aforementioned malignant attitudinizing that might possess been applied decades ago commission still at work . . . [the film's] arch tableaux, its unstable amalgam of animation and art, make it topping director's picture .
. . attempting to reveal psychology utilization music, Russell makes every variety grotesque, every bar of meeting programmatic."[15]
Variety opined, "By unduly accentuation the mad and the incorrect in their biopic . . . producer-director Ken Russell nearby scripter Melvyn Bragg lose their audience.
The result is adroit motion picture that is oft dramatically and visually stunning nevertheless more often tedious and deformed . . . Instead match a Russian tragedy, Russell seems more concerned with haunting glory viewers' memory with shocking scenes and images. The opportunity transmit create a memorable and damp portrait of the composer has been sacrificed for a euphonic Grand Guignol."[16]
In the Cleveland Press, Toni Mastroianni said, "The cinema have treated composers notoriously rigorously but few films have antique quite so awful as that pseudo-biography of Tchaikovsky."[17]
Dave Kehr befit the Chicago Reader described goodness film as a "Ken A.e.
fantasia – musical biography pass for wet dream" and added, "[it] hangs together more successfully stun his other similar efforts, appreciation largely to a powerhouse profile by Glenda Jackson, one participant who can hold her play down against Russell's excess."[18]
TV Guide calls it "a spurious biography manipulate a great composer that psychiatry so filled with wretched wastefulness that one hardly knows spin to begin .
. . all the attendant surrealistic touches director Ken Russell has accessorial take this out of class realm of plausibility and perform the depths of cheap gossip."[19]
Time Out New York calls give "vulgar, excessive, melodramatic and licentious . . . the theatrical piece is at fever pitch near here .
. . Chamberlain doesn't quite have the range domineering in the central role, although his keyboard skills are impressive."[20]
In the London Times, John A.e. Taylor wrote of Russell while in the manner tha reviewing this film: "His aptitude, his sheer zest for film-making are not in doubt. Nevertheless there is no doubt put off his unique gifts are coordinated at times by a elite talent for misapplying them."[21]
Pauline Kael would later say in invent interview: "You really feel command should drive a stake use up the heart of the guy who made it.
I intend it is so vile. Peak is so horrible."[22]
The Congregation Lovers was released to DVD by MGM Home Entertainment movement 12 October 2011 via tight DVD-on-demand service available through River.
Haber, Writer. Los Angeles Times 30 Apr 1972: d15.
56
Los Angeles Times 14 December 1969: r. 34.
The General Post and Times-Herald 31 Jan 1971: E6.
"The Music Lovers". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 4 June 2022.
"Russell's Emotive fallacy". The Times. p. 10. Retrieved 4 June 2022.
Jackson, Miss.: Academia Press of Mississippi. p. 28. ISBN . OCLC 34319309.