Show Business: Director in a Caftan

• Share

A BBC current affairs show flickers onto British TV screens. The moderator introduces Ken Russell, director of The Devils, and Alexander Walker, film critic of the London Evening Standard. Crikey! another of those urbanely boring panel discussions. But wait. Russell and Walker are turning red in the face, shouting at each other. Walker attacks The Devils for "monstrous indecency . . . simplemindedness . . . gross harping on the physical. . ." Russell attacks Walker as "old-womanly . . . a carping critic ... hysterical . . ." Then Russell rolls up a copy of the newspaper containing Walker's review and swats him on the head with it.

A rather excessive way for a director to reply to his critics? Perhaps. But then everything about Ken Russell is excessive, from his appetite for food and music to the caftans, Mickey Mouse shirts, canes and monocles he sometimes affects. "This is not the age of manners," he says. "This is the age of kicking people in the crotch and telling them something and getting a reaction. I want to shock people into awareness. I don't believe there's any virtue in understatement."

Especially not when he makes his movies. In 1970 there was D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, with its male-nude wrestling, symbolic bulls and drowned lovers. Then early this year came The Music Lovers, a biography of Tchaikovsky, which, as Russell describes it, is "the story of a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac." This summer, there is The Devils, an account of religious hysteria in a 17th century French town; in it, a far from celibate priest is accused of bewitching an order of nuns, and is tortured and burned alive.

The New Twiggy. All of which has made Russell, at 43, the most provocative director in the business. Last week the Venice Film Festival canceled a public showing of The Devils in order to head off a threatened police raid, and L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, denounced Russell-a Roman Catholic convert-for his "perverted marriage of sex, violence and blasphemy." Says Russell: "They miss the point totally. The Devils is about the way church and state worked together to condemn an innocent man. These things actually happened. The critics don't like to recognize this, and they don't like it treated as I have treated it." A few do, however. A beleaguered minority have praised Russell's imagination, powerful pictorial sense and flair for heightened drama.

While the argument rages, Russell has been busy in London editing his new film. It is an adaptation of Sandy Wilson's 1954 musical pastiche of the '20s, The Boy Friend, starring ex-Model Twiggy, 21, in her acting debut. "A natural," says Russell. "The greatest thing to hit the screen since Monroe." Russell says the script, which he roughed out in five days as "therapy" after The Devils, is at once "a typical stage musical of the '20s, an homage to the great film musical fantasies and a satire on all the backstage Hollywood musicals of all time."