Word: messiahs
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Christmas as a national holiday. Some followers even printed hymns in newspapers that substituted Mobutu's name for that of Jesus Christ. In December the state press agency announced that the nation's single political party "must henceforth be considered as a church, and its founder a messiah." Messiah or no, the president himself last month modestly rejected the ultimate title; "Mobutu does not think...
Cornelius, the programmer (Jenny Runacre) and the three scientists rather tentatively join forces to avert Armageddon and usher in a new age. It will be the time of what Cornelius' ex ophthalmic guru (Hugh Griffith) calls a "new messiah, born of an age of science." At the end of this giddy, spectacular and sometimes quite funny fantasy, the neo-messiah makes his debut...