16 thoughts on “TBT – Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1970)

    1. I dunno… The subject matter had a lot of potential, but it just got uncomfortably weird. Then again, that’s totally Ken Russell’s M.O.

      I need to bump up The Boy Friend in my review queue. That was one of my favorite films as a kid, and I never realized it was a Ken Russell flick until I started writing this post. Should be fun to go back and revisit and see how much fucked up shit went over my head in my youth.

      1. First commandment of Ken Russell film: make viewers feel uncomfortably weird. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

        And now I realized I didn’t tag Gothic & Valentino w/Ken Russell. BRB.

  1. I’m a musicologist, and I’ve always wanted to teach a music-historiography-via-Ken-Russell course. These movies are amazingly hot messes.

  2. There are just some films where you can only enjoy it if you’re totally sauced. Trying to watch some films sober is not always advisable. (There are a few that can only be enjoyed when high too). I could think of a few, though they’re not historical costume movies.

  3. Russell also directed a production of Madama Butterfly for the Spoleto Festival in which he latched onto its Nagasaki setting and moved it to the 1940s, ending with film of the atomic bomb exploding. He also made Cio-Cio-San and Suzuki into roommate prostitutes, which totally undermined their character.

Comments are closed.