Lisztomania is
probably, in my opinion, Ken Russell’s worst film, at least up until the 90s,
when he started making some real junk like Dogboys
(1998), which is so haphazard and dull that a lot of people think it wasn’t
really made by Russell at all. Now,
backing up a little, when I say that Listomania
is a bad Russell film; that really just means I’m happy to watch it every
couple of years or so. It’s a comedy
that isn’t very funny. It’s a musical with
no great or memorable songs. It’s a
bio-pic that is more fantasy than history.
None of these things make the film bad on their own, but the problem is
more a feeling of haste and arrogance on Russell’s part, coming right off the
success of the rock opera Tommy (1975). Written, shot and released within months of Tommy, it seems obvious that Lisztomania was rushed into production
with Roger Daltrey returning in the lead role, whether he was suited to it or
not, and surrounded by a ton of ostentatious sets and costumes. What works best, in an abstract way, are a handful
of sequences in which Russell basically just lets us gawk at the wild
production design and enjoy the wacky atmosphere. Russell had certainly bought into Tommy’s concept of salvation-through-music
and he clearly felt compelled to keep that train rolling while also crafting
something original and more purely Russell-esque; rather than just adapting a
famous existing work. Personally I think
Russell did everything in Lisztomania much
better in his previous film Dance of the Seven Veils (1970) about Richard Strauss, also a comic-book-like extravaganza
about a naïve composer’s music being appropriated by fascists.
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