The CastTOMMY, directed by Ken Russell screenplay by Mr. Marilyn (Monroe).As I said, it's all fairly excessive and far from subtle, but in this case good taste would have been wildly inappropriate and a fearful drag. These include a sequence in which Tina Turner shows up as The Acid Queen who attempts to cure the catatonic Tommy, and others with Elton John, as the Pinball Wizard defeated by Tommy, and Eric Clapton, as the Preacher who presides over a Lourdes-like shrine devoted to the healing powers of St. He also sings quite nicely.The movie, which has the structure of a vaudeville show, is laced together with specialty bits, some of which are simply jokes (Jack Nicholson playing a vacuous Harley Street medical specialist) and some of which are production numbers as riveting as rock can be at its best. Oliver Reed is, correctly, almost a cartoon as the opportunistic stepdad. The Who's lead singer, Roger Daltrey, plays the grown-up Tommy with a drive that matches Ann-Margret's while successfully simulating show biz innocence. Bad jokes or heavy-handed satire are redeemed by everyone-director, production designer, orchestrators, actors-going too far, which is, after all, what the original "Tommy" is all about: a world inhabited by people too jaded to react to anything but overdoses.The performers are extravagantly fine, particularly Ann-Margret who, as Tommy's mother, ages 20 years in the course of the film (largely through the increased application of blue eye shadow) and sings and dances as if the fate of Western civilization depended upon it. Townshend's rock score and lyrics, which are sometimes in embarrassingly dead earnest."Tommy" is composed of excesses. Russell's style, which had the effect of literalizing the artistic impulse in "The Music Lovers" and "The Savage Messiah," seems to liberate Mr. Young Tommy then goes on to become the pinball champ of the world and, eventually, after he miraculously regains his senses, the new messiah who preaches salvation through pinball playing.Mr. It's an elaborate put-on about the terrible victimization of a small boy who is traumatized deaf, dumb and blind when he sees his stepfather murder his real father. #TOMMY THE WHO MOVIE#"Tommy," which opened yesterday at the Ziegfeld Theater, is mad, funny, irreverent, passionately overproduced, very very loud and full of the kind of magnificent physical energy that usually wrecks a movie by calling attention to performance."Tommy" is a solemn tale that must not be taken too seriously. A lot of it is not quite the profound social commentary it pretends to be, but that's beside the point of the fun. Russell's "Tommy" virtually explodes with excitement on the screen. Now at long last the man and his method have found a nearly perfect match in subject matter, "Tommy," The Who's rock opera written by guitarist-composer Pete Townshend."Tommy" can take being fiddled with, and Mr. He deals in headlong but harmless plunges from giddy heights, abrupt changes of pace, joke turns, anachronistic visual effects, ghouls that pop out of the dark, all accompanied by sound of a force to loosen one's most firmly rooted back teeth.The method is spectacular but it has seemed wickedly foolish in movies like "The Music Lovers" (about Tchaikovsky), "The Savage Messiah" (about Gaudier-Brzeska) and "The Devils" (an adaptation of Huxley's "The Devils of Loudun"). Ken Russell makes movies the way another man might design a ride through a funhouse.
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