TS: Ken Russell's "Tommy" vs. Alan Parker's "Pink Floyd the Wall"

But it we're just looking at Ken Russell vs. Alan Parker I think they both had an amazing talent for turning decent ideas into total crap. I'm just happy they didn't go into engineering or something else my life could potentially depend upon.

Franz Liszt (played by Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who)
is a renowned composer and romantic adventurer of the nineteenth
century. In the opening scene of the movie, we see him in bed with a woman, kissing her breasts in time with a metronome. As the lovers build towards sexual climax, the metronome ticks faster. The husband of the woman bursts into the room, dressed in 19th century garb and powdered wig, etc. He engages in a duel with Liszt, who fights him with a candlestick. The husband lops off Liszt's dripping candlestick piece by piece, while the woman chews a banana and watches the fight in anticpation. While all of this is going on, a country-western song plays describing the fight. The husband, who wins the duel, has his henchman tie up the pair in a piano. They set the piano on train tracks, and a train careens into the piano.

This prologue is apparently just a fantasy sequence, as we see
Liszt giving a concert. Backstage he talks with his friends, including Chopin, who clasps desperately to the legs of a transsexual, and Richard Wagner, who is dressed in a sailor's costume. Wagner's sailors cap has the word "Nietzche" emblazoned on it. On stage, Liszt gives a concert to a sold out audience of groupies, premieres one of Wagner's pieces, and does a Russian Cossack dance on one of the pianos, all the while trying
to figure out which one of the groupies he will sleep with when the
concert is over. Wagner doesn't approve of Liszt's interpretation, and storms out of the theater.

Liszt makes plans to see Princess Catherine, with whom he is
having an affair against his ex-mistress-now-turned wife. The wife does not approve, and chides him in their piano-shaped bed, while Liszt's children spy on their conversations from the chimney of a fireplace in the room. There is a "silent movie" fantasy sequence involving Liszt as Charlie Chaplin successfully wooing the heart of his wife. As Liszt prepares to leave, his daughter Cosima informs him that she will be all right because she has formed a doll in his likeness to keep her company while she is away. She tells him that she prays every night that he should meet the Devil so that he can sell his soul to the Devil to make beautiful music. The doll is a voodoo doll.

Liszt is brought into one of the waiting chambers of Princess
Catherine. The walls of the foyer are lined with porcelain buttocks
which issue forth knockout gas. Liszt eventually comes to and finds
Princess Catherine. There is then a fantasy sequence involving a huge, air-filled fun-house slide of Catherine's crotch, and a fifteen-foot penis, on which her handmaidens kick and strut as a chorus line, and dance about in English pole-dance fashion. They then lead Liszt and his fifteen-foot penis to a guillotine, where Princess Catherine, dressed in a bat costume, and singing out of key "Through me is the way to the City of Weeping...", decapitates it.

This apprently is yet another fantasy sequence, and Liszt is back
at home. He sings a ballad while his wife is killed by a bomb. We see a burning baby stroller. He talks with Wagner again, who is now a revolutionary hiding from other soldiers. Liszt, disinterested in
Wagner's revolutionary activities, hides him from enemy soldiers. Wagner turns into a vampire and sucks Liszt's blood, while taking his hands and banging chords onto the piano.

Liszt and Catherine want to marry, but first they must get the
permission of the Pope (played by Ringo Starr), who wears cowboy boots. The Pope, catching Liszt in bed with a groupie, says that he will permit the marriage if Liszt can destroy Wagner and his evil music, which will lead to a new master race if left unchecked. Liszt has no choice but to agree. Upon leaving the room, the groupie shoots herself.

Liszt asks the Jewish people of the town the way to Castle Wagner, and they run off in fright as if he had asked to find Dracula. Liszt walks another six feet past his last inquiry and finds Castle Wagner, and he peers inside. There is a huge, glowing obelisk, under which lie about ten naked, prostrate women. They are bowing to the obelisk. A hulking, bald man carries the women off one at a time, rapes them while laughing, and then dumps them one on top of another. Each woman screams horrifically as they are dragged away from the obelisk. Wagner and Cosima appear dressed in red and blue superhero costumes, and sing to a bunch of blond, British children that they are the master race and will rule the world (the music at this point sounds like 70s funk, with wah-wah and tamborine sounds). As Cosima exits with the children, and Liszt enters disguised as a Franciscan, Wagner approaches Liszt and shows
him his new creation, a blond Aryan monster named Thor (played stunningly by Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman). Thor awakens, screams "Stein! Stein!" and drinks a mug of beer. He walks over to the fireplace and urinates on it. Liszt sneaks holy water into Wagner's drink thinking it will destroy him. It doesn't work, and Wagner shows his vampire fangs. Liszt laments that he should have put his faith in his music instead of religion, and attacks Wagner with a piano that shoots out fire like a flamethrower. Wagner snarls in defeat and the jets of fire demolish two pillars of rocks which tumble onto Wagner and kill him. Cosima and her henchman knock Liszt over the head and lock him in a room, where she
proceeds to torture him with her voodoo doll.

At a rally to lead the new master race, Wagner rises from a
coffin (with a swastika on it) as Hitler with the scars and features of Frankenstein's monster. Armed with a machine gun in the shape of a guitar, he mows down with gunfire everyone in the audience. He then goes into the Jewish section of the town and kills everyone.
Looking down from Heaven (some time later?), Liszt, Cosima,
Princess Catherine, and Liszt's wife have all reconciled, see the havoc being caused by Wagner on earth, and decide to "put him out of his misery". They travel back to Earth on a pipe-organ spaceship (with each woman in one of the pipes) in the shape of an eagle, and destroy Wagner with a laser blast. The ship then travels back towards the Heavens, with Liszt singing a variation of the song he sang in the Charlie Chapline fantasy sequence.

Now, Quadrophenia: THAT'S a great movie, despite being based on an even worse Who LP. And for animation, I'll take Yellow Submarine over Scarfe's stuff.

(Anyway, I vote the Wall--the music's better and so is the animation.)

anyway, I issue a protest vote for Head by Monkees. better tunes

Whomever cited "Quadrophenia" is dead-on, but it's disqualified from this debate on the account that it's a comparitively coherent, logical, well-thought out film. "Tommy" and "Pink Floyd the Wall," though both visually compelling (more so Parker's film in this capacity, I'd say) are excercises in surreal aimlessness and needlessly mastrubatory excess.

I eventually saw it at the cinema, where i guess they thought it might appeal to the "rocky horror" crowd. Well it didn't, so i had just that one chance to see it on a really big screen, which i felt i'd deserved.

I didn't expect it to be anything but silly and wasn't dissapointed. I enjoyed seeing the Who turn up where they did which didn't seem overplayed. I think Russell used his best instincts for visual comic splendour to deal with music i suspect he didn't much like and a plot line that was just plain silly. I agree that Clapton is unconvincing, perhaps the lowpoint star-turn, unless this was a deliberate poke at that "eric the divine" rubbish, which i assumed it was (I think Arthur Brown's cameo in the same scene steals it and is something of a highlight).

So i saw it on the big screen first. I think that helped a lot. However mindlessly silly Tommy is, i enjoy some of the songs (which i think pack a lot more punch than the original album, again if you've seen the film first, .. and the soundtrack is a mish-mash tease). I see the film as a series of star cameo videos, and for the mid '70s and given how generic videos are these days, i think it's aged well. It makes me laugh.

I think Townshend has some ideas that are hopelessly pretentious and half-baked. So Kit Lambert wanted an opera. Wasn't this just a stunt ? Really Townshend might have had the musical chops, but i think he had few great lyrical or conceptual ideas. The grandiose baggage he tried to attach to much of the Who music is testament to how important the lyrics really are to so many fans. In $$$$$$$ terms the Who were machismo music.

In this dept. Townshend is far worse (more pretentious) than even Waters. Did Townshend's father die in the war too ? Absent war dads are obv. a big deal for baby-boomers.

Both these guys seem to want to bring some personal agenda to music that is in each case very visceral. These bids for "respectabibilty" in rock music, i think they're laughable and pompous. This notion that "opera" is more "cerebral". Why didn't both bands just accept that they're about records, cds, drugs and big venues ? Both Tommy and The Wall don't really hold together as story/ concepts, and The Wall is such self-indulgent personal rubbish.

Yeah, The Wall sucks. It's so morose, moral. I liked the album a bit when i was a kid but I don't think the arty stage show or the film were necessary. At least the album has some abstract qualities that don't benefit from being further fleshed out. The film is so painfully boring and leaves nothing to the imagination. I imagine how much fun bits of it might have been if Ken Russell had made it too. Parker just taps the doom and gloom. Is it far too literal an interpretation ? I think so.
Yeah, the album is enjoyable musically i suppose, but the the film is like one gloomy dragged-out guitar solo. I agree.

Rick Wakeman as Thor

Though I have fondish associations with The Wall, primarily because the last time I saw it was on a 9000+ km roadtrip in Australia and I was half-tanked on XXXX. Aside from that, I can't bear either the album or the movie even now. Why couldn't they have just made a film out of Saucerful, I ask.

terry gilliam

b) 'Joe's Garage'

pedro almodovar or todd phillips

well, he WAS a last minute replacement for werner herzog. what did you expect?

Alan Parker's "Pink Floyd the Wall" = SHITER

That man being Paul Nicholas of course! He's also the snotty new wave rock star who fucks up "Love On the Rocks" in "The Jazz Singer" - a role based on Neil Diamond's experiences with The Monkees and specifically Mike Nesmith

i stick up for Tommy because it's one of the few that is remotelty credible by virtue of its tongue-in-cheek deliberate wacky excess -- how many "films" in this genre could fail to be ? but how many even exist ?

and look at the direction things have gone since Lord Lloyd-Webber -- i've bits of the early stuff like Jesus Christ Rockstar, i've heard Randy Newman trashing Broadway and admitting "well they would reject my Faust after that, wouldn't they" (Newman's Faust the OST was promising in the usual sick-fuck way -- i'd like to see that)

how many even slightly good rock operas/ films are there out there ?

I haven't seen "The Jazz Singer" movies -- should i bother ? Oh, and I read that "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" is so bad that it's been shelved, vetoed, so no-one will ever be able to see it on video/dvd ever (another RSO production like Tommy and Saturday Night Fever, but sadly too dire even for the cult/ curiosity circuit, presumably vetoed by the Bee Gees).

I'm secretly quite fond of Neil Diamond's "The Jazz Singer". In it Neil proves himself to be a far better screen actor than Laurence Olivier whose performance is a crime against the Jewish people. Of course, starting off with Neil in blackface so he could play in a soul band was maybe not such a good move but - I've just realised this(!) - is of course a sly reference to Al Jolson!

Err...that's "Jesus Christ Superstar", you mean. And "Godspell" had better tunes, despite being a crap film.

not true, it was widely available on VHS for years.

it really is. it makes "Tommy" seem fast paced. but the last twenty minutes go over the top into writhing incomprehensible madness, if you've got a taste for human tragedy.

Rewatched Tommy. This is probably Ann-Margret's finest performance, better than Carnal Knowledge. The film gets really creepy after Tommy is "cured" (not that the rest isn't). I didn't understand what incident precipitated Tommy's followers turning against him and singing "We're Not Gonna Take It" - it was like one random guy started smashing his pinball machine and then suddenly the whole mass of followers were in open revolt.

I didn't understand what incident precipitated Tommy's followers turning against him and singing "We're Not Gonna Take It" - it was like one random guy started smashing his pinball machine and then suddenly the whole mass of followers were in open revolt.

Townshend wanted to cast Stevie Wonder in the Pinball Wizard role, and Charles Mingus as the preacher (“Eyesight To The Blind”). Ken Russell nixed both suggestions.

OK thanks - I just rewatched that part at the end and I see what I missed was that Tommy's disciples were suspicious of him before they even got to his pinball camp. They go into it chanting something that sounds like they're challenging him. So they just unenthusiastically go through the motions of following him until the actual moment of revolt.

That's the worst part of the film. The last 20 mins. You just wish it would end.

A better ending would be that as soon as he is cured Tommy goes on a Death Wish style revenge montage sequence against everyone that fucked him over.