Cult Movies: ‘Wildly entertaining’ biopic The Music Lovers might be Ken Russell’s finest achievement

FEW film directors can claim to have devoted their professional lives to music quite as much as Ken Russell.

While his most successful and notorious films, like Women In Love and The Devils, moved in very different circles, he kept on tapping into the subject of music and the people who make it throughout his career. It’s an obsession that drove his earliest TV documentaries and continued to inform his cinema offerings as his career took off.

With the odd significant exception like Tommy, which took The Who’s fabled rock opera and moulded it into a manic slice of sensory overload proto-pop video insanity, Russell’s taste generally tended towards the classical, although that doesn’t mean his work was either staid in approach or conservative in content.

There are mad and manic biopics of Mahler and Liszt peppered among his early-70s purple patch, but The Music Lovers remains perhaps his finest achievement.

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A colourful study of the life of Tchaikovsky that Russell famously pitched to United Artists as “a film about a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac”, it’s never going to win any awards for precise historical accuracy, but it remains a wildly entertaining experience to this day.

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Originally released in 1971 and now available on Blu-ray through the BFI, it stars Richard Chamberlain as the troubled composer and Glenda Jackson as his outrageously mismatched bride Antonina. Working from a script by TV arts doyen Melvyn Bragg, Russell uses the couple’s short-lived marriage as the core of his story, which plays fast and loose with historical fact but enthrals all the same.

While the central roles are impressive, with Chamberlain in particular delivering a brilliant performance as the neurotic and conflicted composer, this is all about the director, and every trait that made Russell stand out from the crowd in the 1970s is clearly on show here.

There are endless close ups, crazy camera angles and a sense of visual style that borders on the psychedelic at times.

The musical score, conducted by Andre Previn no less, includes themes from Romero and Juliet, Dance of The Clowns and the 1812 Overture, adding greatly to the grand vision that Russell captures on screen.

Tracing the history of Tchaikovsky from around 1875 to 1881 in a fantastical, if not exactly historically accurate manner, it’s as lush to look at as you’d expect from a Russell film of the era.

If you need further enticement to buy, there numerous extras on this lovingly curated release, including a fresh audio commentary from film historian Matthew Melia, plus vintage interviews with everyone from Bragg - who looks back on his career working on artistic projects rather than commenting on them - and visuals from Shirley Russell, who offers up some impressive original sketches for costume design.

There’s even room for a chat with the director’s son Alexander Verney-Elliott, who neatly puts his father’s work in context and remembers his own appearance in the film.

Much like Russell himself, The Music Lovers is wildly over the top and always bordering on the pompous, but it never proves less than entertaining - which is good enough for me.