lisztomania
My friend Ben’s obsession with the perfect-spring-music pop album that Phoenix is about to release (I am late on the Phoenix train by at least three years, but hoo boy I’m on board now) led him to Google the term “Lisztomania,” the title of the first track off of the upcoming Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Lisztomania, we discovered, is the name of a deeply insane 1975 film directed by the exuberant nutbar English director Ken Russell, who also made the Ann-Margaret-swims-around-in-a-pile-of-baked-beans, Jack Nicholson-sings-”Go To the Mirror Boy” cult fiasco that is the film version of Tommy. That movie starred Roger Daltrey as Tommy, and is generally considered a useful document of a certain kind of sit-around-and-giggle-while-stoned movie genre.
As we read more about Lisztomania, we became morbidly fascinated by the sheer absurdity of its details. After a little sniffing around the Internet, Ben produced a torrent file, and last night, we sat down to watch. I have to say: Lisztomania is a small masterpiece of what Patton Oswalt has dubbed the “is-this-happening?” film genre (You can tell of movie of this genre by the number of times you ask that question aloud during its running time.) Roger Daltrey plays the 19th-century Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, taking the notion of Liszt as one of music’s first flamboyant superstar virtuosos to its logical extreme and playing Liszt basically as Roger Daltrey. Which is best, after all – Daltrey is excellent at stomping, and he’s REALLY good at bellowing, but his range is an actor is, shall we say, limited.
Liszt’s foe in the film is Richard Wagner, who shows up at the beginning inexplicably wearing a sailor suit. It is later revealed that he is also a vampire. Suffice to say that classical-music historian Richard Taruskin probably was not extensively consulted by Russell as he was writing the screenplay.
And more: Rick Wakeman, of Yes, composed the soundtrack, which blends original songs with synthesizer arrangements of works by Liszt and Wagner. He also plays Thor, god of Thunder. Ringo Starr makes an appearance as the Pope. There are more papier-mache phalluses in this film than….well, actually, I am struggling to find a proper comparison in this regard. Anyone who EVER sat through a History of Western Music course should see this film; there’s a great naughty-schoolboy quality to how thoroughly Russell desecrates the great composers, and while after awhile your face hurts from the strain of maintaining your incredulous smile, I have to say that Russell shows a demented genius for finding ways to continually top himself.
The trailer does a decent job of capturing the aesthetic at work here.
already downloading it!
Holy Cow. I saw this movie wayyyyy back in nineteen-eighty-something with a high school friend. We were all about the Wakeman and The Who and I was also a big fan of the actual composer . . . we couldn’t turn this down. As I recall, we rented it from a strip-mall video outlet lined with both VHS and betamax copies of mostly awful movies.
But hey – Ringo Starr as the pope! How could this POSSIBLY go wrong?
Randy
It’s impossible to overstate how scandalous this was at the time, even for those of us who whose love for The Who and Roger Daltrey — who in the aftermath of Tommy and Who’s Next WAS The Who (sorry Pete) — had made us almost accept the tribute-album-gone-wrong that the movie Tommy was. Lisztomania opened our eyes — hey, PETE is The Who, Roger’s off the rails, and Ken Russell is a jackass! Or was Roger a jackass, and Ken Russell off the rails?
No matter what avant-whatever, superior intellect “Pete Townshend is a true poet, and Tommy is truer ART than mere OPERA” we could muster, we still couldn’t get past the X rating, and that massive pictoral feature in Playboy. Our reaction to Roger’s claim that they were really having sex onscreen skipped right past “oooh,” to “ewww,” followed quickly by, “but that doesn’t make it interesting to watch.” In this, we realized that there were limits to our own licentiousness, and believe me when I say that, in 1975, this was a scandal unto itself.
Though a lesser crime, it took the last of the fun out of Wakeman too…who’d already sucked out virtually all of it out himself with The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and The Knights of the Round Table earlier that year.
Now if you’re looking for when Russell got back on the rails, skip past Altered States (definitely full of crap) straight to Lair of the White Worm, starring Catherine Oxenberg (the real-life countess from Dynasty!!), Amanda Donahoe (LA Law?! FRASIER?!?), and the third film appearance by Hugh something or other (Grint? Grunt?), who’d barely be a blip on the radar for another 6 years before he showed up in Four Weddings and A Funeral. Seriously. Check it out. It was like the guy showed up fully formed from the head of Zeus before then…unless you had seen Lair of the White Worm first and thought, Hey, it’s that guy from the movie with that duchess chick and that chick from LA Law where they both wind up naked, except one of them is a giant blue snake (guess which)…wait, wasn’t there a white worm in there somewhere? And something about a hand grenade, human sacrifice and arthritis medicine.
THAT thing is a masterpiece of crack moviemaking…emphasis on crack.
So yeah, I can see how you kids can laugh at Lisztomania today, but we weren’t laughing then, not even a little. And I don’t mean to sound haughty, like it offended our artistic sensibilities…although it obviously did. It mostly made us sad. The movie was full of crap, Roger was full of crap, Ken Russell was full of crap…maybe we were full of crap too. And we kind of were. I pretty much still am.