#Tommy the pinball wizard movie movie
#Tommy the pinball wizard movie full
#Tommy the pinball wizard movie series

#Tommy the pinball wizard movie full

Tommy was already a fucked-up satire full of surrealistic flourishes and woozy, dreamy psychological portraiture Russell didn't even have to work to make it a vehicle for all his characteristically warped visions.Īnd so it is that Tommy is, arguably, one of the director's least-radical efforts compared to Lisztomania, which came out later the same year, it's downright safe, for example. He'd also directed 1971's The Boy Friend, which was less an adaptation of Sandy Wilson's 1953 stage musical than a transfiguration of that material into a psychological horror comedy about the desperate inner lives of hustling actors.

#Tommy the pinball wizard movie series

Russell had, by this point, firmly established himself as a specialist in films driven by music: he'd broken out with the 1962 docudrama Elgar, the first in an ongoing series of films about the lives of composers which had continued as recently with 1974 with the lightly fantastical Mahler. The fame this brings to his family leads to a treatment where he confronts his trauma and turns into a pop-spiritual guru whose unconventional methods tap into the inexhaustible British propensity for bending the knee to authoritarians.Ī proper film trying to wrangle this all into a visual form would need to be sprawling in its own right, and when producer Robert Stigwood began to go about turning the album into a movie, he made the absolute best possible choice of director available in the mid-'70s, grabbing the idiosyncratic visionary Ken Russell for the job. And so he psychosomatically deaf, blind, and mute, not interacting with the rest of the world in any way until, as a young man (Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who), he turns out to be a pinball prodigy. They tell the boy that he didn't see or hear anything, and he should never tell anybody about it, and Tommy, to cope with the trauma of seeing his long-lost father murdered, over-interprets this to mean that he can't see, hear, or say anything. She takes as a lover 'Uncle' Frank (Oliver Reed), who agrees in his loutish way to be a father to the boy, but when the Captain returns, years after his presumed death, Nora and Frank murder him in a panic, and Tommy sees this.

The story (which is slightly different in the film than in the movie) begins when Captain Walker (Robert Walker) is believed dead when his plane is shot down his widow Nora (Ann-Margret) is thus left with a small boy, Tommy, to raise. It has a remarkable, maybe even unprecedented amount of ambition that could only go hand-in-hand with a compete fearlessness about coming off as ludicrous and goofy more than it is good or bad as such, it is a work of sprawling grandeur (and for the record, I think it is extremely good not The Who's best album, which is the 1971 follow-up Who's Next, but maybe the one that shows them off the best). The album was a self-anointed 'rock opera', one of the very first (the term dates to 1966, but no rock operas were successfully completed until 1968), and The Who - that is to say, the band's creative head, songwriter Pete Townshend - took that phrase as permission to create a sprawling wall of music in several genres, strapped around a narrative that's convoluted and elaborate while simultaneously being opaque and barely comprehensible if you don't know it in advance. It would be an indescribable shame if that weren't the case.įor Tommy is, as its most basic level, a work of overweening excess. Tommy, the 1975 feature film adaptation of the 1969 concept album by The Who, is an erratic, garish mess.

#Tommy the pinball wizard movie movie

A review requested by Gavin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!