A House in Bayswater (1960)

"We're quite quiet down here..."

‘Celluloid Marmite…’

Ken Russell’s celluloid Marmite. The man was a whirlwind of talent, a cinematic bad boy, not to universal taste— which rather elevates him by my book. Nothing like a spot of originality, is there? The film, perhaps, everybody will remember (if, say, in three hundred years time anybody remembers anything at all) is Women in Love (1969), which, as Wikipedia describes rather primly (cue fussy, donnish voice): “The film is notable for its nude wrestling scene, which broke the convention at the time that a mainstream movie could not show male genitalia.” People say they “Don’t like Ken Russell”, but how many Ken Russell films have they actually seen? For Russell was a prolific director of features and documentaries, both on television and on film, and going through his filmography, I’m beginning to grasp just how prolific he was, upsetting all sorts of critics along his progress. Alexander Walker described The Devils (1971), a sensational, quasi-religious romp based on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (plus Derek Jarman’s brilliant sets), as ‘monstrously indecent’. Roger Ebert, in a deliciously sarcastic review, gave the film a rare ‘zero-star’ rating. 

And there are many other Ken Russell films I have yet to see: Lisztomania (1975), starring Roger Daltrey, Crimes of Passion (1984), and Whore (1991)— another film which upset the censors. I had also forgotten— or hadn’t grasped— that Russell directed The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the third Harry Palmer/Michael Caine film. But The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is one of my favourite films: in its way, a surprisingly cosy English folk horror, with a hilarious performance from sexpot Amanda Donohoe as a phallic snake goddess with a penchant for Jaguar E Types. And Gothic (1986), too, which we covered in a previous post, Ken’s take on the rum goings on at the Villa Diodati, that haunted summer of 1816, a perennial obsession, even if the end of the film degenerates into a bizarre, shambolic mess.

Ken Russell’s Elgar, BBC Monitor (1962).

Yet Russell was also king of the intelligent art documentary, championed by the BBC’s Monitor (1958-65) and Omnibus (1967-2003) and Melvyn Bragg's splendidly open-minded The South Bank Show (1978-2010) on LWT, at a time when British television was prepared to take risks. Would Jonathan Meades' documentaries be made today? Again, I have yet to see Ken Russell's The Planets (1983), a montage set to Holst's music, which sounds a bit like Disney's Fantasia (1940), or at least the same concept, but it looks terrific. And Ken Russell's early black-and-white documentaries are a subtle, sensitive delight. Elgar (1962), made for BBC Monitor and narrated by Huw Wheldon, is a charming, poignant tribute to the great English composer, visually beautiful in black-and-white, with the young Elgar riding his pony across the Malvern Hills, set against the haunting Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Op. 47.

30-32, Linden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate.

Which takes me, finally, to A House in Bayswater (1960); set in Linden Gardens, a residential street to the north of Notting Hill Gate— an address with personal resonance, as I once lived in that very street; a Withnail existence in a squalid basement flat, where a greasy glass partition separated the next-door ‘apartment’: a voyeuristic opportunity to watch a couple having sex.