Synopsis
The renowned director of more than fifty films tells his life story in a cinematic style that flashes back to his childhood and the experiences that influenced his art and touches upon his failed marriage and his film industry colleagues
Reviews
The controversial British filmmaker ( Women in Love ; The Devils ) takes an extravagant stream-of-consciousness trip through his life, swinging between present and past so rapidly that readers may occasionally lose their footing. Russell, now 64, describes problems on his film sets, the frequent periods when he has seemed to be persona non grata in the movie business, and his two marriages; also provided are flashbacks to his childhood in a working-class neighborhood of Southhampton, his years at a nautical college and his start in filmmaking with the BBC. Some of his recollections, especially those of his outspoken Mum, are funny, and a few are poignant. This memoir, peppered with accounts of madcap experiences, biting comments about associates in the film world and hallucinatory scenes, has the same shock value as Russell's movies. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The former enfant terrible of British cinema, now in his 60s, bares all, pretty much. Russell takes his life episodically, hopping about with flashbacks and flashforwards in no particular chronology. In print, he is a charming, sometimes waspish storyteller with axes to grind only against his American distributors who have taken his pictures and lopped off whole reels (e.g., The Boy Friend). Raised in the working-class, he introduces us to his mother and father as dad prepares senile mom for her last days in a nursing home. He pieces together his days in the RAF and the Merchant Marine and five years as a ballet student and dancer. Russell early fell in love with photography, and his amateur films earned him entrance into TV, where he made exciting shows about composers. That these shows were often viewed as pictorially cuckoo travesties in no way damped his spirits: he didn't see them that way. And he had access to bottled spirits anyway, ever breakfasting on a half-bottle of champagne to get the morning charged up, with an iced bucket of bubbly at his side throughout the day's shooting. Through Russell's eyes, his work seems a lot less appalling than it is famed to be--a fame reinforced by the posing Nazis in Mahler, the TV set that erupts with chocolate sauce and buries Ann-Margaret in Tommy, the shrinkage of Liszt to rock-'n'-roll pop-star satyr in Lisztomania (a degradation Russell feels was forced upon him when he was unbankable). Highlights include duels with Paddy Chayevsky during the making of Altered States and with Bob Guccione for an aborted Moll Flanders, his first wife Shirley's tit-for-tat adultery with their chauffeur, and Oliver Reed's way of puffing himself up behind a screen for the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love. A modest demythologizing from the horse's mouth. (Photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
British filmmaker Russell virtually defines the word "iconoclast" with a career in television and motion pictures studded with controversy, mainly over his interpretations of the lives of famous artists. Isadora Duncan, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Mahler, and Delius have all received "the Russell treatment," provoking howls of outrage from critics and lovers of their art. Russell has also been attracted to sources as diverse as D.H. Lawrence ( Women in Love , 1969), Sandy Wilson ( The Boy Friend , 1971), and Paddy Chayevsky ( Altered States , 1980). In this freewheeling self-portrait, Russell wanders through his life and career, offering few apologies or explanations. In spots his book can be as entertaining as his best work, but like many of his films it is ultimately less than satisfying. For large col* lections.
- Thomas Wiener, formerly with * "American Film," Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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