1988 Directed by Ken Russell
London, England, November 5th, 1892, Guy Fawkes Night. The famous playwright Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas discreetly go to a luxury brothel where the owner, Alfred Taylor, has prepared a surprise for the renowned author: a private and very special performance of his play Salome, banned by the authorities, in which Taylor himself and the peculiar inhabitants of the exclusive establishment will participate.
Glenda Jackson Stratford Johns Nickolas Grace Douglas Hodge Imogen Millais Scott Denis Lill Russell Lee Nash Ken Russell David Doyle Warren Saire Kenny Ireland Michael van Wijk Paul Clayton Imogen Claire Tim Potter Matthew Taylor Linzi Drew Tina Shaw Caron Anne Kelly Mike Edmonds Willie Coppen Anthony Georghiou Leon Herbert Douglas Howes Lionel Taylor Colin Hunt David Addison Robert Goodey Danny Godfrey Show All…
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USAR
Czechia
Czechia
USA
With this louche adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s least produced play, Ken Russell solidifies his status as an honorary gay. To this day, I’m gobsmacked that a straight man was able to crack the genetic code of camp sensibility so completely and definitively. And the fact that he was able to do it so quickly and on such a low-budget — the film was cranked out as part of a three picture deal with Vestron — makes the accomplishment all the more astonishing.
To fully appreciate this film, it really helps to understand the historical context surrounding the Oscar Wilde trials and the literary genealogy of decadence and aestheticism which informed the play itself. Simply put, the international spectacle of Wilde’s…
ken russell match-cutting an imprisoned john the baptist being sodomized by leather-clad vixens into a photograph taken of a lounging oscar wilde, drunk on his own play's debauch -- this is the thesis of russell's entire cinema, that spectacle reveals what its spectators value.
john the baptist's skin is alabaster white, just like the screen of the theater upon which film projects -- it is a body he considers sacred, the body of christ, here stylized to look like one of dr. caligari's mind-slaves, chalky and drained of life's red flush, the originary body of the silent cinema, then juxtaposed with salome's gyrating technicolor chandelier of glitter'd eyes and bejeweled hips, which diffuses the dour purity of the saintly white…
Ken Russell and Oscar Wilde shared a very simple thing: they were both provocateurs. It should be no surprise that Ken Russell chose to adapt Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salome as a piece of provocation. How Ken Russell chose to adapt it makes all the difference.
Russell's ingenious non-fourth-wall reimagining of Salome, with the actors coming out into the audience (consisting of Oscar Wilde) breathes life into what could have been a cheap and stagey reconstruction. The blocking and staginess of the film is intentional as it is a staged play in a film. The meta-ness is merely there to comment on the homosexuality of Wilde, and his life story. Wilde, at the end of the film, is arrested for…
"I will kiss your mouth, John the Baptist."
I feel like I've seen enough Ken Russell films now to know the man did not give a crap if he offended you or not! He was gonna make the movie he wanted! (Unless the censors stopped him.)
Coming from Russell and based on a play by Oscar Wilde I fully expected this to be outrageous, over the top, offensive, sacrilegious and super horny! It did not disappoint! What I was not expecting...
Imogen Millais-Scott! I'm blown away! I kid you not, one of the most delightfully wicked performances I've ever seen! An all timer! Her eyes, nose, mouth, entire face, so expressive! And the delivery of her lines, phenomenal! If it's…
August 2022: Theme of the Month - Make/Remake
"Salome" (1922) vs "Salome's Last Dance" (1988)
Like Nazimova, director Ken Russell sticks closely to the storyline of Oscar Wilde's 1891 one-act play. But Russell puts an interesting frame around it. He imagines it as being staged in a brothel frequented by Wilde and his young lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas as a birthday present to Wilde because the play had been banned. The parts are played by the sex workers (male and female) and customers from the brothel, with Bosie taking on the role of John the Baptist.
This version benefits from the decision to include much of Wilde's dialogue from the play (The earlier version was, after all, a silent).…
Lesser Russell, but still not without its charms. Much of this reminds me of a kitschier version of The Boy Friend, the onstage fantasy reflecting and interacting with the offstage reality in much of the same way. I'm going to assume that the fart jokes were Russell's contributions to Wilde's play?
Hooptober X: Encounters of the Spooky Kind
Spooky Encounter #4
5 Films from De Palma, Wes Craven, Ken Russell, Hitchcock and/or Morehead & Benson 1/5
6 countries: UK 4/6
“What our production lacks in stagecraft, we hope to make up for in enthusiasm. And any shortcomings in design I know will be compensated for by your fertile imagination.” Guy Fawkes night, 1892. Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) saunters into a London brothel and settles down for a clandestine production of his own recently banned play Salome as performed by a motley troupe of slumming-it divas, rent boys and courtesans. The opening scene has Wilde’s lover, Lord Douglas (Douglas Hodge), take to the stage as John the Baptist. Naked aside from a loincloth,…
God I wish we could go back in time and have Ken Russell direct every play ever. Or at least revive this as an immersive theater play.
As a Godless heathen I gotta admit I went into this a little blind as far as how I was 'meant' to feel about this story of Salome. I presume from Oscar Wilde's tears and the small bit of Biblical knowledge I possess that Salome is, for all intents and purposes, the 'bad' guy here. But I couldn't help but think – and I think Ken Russell is definitely here with me – that she comes across as more of the celebrated victor. I mean, starting off this play with three topless women…
If I didn’t tell you this was a Ken Russell film, you’d still guess it right away: Salome’s Last Dance is gaudy, vulgar, visually fascinating (even if it doesn’t indulge in psychedelic imagery like his most well-known works), and a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play. Staging the production as a show-within-a-show is a brilliant idea, and having Wilde himself as its audience of one also adds interesting subtext to the performance. I’d argue, however, that the middle of the film drags a bit and the ending is anticlimactic. Not one of Russell’s totemic works, but most of it is appealing enough.
MY JAAMMMMMMMM
Give yourself 18 minutes to adjust to the tone, 20 minutes in will have you completely invested in announcements of "Don't look at her!" and "See the moon tonight, she's naked- the clouds, they try to clothe her but..."
Salome. Fuck. Yas Queen. Queeeeeeeenn. That fucking dress. ThT fucking hair. That fuck voice. Tbh she nearly sounds like Zelda Rubinstein (Tangina from Poltergeist) but like, you could fuck it. Also she may be a robot.
Give me any film where the film is about a guy watching a play but the play is the entire movie and the guy gets to chill with the actors who played the characters you got to know of the course of the film that gave you blue balls. I'm with the king
late-period, underdiscussed Ken Russell film based around and adapting a late-period, underdiscussed Oscar Wilde play. It's easy to see the interests of the two artists, separated by a century, overlapping here - the struggle between the Divine and the Gutter, so to speak, or the law as an instrument of punishment for Improper Desires. The framing device (setting it in a Brothel that Oscar Wilde is visiting to have it performed for him as a treat) feels key in this regard, and the interplay between Russell the director's cuts away from what's going on on stage and how Wilde is reacting (or not reacting) feel like more than just a conceit, as does the director's decision to put himself in…
