Review by Gary Tooze

Production:

Disc:

Video:

Audio:

• Michael Bradsell Interview (2015, 17:32): the film editor talks about working with Ken Russell
• Late Night Line Up: Russell at Work (Ian Keill, 1966, 30:32): documentary shot during the making of Isadora
• Brian Hoyle audio commentary for Always on Sunday
• Paul Sutton audio commentary for Isadora
• Brian Hoyle audio commentary for Dante's Inferno
• The Paul Sutton Tapes: alternative audio track to Isadora: comprising interviews which Paul Sutton conducted with the cast and crew between 2008 and 2012 (1:04:36)
• Illustrated booklet featuring new essays by John Wyver, Kevin Jackson, Christophe Van Eecke, Brian Hoyle, Paul Sutton and Michael Brooke, and full credits

DVD (Dual-Format)

Bitrates:

Always on Sunday

 

Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World

 

Dante's Inferno

 

 

Description: THE KEN RUSSELL COLLECTION: THE GREAT PASSIONS (Dual Format Edition)
Three films by Ken Russell

A Dual Format Edition collection bringing together the career defining work of Ken Russell at the BBC. Russell's work during the sixties for award-winning arts documentary series Monitor and Omnibus were critically-acclaimed and often seen as a high point in his filmmaking.

The collection opens with Always on Sunday (1965) a dramatized examination of the painter Henri Rousseau. The combination of Russell reuniting with Melvyn Bragg and Oliver Reed and Russell's infectious love of the film's subject results in a film which is illuminating in every frame. Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966), a study of the outrageous American dancer, Isadora Duncan, starring Vivian Pickles as the dancer whose obsession with the importance of art and complete disdain for decorum chimes perfectly with Russell's own sensibility. Last of the TV dramas is Dante's Inferno (1967) which tells of the complex relationship between the 19th century artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his model Elizabeth Siddal.

The films in this collection have been remastered to High Definition, and are presented on Blu-ray for the very first time.

 

 

 

 

Always on Sunday
A dramatised portrait of the painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), known popularly as 'Le Douanier' because of his day job as a Customs clerk (he never reached the level implied by the nickname), both the film's best-known title and the one that actually appears on screen (Henri Rousseau: Sunday Painter) refer to the fact that his art had to be produced in his spare time, even after retirement.

Rousseau is played by the painter James Lloyd, the subject of an earlier Ken Russell Monitor documentary (The Dotty World of James Lloyd, BBC, tx. 5/7/1964), whose own career as a misunderstood naïve painter had many similarities. As Russell later told his biographer John Baxter, "He helped a lot with the atmosphere and the actors, because professionals have to adopt a different attitude when they're with someone like that. They can't do their 'acting' bit."

It was Russell's first fully dramatised biopic, without either the restrictions imposed by Monitor's former editor Huw Wheldon or the complex film-within-a-film framework of The Debussy Film (BBC, tx. 18/5/1965). Here, the actors use their own voices (Lloyd's Cheshire accent neatly paralleling Rousseau's provincial Breton) or, in Annette Robertson's case, are dubbed by a male voice to create an unsettlingly androgynous Alfred Jarry. The film also reunited Russell with Melvyn Bragg and Oliver Reed, who wrote and delivered the understated commentary.

Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World
There's plenty of over-the-top exuberance at the start, a breathless montage of speeded-up images, music and quoted newspaper headlines that crams all the best-known stories about the dancer Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) into just two minutes. The remaining hour is spent examining the same material in much greater detail, attempting to explain the motivations behind her frequently scandalous life and career while conveying both her impossible ambitions and her actual achievements.

Russell presents this as a mixture of dramatised material and fantasy sequences that blend original dance numbers with footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (Germany, 1938), an ecstatic paean to the glory of the human body. The scale of Russell's set-pieces belies the film's television origins, with a jazz band playing on the roof of a hearse, a giant box breaking open to reveal half a dozen harpists, and the screen filling with hundreds of dancing children at the climax.

Excerpt from Wikipedia located HERE

CLICK EACH BLU-RAY CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION

Always on Sunday

 

 

 

 

Audio :

TRIVIA NOTE: from IMDb (about Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World) "According to Eric Idle, he and two other future members of Monty Python (Terry Jones and Michael Palin) are among the band members on top of a hearse in an early scene. This occurs approximately a minute and thirty seconds into the film and only lasts for a moment."

BOTTOM LINE:
The Ken Russell Collections: are a fabulous idea by the BFI. These are can really represent a landmark in exposing higher culture/art with Russell's unique explorations they are so dissimilar to mainstream  - and we get three of them on one Blu-ray! The a/v quality is, akin to the broadcast original, more modest but we also get immense value in the extras as well as access to the films in HD. I thoroughly enjoyed watching these - especially Dante's Inferno and Always on Sunday - truly brilliant! Pretty much a must-own for the director's loyal following and we give it our highest recommendation. Amazing job BFI! 

Gary Tooze

March 12th, 2016