Oliver Reed gets down to some dirty business in Ken Russell’s down and dirty cult classic THE DEVILS
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
July 30 – August 5
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
The Film Society of Lincoln Center is celebrating the career of iconoclastic British director Ken Russell by showing nine of his works, ranging from 1969’s classic WOMEN IN LOVE to 1977’s VALENTINO, with the octogenarian in person for at least one screening almost every day. Russell has had quite an up and down fifty-plus-year career (and life — he’s been married four times), mixing biopics of classical composers with psychedelic forays, sexual romps, gothic horror, and deviant delights, scoring such hits as ALTERED STATES (1980) and THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988) along the way. He’s worked with a diverse cast of characters, including Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky, Roger Daltrey as Liszt (and Tommy), Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino, Robert Powell as Mahler, and, numerous times over the years, his onscreen alter ego, Oliver Reed. He’s adapted writings by Bram Stoker, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Paddy Chayefsky and is currently making his first feature-length film in six years, a film based on Daniel Defoe’s MOLL FLANDERS. Yet he also appeared on the British edition of CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER back in 2007. The enigmatic and unpredictable Russell, who just turned eighty-three, will be at Lincoln Center for screenings of THE DEVILS (July 30), WOMEN IN LOVE (July 31), THE BOY FRIEND and SAVAGE MESSIAH (August 1), MAHLER (August 2), LISZTOMANIA (August 4), and TOMMY (August 5), which we still consider one of the ten worst films we’ve ever seen. It was quite a period for Russell, and it should be quite a week at the Walter Reade Theater.