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.
As a young boy, Thet Sambath lost his mother, father, and brother during the Cambodian genocide of the mid- to late 1970s, immediately following the Vietnam War. Led by Pol Pot, known as Brother Number One, and Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two, the Khmer Rouge murdered nearly two million of its fellow citizens in the name of Communism, dumping the bodies in mass graves that journalist Dith Pran famously termed the Killing Fields. In order to reveal the truth about what happened during that horrific period, Sambath became an investigative journalist himself, dedicating weekends for ten years to meeting with the men and women who actually committed the murders, rural peasants who were ordered to commit crimes against humanity — and did so seemingly with little regret. But Sambath’s primary goal was to get Nuon Chea, a fiercely proud and private man, to talk about his involvement in the genocide and share the full story of what happened for the first time. Part historical document, part personal journey, told in a compelling procedural narrative, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is an eye-opening film that finally gets to the bottom of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century. Sambath, teaming with British filmmaker Rob Lemkin, who himself lost family during the Holocaust, risks everything to seek out the truth and try to put his country back on the road to reconciliation.
