Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 237: Sun Aug 27

Savage Messiah (Russell, 1972): Cinema Museum, 2.30pm


Over five days in August (Wednesday 23rd – Sunday 27th) the Cinema Museum will be celebrating the life and work of the director Ken Russell with a host of famous guests, including Glenda Jackson, Robert Powell and Georgina Hale. You can find the selection of his movies, TV films and rare shorts in the line-up here. Before today's screening Lisi Russell will be talking to Brian Sibley about living and working with Russell, with other guests including Judith Paris and Mike Bradsell. Savage Messiah will be screened from a 35mm print.

Here is an extract from film critic Neil Young's review:
'Vibrantly unconventional biopic, (melo-)dramatising the unorthodox relationship – more inspirational/mental than romantic/sexual – between penniless French sculptor Henri Gaudier (Scott Anthony) and a much older Polish writer Sophie Brzeska (Dorothy Tutin), in Paris and London during the early years of the 20th century. Though not all of Russell’s flashy directorial and gambits pay off, Savage Messiah has a spiky, bracing charm all its own and rivals The Elephant Man among the most convincing, scruffily evocative cinematic visions of bygone London. The air of persuasively percussive exuberance renders the sudden ending (reflecting Gaudier’s fate in the Great War’s trenches) all the more jarringly poignant: a pair of sepia-tinted stills show Anthony-as-Gaudier among his comrades-in-arms, grinning laddishly in uniform, white of tooth and muddy of face.'
You can read the review in full here.


Here (and above) is the trailer. 

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