Barton is a soldier in WW2 England; he meets Alice, who is looking after her farm single-handed as her husband is a prisoner of the Japanese. Read More »
Tag Archives: Glenda Jackson
The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) Joseph Losey, Glenda Jackson, Michael Caine, Helmut Berger, Comedy, Drama
What is real and what is fiction? Faced with writer’s block with his novel, Lewis Fielding turns to a film script about a woman finding herself Read More »
House Calls (1978) Howard Zieff, Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Art Carney, Comedy, Drama, Romance
Charley is a surgeon who’s recently lost his wife; he embarks on a tragicomic romantic quest with one woman after another until he meets up with Ann Read More »
The Music Lovers (1970) Ken Russell, Richard Chamberlain, Glenda Jackson, Max Adrian, Drama, Biography, Music
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is given the Ken Russell treatment in The Music Lovers, which means that there is plenty of music, plenty of passion, plenty of debauchery, and plenty of excess. Tame by Russell’s later standards (Lisztomania), The Music Lovers nevertheless thrives on creative and sexual anguish. Richard Chamberlain plays Tchaikovsky with a bug-eyed intensity as a composer consumed by his art – so consumed that his romantic attachments become bisexual and irrational. He falls in love with Nina (Glenda Jackson), the hysterical trollop he marries with dire consequences. As he explodes emotionally, his public performance of Piano Concerto in B flat minor becomes a cue for flashbacks to a series of discomforting childhood events that suggest incestuous relations with his sister. Back in real time, Tchaikovsky has to deal with Nina’s outbursts while juggling his homosexual urges and his almost hidden desire for Count Anton Chiluvsky (Christopher Gable). The film also details the curious relationship between Tchaikovsky and his rich patroness, the middle-aged widow Madame Nadedja von Meck (Isabella Telezynska), who loves Tchaikovsky deeply, but refuses to meet him – their only communication being through letters, even though he lives on her estate. Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra perform Tchaikovsky’s music.
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