![]() Most of the time, this works - Ann Margaret, Roger Daltrey, and cameos by Jack Nicholson, Elton John, Tina Turner and Keith Moon are all outstanding. WITH REGARD TO THE FILM: Facing a nearly impossible task, Ken Russel enlisted Townshend, Daltrey, and a host of very talented and popular musicians and actors to make Tommy. I won't promise that you will like it, but rather, that if you keep your mind open and let it pour in, like most operas, Tommy will move you. If you let yourself 'go with it' Tommy will likely take you places you've never been. And both the lyrics and the film incorporate widespread and often incisive social criticism - touching on broad intellectual themes such as the escape from freedom, the subjectivity of truth, and the inherent futility and silliness of most efforts to improve the lot of humanity. Allegory is a key to understanding the entire process. Religion plays an important, though atypical, role in Townshend's story. Although the medium of the album and the film is rock music, Tommy strings together many of the most powerful elements of classical opera. And Tommy will offer his apparently miraculous awareness to the rest of the world as a universal form of salvation. Eventually, Tommy and his mother will find their own cures - in quite unexpected places. Guilt and sincere love drive his mother and her new husband Frank to seek every possible cure, and Townshend (and Russel) waste no opportunity to skewer religion, medical science, traditional family dynamics, and testosterone-influenced views of sexual rites of passage. what you know is the truth." So Tommy grows up in a state of trauma-induced deafness, muteness and blindness. Tommy witnesses this and Nora and Frank expand the trauma by shouting silence and near-catatonic autism into the young boy with the classic lines "You didn't hear it, you didn't see it, you won't say nothing to no one, never tell a soul. One night, Captain Walker comes home to find his beloved wife in bed with Uncle Frank, and Uncle Frank, in a panic, kills him. His mother, Nora (Ann Margaret), a war widow, has shacked up with "Uncle Frank", a well-off and well-intentioned but rather low-brow gentleman (Oliver Reed). Tommy knew his father - Captain Walker - mainly through the photograph which has stood on the nightstand next to his bed all of his young life. But unlike similarly assembled LPs by the likes of Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, etc., Tommy told a story through music and lyrics. Written almost entirely by 23-year old Pete Townshend, Tommy was, like many albums of its time, an early example of album-oriented rock. In 1969, The Who released their wildly innovative breakthrough album "Tommy". #Who wrote pinball wizard first movieMany of the less complementary comments offered here on IMDb concerning this movie appear to be driven by commenters' personal opinions or prejudices about The Who or about Ken Russel, and seem to have very little to do with this film. And anybody generally familiar with 1970s cinema will note that Ken Russell's envisioning of this film was actually one of a very small handful of intelligent and serious musicals produced during that decade, not a psychedelic experiment or a contribution to the avant-garde. Its "out there" but a vision in its tale.Īnybody generally familiar with opera will immediately recognize that the Who's Tommy suffers from neither a weak nor outrageous nor terribly surreal nor even bizarre storyline in comparison to what passes for plot in many classic operas. It is, in fact, a brilliant masterpiece of 20th Century pop culture: a brave, warped and cartoon mixture of sex, violence, war, religion and celebrity worship with the backdrop of one heck of a rock opera and story by The Who but focusing on the burning questions.what IS the central focus in our lives? Do we choose to look up to the right thing in our lives? And what do they look up to? Do they understand the power they have? Do we? Tommy is an experience in film, not for everyone. I understood what Ken Russell's vision was and for 1975 it was WAY ahead of its time. Well, 20 years went by and on cable I saw Tommy again. But as a young teen, the movie I didn't get. I loved the performances in the movie by Elton John and Tina Turner. Three years later, this movie came out directed by Ken Russell. In the 70's I had a fantastic music teacher who played music soundtracks of several rock artists for my class, included was The Who's Tommy which I remembered immediately. My older brother bought an LP The Who's "Tommy" in the 60's. ![]()
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