TOMMY @ 50

All of The Who mime to the audio of Elton John's band in the
Pinball Wizard scene. That's Elton in the background.

Tommy suffers a childhood trauma so profound that his senses shut down. Doesn't end there. He's bullied by his cousin and molested by his uncle. None of the gurus, psychedelic shamen or medical experts can draw him from his sensory isolation. Then again, he's developed an inner life that none of them could dream of. He travels and plays inside his head, past all the abuse, and finds that his skill at pinball can connect him to the world. Is there hope for him to find his way back? What will happen if he meets the world again, strengthened by his inner vision but seeing and hearing the world of his abusers?

Pete Townshend's rock opera changed The Who's career from its place as a second tier British rock players to the heroes of festivals and stadium tours. They toted the song cycle for years of touring. There were theatrical adaptations with casts and music rearranged rearranged for orchestra and the mystique of the opera, aided by the trend that entered similarly esoteric territory like Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell. The original album and the adaptations sold by the million. The next step of putting it on the big screen was not only inevitable, it had already been written and rewritten by co-manager Kit Lambert but relations between him and the band had deteriorated and his screenplays were adjudged failures.

Enter Ken Russell, enfant terrible of British Filmmaking, whose biographies of great composers could turn geefully anachronistic or vulgar and whose adaptations of literature like Women in Love pushed the by-then D.H. Lawrence back into the public imagination. And that's before you get to The Devils. Russell liked the messianic story of the second half and imported ideas from his own unproduced Poppy Day into the adaptation. He also plugged the many holes in the narrative that Townshend had left in the too hard box to keep the narrative flowing. 

Russell did not like rock music but threw himself into what he did understand which was opera. And just as Wagner or Verdi did, he stuffed this opera full of pop and classical references and as much colour as he could throw at the screen. From Frankenstein to Teddy Boys, from Warners cartoons to sombre animation, from mimed rock performance to proto music videos, all he knew and much he didn't made it, brick by brick into this extravaganza. If Jesus Christ Superstar had Roman soldiers in U.S. issue helmets, Russell put Tommy in a hang glider in a scene of ascension. If King Herod could sing a ragtime number, the pinball champion could play a small keyboard at his machine while wearing gigantic Doc Martens lace-ups. TV commercials, dream sequences, hallucinatory set pieces and even, poignantly, a minutes-long cut to black as Tommy is sexually assaulted by his uncle. If Townshend wanted justice for his brainchild he could not have chosen better.

But does it, reaching through five decades, still appeal the way it did as a mega hit at the cinema on first release? In parts admirably with use of physical effects like the Cousin Kevin sequence or (more simply and affectingly) the image of the boy Tommy swirling playfully in the shallows with his head literally boxed in. The iron maiden drug injection machine that the Acid Queen confines him to is saved from a contemporary drugs-are-bad tone because of its clear ritualistic purpose. The Healer's church of Marylin is as creepy as that sounds. Ok, it's time to talk about the cast.

The Acid Queen is played by a possessed Tina Turner either dominating the attic room or her trade or spasming with a decidedly non-sexual energy. Elton John's turn as the pinball champ shows him shining in the role, in a costume that constains him to standing still (one wrong move in those boots would have ended in hospital for months). Even Eric Clapton whose impassive delivery as the Healer (with the Gibson guitar and The Who playing around him) gives him a duplicitous sincerity. Arthur Brow's screaming assistant at least seems to believe in the garbage he's spewing. As for Uncle Ernie, Keith Moon was form fit for the role of the leering reprobate, being disgusting and funny. And that's just the rock stars!

Oliver Reed struggles with his pitch but provides us with a modern Neanderthal Man whose brutality is more than masked by an innate sexiness. Anne Margaret is, against type, the providor of gravitas, adding pathos and fury to her torchy vocals. Of all of them, she is probably the one we get closest to. Paul Nicholas, at the time an actor with aspirations to pop stardom, overplays Cousin Kevin to perfection as an overgrown school bully.

And it is Roger Daltrey, the central and title role, who does manage to make the mostly impassive Tommy emote from within his closed self. He had described the character and his performance of the music as being the point at which he stopped just being the singer in the band and proceeded to build characters from a solid stage persona. His vocal performance throughout is, of course, stellar and goads his on screen incarnation to something like real acting. His is a poignant presence, placed fragilely at the peak of the story and its operatic claims. There might well have been singing actors who could take the role into more lofty places but Daltrey as the one who embodied the role in front of the Woodstock crowd and the masses at American mega venues, feels right and ready.

Ken Russell brought cinema to serve to fans and curious cinemagoers but was held aloft with great rock music, reimagined by Townshend to the kind of synthesiser-rich mid '70s rock without a note of nostalgia. It was a triumph and remains so. The band's second continuous narrative was realised a few years later when Quadrophenia came out. It was a different film more interested in the social drama of subculture than Townshend's grand scheme (more puzzling that Tommy). No one sang on screen and the sound of the tracks chosen for the score underlined rather than wove. Tommy, Townshend and Russell had probably already said as much as could be said for the collision of rock and opera. What was left to say? Grease? I'll take Tommy.

Oh, yes, I am aware that Cousin Kevin and Fiddle About were written by John Entwistle, not Pete Townshend. 

Viewing notes: I watched my Umbrella Blu-Ray of the film with a surround audio (not the quadrophonic original that had appeared on the old Superbit DVD). I think it's still available. Not available on local streaming, though.