Intermittently inventive, always lively, [Tommy] remains a series of separate units linked only by a disparate if vigorous style. Which is a fair capsule description of Russell's film-making style.

Not surprising, then, that Tommy represents both the best and the worst of Ken Russell, often within the same sequence…. Russell's visual representations of the score (already, in 'Quintaphonic' sound, well into aural extravagance) are here merely aggravating annotations—in, out and zoom it all about like some nightmare conjunction of TV soap operatics and TV commericals. The rest, as nearly always in Russell's cinema, is bits and showpieces. And it would scarcely be worth noting did it not exemplify the familiar problem in responding to a Russell film: for all the tuppence-coloured banality (perhaps because of it), there is no denying the vitality of expression (it is hardly a style) which punctuates his films like an excess of exclamation marks.

And why should one deny it? Russell is rightly contemptuous of critics who have labelled (bludgeoned) him as 'tasteless', whatever that means, And if one index of a visual style is that it is irreducible to, or at best impoverished by, verbal exposition, it is not the only one. Russell's visual method is 'obvious' and 'banal' only in the sense that pop art is obvious and banal. Like pop art it can be both narcissistic and self-defeating; whether it is or not depends on whether the method, and its paraphernalia, is merely self-justifying or makes some discernible connection with the material. The analogy is not gratuitous. That frequently visited shrine of pop art, Marilyn Monroe, makes an appearance in Tommy in the shape of a grotesque plaster model, the centrepiece of the faith-healing carnival—a familiar Russell amalgam of religious hysteria and tame blasphemy—to which Tommy … is taken in the hope of finding a cure for his catatonic trance. Here, as with the cannon-ball sequence in Music Lovers or the Nazi emblems in the television 'biography' of Richard Strauss, the iconography seems both inapposite and superfluous, the more so for Russell's insistent illustration of it. The brash banality of this sequence contrasts tellingly with set pieces in which shrill decor and frenzied camera are more than simply eye-jarring adjuncts. (pp. 192-93)

In other words, this is the Russell mixture as before. In Tommy, though, there is a difference. Where previously the garish, only superficially outrageous display has obstinately remained just that, there is evidence enough here of subject and author making a genuine, if often troubled, marriage of like minds. Perhaps, after all, that is the key to Russell's film-making. Like any pop artist, he needs a special relationship with his material. When he finds it, as he does in several of the units of Tommy, the effect can be dazzling. When he doesn't, as he doesn't at intervals in Tommy, the result is mere discord. (p. 193)