Ken Russell's methods of adaptation and his extravagant style of filmmaking have been grossly misunderstood, but the usual naive pronouncements of film critics can no longer be considered justified. Ken Russell is not a "compulsive Hollywoodizer" who distorts facts in order to outrage audiences for the sake of pure sensationalism. He does not "murder" his subjects, and his films are not examples of "bad art". He is not motivated by sadism or "egoistic frenzy". He is not driven by cruelty or insanity to embrace excessiveness, and his films are neither "degenerate" nor "despicable". True, they do cultivate a baroque vulgarity, and they are frequently punctuated with bizarre humor which manifests itself in "camp" images, but even to describe his films as notable illustrations of "kitsch" is to do them a serious injustice. (p. 204)

More often than not, the excessiveness and frenzy of Russell's films are derived from his original sources, and he often wisely selects material especially appropriate to his unique style of filmmaking. Subtlety does exist in his films—in the complexity of his allusions, the effectiveness of his mise-en-scène, the richness of his visual patterning, and the mastery of his matching images to music—but it is his shock editing, his obsessive camera movements, his penchant for theatricality and overblown performances, and his extraordinary, phantasmagoric images which overwhelm his audiences. For Russell, the art of gentle persuasion is lost in this present age; audiences have become complacent and therefore must be assaulted and jolted into awareness, or into sharing emotions of ecstasy or outrage about a particular subject.

To some extent, Russell's methods can be compared to those of D. H. Lawrence, another experimental artist too often dismissed as excessive and extravagant. Lawrence uncompromisingly, intemperately, and compulsively assaulted his readers in an attempt to alter their responses. He over-emphasized the power of the body and the "blood" because he claimed that this aspect had been denied by twentieth century man's over-dependence on abstract reasoning. His purpose, however, was not to tip the scale in favor of the flesh at the expense of the spirit. Instead, he used extremes to compensate for man's dominant preoccupations and to aid in the development of the total self. Russell's methods of assaulting his audience are not really dissimilar. He, too, goes to extremes to bring his audience to his position, which frequently rests somewhere between their conventional pieties or indifference and the presentation on the screen. (p. 206)

[Perhaps] the death scene of Grandier in The Devils becomes the quintessential Russell sequence. The skin on Grandier's face blisters and pops before the viewer's eyes as the flames consume him, but in his last moments, he looks out at the inhabitants of Loudun and at the audience of the film and cries out, "Don't look at me. Look at your city." It is a deep, strong, over-powering voice, but one which, like Russell's, cannot be denied or ignored.

Ken Russell possesses a remarkable visual flair, a trait uncommon among British filmmakers; as in the past, he continues to experiment with film as a fusion of various art forms at a time when most film critics are praising what could be called "pure film"; and finally he has changed and continues to change the ways of making and of viewing biographical films. When seen from this perspective, Ken Russell emerges as the most significant filmmaker presently working in Great Britain. (pp. 206-07)