It would be convenient to be able to say that Ken Russell's "Savage Messiah" is bad strictly on formal and technical grounds, but that would, I think, be fundamentally a lie. It is very poor technically; but that's not all that makes it bad….

Is there any other movie director with the flair and imagination and, yes, the force of Ken Russell who has so little actual command of what is generally considered "film technique"? "Savage Messiah" starts by lunging into the middle of a situation and then just keeps throwing things at you. It's more hurried than his other films, and not so visually lush. You feel as if it were rushing through the projector at the wrong speed and with the sound turned up to panic level. Russell edits with a cleaver, and the frenetic intercutting is choppy and rhythmless. Nothing is prepared for, and the disjointed scenes are played as if they all had the same value; he charges from one to the next, and his inventiveness gets buried under the avalanche. (p. 225)

As a picture of bohemian life in Paris and London, "Savage Messiah" is about as convincing as "The Subterraneans" was about the Beats in San Francisco; but you understood the commercial pressures that shaped that, while with "Savage Messiah" the pressures are from Russell's insides. He's a one man marketplace, a compulsive Hollywoodizer, and his images of the artist's suffering are frantic versions of Hollywood's. This movie is like a continuation of "The Music Lovers," but now it's all random buffoonery. Russell seems to want something from them, but each time he gets close to them he dances away. His movies are charged with sex, but it's androgynous sex, and sterile. There's a giddy violence to the sensations of dislocation that this new film produces. The abrupt contrasts score points against the characters. Russell celebrates the pandemonium and senselessness of art and life. Yet in the middle of this lurid debauchery the virginal hero seems to be saving himself for something…. (pp. 225-26)

The title seems so appropriate to Ken Russell … that some people have thought the film … to be autobiographical. And in a sense it is, because Russell has wrested Gaudier-Brzeska's story from its place in art history and made it one move of his unstable satires on romanticism. Gentle, delicate-looking Gaudier…. becomes Russell's strutting, phallic artist assaulting society. His whole life builds up to the final Hollywood-style irony: he is taken up after death by the fashionable world, for its amusement. In a musical-comedy finale, Russell concocts a parade of rich and vapid young people with pink parasols who attend a posthumous exhibition of Gaudier-Brzeska's work and flirt and politely smile their approval…. [But] to suggest that his art was immediately taken up by smart young society people is to miss out on the meaning of his dedication to the avant-garde movement of his time, which was what kept him poor.

In Hollywood bios, the consummation of the artist's life was, of course, the romanticizing movie itself; Russell seems to be tormented by this convention—he keeps jabbing at it, angrily demonstrating that artists are not the ethereal dreamers those silly movies said they were, yet accepting the Hollywood myths of genius and "inspiration." This movie doesn't have the deliberate shocks and horrors of "The Music Lovers" or "The Devils"—the sores and the burning, bubbling flesh, and Rube Goldberg machines inserted into women. This time, Russell's full energy—a kind of mad zip—goes into parodics that burst out where they don't belong. The most inventive sequence is a freakily decadent erotic entertainment in a Vortiscist night club in London…. Russell's jokes don't work, because they're so maniacally off target. The points aren't satirically valid; they're simply for kicks (though I imagine that Russell himself would defend them as valid, and would also say it's all meant to be a joke on us)…. His hyperbolic method—going from climax to climax—is itself a form of ridicule, and it's orgiastic. And I think this is a large part of his fascination: some people can't resist his movies, because they can hardly wait to see what mad thing he'll do next. His films are preceded by puffery about the biographical research and the authentic incidents. But he removes those incidents from their human context; the attraction for him and for the audience is the porn of fame…. He's not trying to deal with the age any of his artist subjects lived in, or the appetites and satisfactions of that age, or the vision of a particular artist, but is always turning something from the artists' lives into something else—a whopping irony, a phallic joke, a plushy big scene. (pp. 226-28)

Russell is as crazed in his hatred of art lovers as some reactionary fantasists are about liberals. The world of the movie is made up of repulsive desiccated poseurs, who are mocked for the sensuality in their love of art. To Russell, love of art is an affection: these ghoulish art lovers really want the artist's flesh…. Russell seems to share with Hollywood the view that a supercilious manner and an aristocratic style and homosexuality equal decadence. For him, decadence is glitzy camp—which at one level he must love, because he compulsively turns everything into it…. [Those] who adore his movies say, "He's a genius." Genius is, of course, his subject—genius and possession. His possessed artists burn with an intensity that is so exhausting they seek death. But he can't help making them fools, too. He turns pop into highbrow pop. This is "art" for people who don't want to get close to human relationships, for those who feel safer with bravura splashiness. (pp. 228-31)

You never get to see what brought Henri Gaudier and Sophie Brzeska together, and you never get to understand why he needed the woman who called him her little son. There's one quiet moment in a shelter on the beach when Henri and Sophie talk together and you actually begin to feel something; but Russell doesn't trust it, and he throws it away….

What is the sum total of his vision but a sham superiority to simple human needs a camp put-down of everything? Like Yellow Book diabolist of the eighteen-nineties, Russell lusts for a purity he doesn't believe in. He turns Gaudier-Brzeska into the virgin-artist raped in life by his dilettante admirers and raped in death by the fashionable world. One can't just dismiss Russell's movies, because they have an influence. They cheapen everything they touch—not consciously, I think, but instinctively. (p. 232)