A House in Bayswater

United Kingdom

1960

28 Min

Black and White

English

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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Ken Russell’s first BBC film not made for Monitor was shot and broadcast during the arts strand’s summer break. As with some of his earlier work, notably Scottish Painters (BBC, tx. 25/10/1959), Russell used the film as an excuse to revisit old haunts, in this case a converted Edwardian house in Bayswater that he himself had inhabited in the 1950s (though there’s no acknowledgement of this in the film itself) and of the tenants who lived there just prior to its demolition and replacement by a soulless office block.

They’re an eclectic mixture, the only linking factor being that three of them work in the creative arts (photography, painting, dance) and appreciate the house’s bohemian atmosphere, as indeed did Russell. Each has constructed a private world for themselves, whether it be Helen May’s dance studio (bringing back memories of Russell’s amateur film Amelia and the Angel, 1958), David Hurn’s use of the balcony for outdoor shots, James Burley’s accentuation of what he perceives as the house’s “decaying grandeur” by the addition of statues and assorted bric-a-brac, Miss Croft’s ‘America’ inside her filmstrip viewer, or even Tom and Lou’s family flat, distinguished from the others by its very normality.

Holding this all together is the long-suffering housekeeper Mrs Collings, who gets on well with everyone but who isn’t above making hints as to a possible use for the deadly nightshade she’s found growing in her small garden. She also has a startling repertoire of anecdotes about fatal and near-fatal incidents involving previous tenants. She’s comfortably as bohemian as the rest, with her waist-length blonde hair, and a basement filled with junk purchased from the nearby Portobello Road market.

Much of the film is straight reportage, with each tenant describing their lives and ambitions over a montage of their daily routine. Towards the end, as if sensing that the end of the house is fast approaching, Russell creates a montage of its inhabitants and their defining characteristics, seamlessly dissolving into one another as if to cram as many of their memories into a short space of time before they’re irretrievably lost in the rubble. Although the tenants talk about their dreams and future plans, the film’s overriding emotion is one of nostalgia, doubtless shared by its director.

Three years later, photographer David Hurn would be the subject of Watch the Birdie (BBC, tx. 9/6/1963), one of Russell’s Monitor documentaries. —Michael Brooke

Director

Ken Russell

British director Ken Russell started out training for a naval career, but after wartime RAF and merchant navy service he switched goals and went into ballet. Supplementing his dancing income as an actor and still photographer, Russell put together a handful of amateur films in the 50s before being hired as a staff director by the BBC. Russell made a name for himself (albeit a name not always spoken in reverence) during the first half of the ‘60s by directing a series of iconoclastic TV dramatizations of the lives of famous composers and dancers. And if he felt that the facts were getting in the way of his story, he’d make up his own — frequently bordering on the libelous. If he had any respect for the famous persons whose lives he probed, it was secondary to his fascination with revealing all warts and open wounds.

A film director since 1963, Russell burst into the international consciousness with 1969’s Women in Love, a hothouse version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. No director… read more

A film director since 1963, Russell burst into the international consciousness with 1969’s Women in Love, a hothouse version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. No director who staged a scene in a mainstream movie in which two men wrestled in the nude could escape notice, and thus Russell became more of a “star” than his actors. While some viewers had their sensibilities shaken by Women in Love, others had their sensibilities run through the blender with Russell’s next film, The Music Lovers. Predicated on the notion that Peter Tchaikovsky and his wife were, respectively, a homosexual and nymphomaniac, the film’s much discussed “highlight” is a scene in which Nina Tchaikovsky (Glenda Jackson) allows the inmates in the cellar of an insane asylum to reach up and play with her privates. But this was kid’s stuff compared to Russell’s The Devils (1971), an ultraviolent and perversely anachronistic adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. Russell returned to his musical theater roots with The Boy Friend (1971), a bloated version of Sandy Wilson’s intimate 1920s pastiche, and then went back to biography with the insanely inaccurate Lisztomania (1974) and Valentino (1975). The latter film not only suggested that Rudolph Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) performed totally nude in his silent films, but also offered up the spectacle of Huntz Hall as producer Jesse Lasky. At this point, even some of the most devoted fans of Russell’s outrageous (but undeniably brilliant) visual sense were fed up with his shock-for-shock’s-sake approach and his all-consuming narcissism. Following the mind-bending horrors of Altered States in 1980, Russel maintained momentum with Gothic, a visually lavish retelling of the weekend of debauchery that gave birth to the Frankenstein mythos in the mind of a young female author named Mary Shelley. Though the film may have had its fair share of detractors due to Russel’s signature departure from historical fact, it nevertheless aquired a cult following thanks to its heavy atmosphere and dark fantasy. After detailing the exploits of yet another famed author (this time Oscar Wilde) in the 1988 comedy drama Salome’s Last Dance, Russel turned out another curiousity in the form of that same year’s Lair of the White Worm. Based on Dracula author Bram Stoker’s short story of the same name of featuring a memorable performance by a pre-romantic comedy stalwart Hugh Grant, Lair of the White Worm’s outrageous, sex vampire excess and near surreal humor earned the effort a proud spot in many a cult movie aficionado’s collection. He was back in his old form with 1991’s Whore, which conveyed several times over that life on the streets is hell — then for good measure, said it a few more times. Backed by a childishly slavering ad campaign, Whore brought Russell into the spotlight again for what would be the last time in some while.

Dabbling in television for much of the 1990s, may of Russel’s efforts during the decade were fairly unmemorable despite featuring such noteworthy actors as Richard Dreyfuss (Prisoner of Honor) and Bryan Brown (Dogboys). Just when it seemed as if Russel’s career may have lost steam for the last time, the ever unpredictable director struck back in 2002 with the unhinged comedy horror musical The Fall of the Louse of Usher. Brimming with the director’s trademark debauchery and offering a curious meld of various stories by timeless horror author Edgar Allan Poe, the film may have found Russel back in proper form, but still somehow managed to elude audiences due to both its independent origins and a virtually nonexistant advertising campaign. —allmovie

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CRW

21Apr13

Living one street across made this all the more interesting for me. The dream sequence at the end is something to behold!

richmondhill

11Nov12

A gentle and rather elegiac meander around Russell's own former boarding house. It leads nowhere in particular, apart from up to the attic, but has a oddly beguiling blend of realism and fantasia that would mark out much of Russell's later television work.