Always on Sunday

United Kingdom

1965

45 Min

Black and White

English

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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CAST Oliver Reed, James Lloyd, Annette Robertson, Bryan Pringle, Jacqui Cook, Susan Sontag

Coming across as a rarified boob, Russell’s version of Rousseau could best be described as an accidental master. Most of his canvases are crackpot versions of reality as seen through the eyes of a naïve painter, and his loneliness and lack of worldly perspective really amplifies his applied amateurishness. Russell treats this tale as sadly comic, and there are many jokes and jibes as Rousseau’s expense. In fact, there is such a lighthearted atmosphere here that when we finally view the artist’s best known masterpiece – “The Sleeping Gypsy” – it comes as quite a shock. Indeed, many of Russell’s films purposely demystify the legendary, showing them just as capable of flaws and foibles as us mere humans. Indeed, as he continued on in his career, the filmmaker would make such an approach his main raison d’etra. Much of his work here can be seen as the basis for Women in Love, Tommy, and his ultimate classical rock god goof, Listzomania.

Always on Sunday (1965), though the onscreen title is Henri Rousseau Sunday Painter. Among its connections with the Debussy film, it’s co-written by Melvyn Bragg and focuses on a French artist of the same period. Oliver Reed is the narrator. Starring as Henri Rousseau is James Lloyd, a primitive artist with some similarities to Rousseau and who had been the subject of another Russell TV film.

The rural, working-class Rousseau (calling himself Henry) is a serious and naive clod who comes to Paris in his 40s with the intention of showing himself a great realist painter, never mind that everyone laughs at the strange, brightly-colored, primitive originality of his pictures. His first friend is “the pataphysical midget” Alfred Jarry (played by a woman, Annette Robertson, who’d played one of Debussy’s mistresses), who romps through this portion of the film. Russell stages the riotous premier of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, a deliberate assault on its bourgeois audience, and Russell clearly relishes the confrontation and the sentiments behind it; look at a similar sequence in the next film, when Isadora Duncan harangues a hostile audience. For all its rowdy moments, this is possibly the gentlest film of the six and the wittiest, because of the qualities of Rousseau himself and his art.

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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DK

23Mar12

Truly truly truly under-appreciated. Scripted by Melvyn Bragg, Rousseau is played as a Yorkshireman in Swinging London/Paris. This plays out like the bastard child of Richard Lester and early Truffaut, in the best possible sense.

DK

23Apr12

And is Susan Sontag really in this?

richmondhill

13Dec11

Another small peak from Russell's televisual purple patch with an appropriately mordant reading of Rousseau's life and career. The casting of Lloyd - all flat vowels and dour gesticulations - provides a neat counterpoint to the florid naivety of the painter's work and cuts through the beret and garlic cliché of the French artist.