Guitar Craze

United Kingdom

1959

10 Min

Black and White

English

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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Also known as Guitar Craze and the more evocative Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts, this Monitor item (Ken Russell’s third for the pioneering BBC arts strand) offers a whistle-stop tour of how Britons are enthusiastically taking up the guitar in all sorts of ways. The instrument’s sudden popularity came about as a by-product of the skiffle revival, which led a wide range of people to form bands whose instrumentation was generally as cheap and cheerful as possible. Washboards and comb-and-paper combinations were common, and the only conventional musical instrument was often the humble acoustic guitar.

Russell’s lively film pays tribute to the hand-me-down nature of the skiffle movement in the opening sequence, in which a group of children create an impromptu band from assorted junkyard items, including a discarded piano. One of them, Laurie, is then whisked off to a music shop to buy a guitar, with which he later accompanies his beloved Elvis Presley singing ‘Hound Dog’. The following sequence shows assorted would-be guitarists being drilled by their no-nonsense teachers, one of whom visits his pupils at Wormwood Scrubs prison.

If there’s a certain element of finger-wagging about the importance of technique and practice in this section, Russell compensates by going on to illustrate the potential rewards (talent permitting). The then 18-year-old Davey Graham gives a spellbinding jazz performance in a run-down building site, attracting an understandably enthusiastic crowd in the process. This was in fact the film that made Graham’s reputation – he would go on to become one of the leading figures in the following decade’s folk-rock revival.

Another expert performance is given by classical guitarist John Williams (a few months younger than Graham, and similarly destined for future greatness in his field) while Davina Dundas sings a French chanson in the shadow of the Albert Memorial. But perhaps the most heartfelt performance in the whole film is that given by a group of Salvation Army volunteers, for whom the guitar is the most convenient instrument for impromptu public performance. Above all, the film is keen to stress the sheer ease of taking it up: although a classical guitarist needs twelve year’s study, you only need twelve hours or so to master a three chord rock’n’roll riff.

This was the first of Russell’s “survey” films for Monitor, and would be followed in 1960 by the dance equivalent, the even more eclectic The Light Fantastic. —BBC

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

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 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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