Ken Russell | Salome’s Last Dance / 1988

the importance of being naughty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ken Russell (writer, after the play by Oscar Wilde as translated by Vivian Russell, and director) Salome’s Last Dance / 1988

 

I must admit that I am not exactly fond the films of Ken Russell, who approaches basically classic 19th and early 20th century artists and their works by preliminarily deconstructing their lives and literary structures before he transforms them into camp parodies with large budgets, flamboyant sets, and lots of garish colors he pretends to make into extravagantly transgressive statements. It’s somewhat like Cecile B. DeMille in his later years aspiring to be a kind of Charles Ludlam who produces works viewed by his white suburban admirers who leave the theater feeling that they just experienced something vaguely avant garde and sexually naughty that simultaneously has provided them with a sense of educational uplift. He is a bit like a giddy interior decorator with a big story to tell.

     It reminds me somewhat of a course I once taught on contemporary performative art and theater works to a class made up of suburban Philadelphia back-to-school adults at Tyler School of Art outside of Philadelphia. They loved it; for them it was like reading The Village Voice and understanding most of its art, theatrical, and literary references without having to travel to New York to see them.

     Russell’s 1988 film Salome’s Last Dance might almost be submitted as exhibit A for evidence for what I said above. Evidently, as early as 1974 a drunken and always ready to be seen as outrageous gentleman Russell, having caught a stage production by Lindsay Kemp—the gay mime, actor, dancer who had an affair with David Bowie and staged and performed in the Ziggy Stardust concerts—of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, began calling studios declaring he could film the work with Kemp for only 120,000 pounds. Several studios were very keen on the idea until they discovered that Salome was to be portrayed by a man in drag. But Alan Ladd Jr. at 20th Fox was willing to go ahead with the idea, imagining that even if the film were to bomb it would make back such a modest investment. But upon seeing the production for a second time, Russell got cold feet and backed out of the project.

      Yet somehow remnants of the idea must have continued ricocheting through the forever frothing vaults of Russell’s brain since he finally decided to return to the concept as part of his three-film deal with Vestron Studios (who’d had a great hit in Dirty Dancing the previous before, 1987), this time casting, against all of Strauss operatic conceptions, a twiggy-like newcomer with little on-film acting experience, Imogen Millais-Scott, who due to a glandular fever went blind three weeks before filming. Not to be outwitted by his own outrageousness and assurances to bring the film in with a budget of a million, Russell insisted she remain in the role.

     The New York Times Vincent Canby found her a “quite legitimate Salome” despite the fact that she was “small, slight, and blond, with a heart-shaped face and...and a Cockney accent,” describing her as being “part-Lolita, part-Giulietta Masina and part Cecily from The Importance of Being Earnest.”

     Time Out was far nastier in their summation of her acting talents, if not entirely mistaken by describing her as “seemingly a graduate of the Toyah Wilcox School of Over Emphatic Diction and Hyper-active Eyelids.” Let us just say she has none of the allure of the silent version of Wilde’s play on screen performed by Alla Nazimova.

      It doesn’t truly matter, at least at first, since the real focus of Russell’s film appears to be Wilde himself (Nickolas Grace) and his lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas (Douglas Hodge) who on Guy Fawkes Day in 1892 arrive at Alfred Taylor’s (Stratford Johns) and Lady Alice’s (Glenda Jackson) co-ed bordello for a little fun in bed, where secretly the whorehouse workers, Taylor, and Lady Alice, and the brothel maid (also Millais-Scott) have planned a special performance for their dear friend. Since the English Lord Chamberlain has banned Sarah Bernhardt from performing Wilde’s play on stage due to the fact that it concerns religious figures, the denizens of this whorehouse plan a one night only private performance of the work, with Bosie as John the Baptist, Lady Alice as Herodias, and Taylor as Herod, with regular customers and other prostitutes, male and female, performing in the minor roles. Russell himself plays a photographer of the events, an in-joke since the director began his career as a still photographer.

     Near the small basement stage, upon a couch stuffed with colorful outsized pillows like something out of The Arabian Nights or a hippie pipe dream, Wilde sits. Sipping on champagne and later on the face and eventually—we presume since for a long period of the performance he disappears with the boy—the penis of one of the minor actors whose face is painted gold, after which he witnesses most of the single performance of his banned play.

      While Wilde is permitted to escape for a period and even Herodias gets an opportunity to fuck the two beefy soldiers in a large offstage costume box, as we are forced to sit out the play which, having watched it now three times in a silent film version and twice in this cinematic rendition is, quite frankly—unlike Strauss’ opera which I have now seen twice—insufferable as a piece of theater. 

      Despite the truly great acting talents of Johns and Jackson, Wilde’s lines do not exactly lyrically float from his script. Even Herodias is ready to strangle her incestuous husband—as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he is the brother of her previous husband whom he murdered—evokes the natterings of the imprisoned prophet as being meaningless words from his God and his complaints about the strangeness of the moon, or suddenly, after staring at his step-daughter for hours, demands once more that she dance for him. In fact, the only straight-talker in the bunch is Herodias (Jackson).

      And I’m sorry, but if I have to listen one more time to Salome compare John the Baptist’s voice, hair, and lips to every lovely experience her small inexperienced head she can imagine, I too may run off with the page boy.

      Actually Russell might very much like that. Because the play, as lovely as he occasionally frames it, is not really what interests the director either. Roger Ebert speaks insightfully about this director’s talents when he writes:

 

 “What do we learn from this approach, and indeed from this film? Not much, except that Russell is addicted, as always, to excesses of everything except purpose and structure. After his previous film, Gothic which re-created a weekend idyll involving Shelley and Byron, Russell demonstrates again that he is most interested in literary figures when their trousers are unbuttoned. And even then, he isn't interested in why, or how, they carry on their sex lives; like the defrockers of the scandal sheets, he wants only to breathlessly shock us with the news that his heroes possessed and employed genitals.”

     What we feel Russell cares more about are the naked breasted Amazon-like guards who whip and torture the sexually-pure John, or the lascivious dwarfed Jews sitting at Herod’s table who—in what surely must be one of the most blatantly anti-Semitic scenes of late 20th century cinema—endlessly fuck the bordello’s female beauties. The camera spends more time focusing on the inexplicable appearance of three cross-dressers who advise Herod than on the plot.

     And, of course, he knows what Herod and his entire audience is truly waiting for, Salome’s infamous dance. A veiled body-double of the sickly Millais-Scott goes through the grinds before lifting up the final article of clothing you might describe as a veil to reveal—o quelle surprise—

something approximating Lindsay Kemp’s old cock!

     When the truly sick Salome begins to tongue-kiss John the Baptist’s severed head, we all know it’s time to toss a spear into her body and call in the police, which Russell predictably does, to arrest not only the owners of this house of shame, Alfred Taylor and Lady Alice, and way ahead of his actual arrestment in 1895, Wilde himself for his relationship with Bosie, the boy whose head is still on the silver platter as the story ends.

     While Wilde quips that the play should be performed again, this time with him playing John the Baptist and Bosie playing Salome—obviously suggesting that it is he who has been the innocent seduced and punished for his purity—Lady Alice, told that her chamber maid has died, insists that it is been nothing more than a “misadventure”: “She slipped on a banana skin.” The three scoundrels raucously laugh as the police wagon carries them off. Evidently the real joke behind Russell’s farce is that the whole affair has been something akin to a snuff film, a film in which instead of appearing to kill the heroine actually murdered actually murdered her.

     Sorry if I missed the cleverness and humor of the whole thing. I guess for our educational edification Russell has shown us just how truly perverted old Oscar and his queer friends were. He ought to have been locked up in Reading Goal—and the key thrown away. And what a naughty play that was!

     For several years now this movie has been difficult for US citizens to get hold of. It is now, however, featured on the British Film Institute’s (BFI) new internet site. But as far as I am concerned, they can put it back into its can.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Amos Guttman | נגוע (Nagu'a) (Drifting) / 1982

how to move

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amos Guttman and Edna Mazia (screenplay), Amos Guttman (director) נגוע (Nagu'a) (Drifting) / 1982

 

This discussion is particularly painful for me. In a country where gay marriage is still not permitted because of the Jewish Orthodox religious values, but recognizes gay marriage taking place elsewhere, a young 28-year old filmmaker, who had previously directed three short films, one of which was earlier version of Drifting, tried to express on film a viewpoint that was far too radical for his own countrymen and even New York critics such as the haughty The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin could comprehend. If he has since become a legend in Israeli cinema, he is still unknown to most US and perhaps even European film enthusiasts. Just to watch this film immediately brings tears to my eyes.

     Even the film blurb says it all without saying anything at all: “A young gay Israeli man works in his grandmother's store while dreaming of becoming a film-maker.”

     That is most certainly the truth. But it says nothing of his, the character in the film Robi’s (Jonathan Sagalle) feelings, his longings, his own self-hate, the mess he is making of his own life.

     He has moved into his grandmother’s house only because she is the most accepting homophobe he knows, and turns away from the fact that when he brings young men he meets in Tel Aviv’s gay night cruising grounds, Independence Park (Gan Ha'atzmaut), she looks away—clearly with disgust—but generally with no comment. It is a familiar version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” even if at several moments in the film she does explode with her hatred of his behavior.

     But there is a limit, and the night he meets up with three young innocents from Haifa, Han (Ami Traub), Ezri (Ben Levin) and Rachel (Dita Arel), who have missed their bus home and have no money, there is a limit. Robi is attracted less for the far more flamboyant Han than he is to Ezri, who he takes aside for a blow job, voyeuristically enjoyed by other park participants. But the trio are all without a place to stay for the night, and beg him for a place to stay for the night. He reluctantly allows them to crash at his grandmother’s house.

     Actually, the story goes nowhere from there. Robi tentatively falls for Ezri, but doesn’t pursue the relationship. He is far more interested in his career as a filmmaker. These three figures show up again in a gay bar encounter, and Robi abuses them by making the two males strip and engage in a sexual act while pretending he is directing them in his imaginary movie, actually abusing them in forcing them to pretend sex as if it might be a film, even though he assures them they will never appear in his imaginary movie.

    In fact, Robi’s filmmaking seems to be mostly an imaginary act since he can get so financial support and is turned down again and again by all the organizations which might support such independent filmmaker, including the major Israeli organization on whose site I paid for permission to watch this remarkable film.

     Later, he even invites in two Arab boys, on-the-run terrorists, one severely injured. He engages in sex with one of the men, playing the role of a passive and dismissive whore, standing against the wall and pulling down his underwear to attract a male who could never admit he was a homosexual.

     This is the final limit for his previously accepting grandmother, who refuses to any longer host the two dangerous outsiders. For Robi, all of his friends are outsiders, people not permitted in his society.

     When it was shown briefly in 1984 in the US, Maslin dismissed it, her review stating its hostility in its first sentences:

 

“The chief character in Amos Guttman's Drifting, which opens today at the 8th Street Playhouse, is a desultory would-be film maker. ''I'm busy with my film right now'' is the sort of thing he likes to say, although during the course of Drifting his only activities related to film making are to wonder how he can raise some money and muse about whether it would be worthwhile to dramatize the life of Ramon Novarro.”

 

     What she can’t imagine, apparently, is that the movie itself is its own statement, a film about the very concerns the young would be direction might have had as a frightened Israeli filmmaker. He has indeed made the movie, and we are witnessing the process that went into that remarkable result? The blindness of her statements, and those of others of the day, can only frustrate those of us who enjoy his art. This is a movie, for god’s sake, about its own making. It’s not a profound perception; the movie itself states it over and over again. The imaginary becomes real through our encounter with it.

     And, frankly, this is a desultory and problematic experience for the young director working in a world which is quite hostile. He himself cannot fully accept the love of even those he seeks, such as the beautiful Ezri. He tries to resolve his own confusion with a female partner. This is a messy film about the problems, even the ridiculousness of trying to be gay in a society which is not at all fully able in those days. Guttman was a rough rebel who even today is exceptional, the current major gay filmmaker, Eytan Fox declaring quite insistently that he is not going to explore the territory of this innovative director, seeking for more assimilative ground.

    Things don’t go easy in Drifting. All the characters are lost and seeking some sort of temporary respite. Robi is allowed only by his grandmother’s ability to generally look away from what she perceives as despicable, simply out of love for her own kind.

     Despite his now sacred position in Israeli gay cinema, Guttman’s earliest film seems, at least in English, to have little valid commentary.

     The best we get is from Bobby Karmi in a Letterboxd review from 2023, commentary which is actually quite brilliant and moving. I quote at length its first three paragraphs for their truly accurate and concise perception of the depths of this early film:

 

“Drifting offers such a precise moment in queer film history that it's hard to not somehow become enraptured with its specificness and novelty as a cultural artifact in place of it as an aesthetic one as well. It is at once a work of early queer New Wave very intentionally about an attempt to capture an authentic queer experience in a way that may not be palatable to the status quo, literally represented in the first scene as a young would-be filmmaker discusses his own ambitions to create queer art that doesn't try to moralize his sexuality or to appease the status quo of an inherently homophobic Israeli government (one that still won’t perform marriages in its borders, for the record), but instead to create something meaningful and personal to the artist that may resonate with others who have lived similar experiences. It is a portrait of a lonely young man attempting meaningful connections yet confined to one-night stands when all that is available is an unorganized and amorphous queer scene that hardly protects itself, all the while being hounded by an “accepting” but nonetheless deeply homophobic family that cannot understand his desires either romantically or professionally.

      It is a work of long nighttime walks in dark parks so as to find someone only then able to be out in public about their queerness without fear of violence against them, as shown later on in the film during a scene in which Robi attempts to solicit a former colleague in broad daylight and is met with discomfort and further ostracization. It's a work of strained familial and platonic connections as people ebb and flow into each other's lives as money becomes increasingly difficult to come across and as love begins to strain as apathy and indifference manifest. It is ultimately a bleak, profoundly lonely work about queerness and alienation, but it is one that I feel increasingly drawn to. Its director, Amos Guttman, is something of a missing link from the flamboyant and wonderfully designed but nevertheless socially conscious satires of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the beat neck lonely young outsiders of Gus Van Sant, both in terms of aesthetics of detailed mise-en-scene and overtly political themes and discussion of them (Robi as he introduces his film he struggles to make looks directly into the camera challenging us to object to his art while going against seemingly every neo-liberal sentiment in regards to queer art) and frank depictions of loneliness and eroticism.

     For the importance of this connective tissue, I worry that Guttman is being forgotten beyond the specific context of Israeli queer cinema, Guttman often being seen as the first out filmmaker to create films on the subject. Part of this could be accessibility, as I’ve noticed how hard it is to come across any Israeli film that isn’t a war film or something made by a contemporary auteur, but I do think it is because he touched nerves in a way that few filmmakers do, making non-judgmental films about these subjects living in a barely legal state. His work is profound in its depictions of existential loneliness and the attempts of political subversion within Israeli society, going against the presumed status quo even on an aesthetic level, preferring something more ornate and colorful to the social realism that defined and continues to define the dominant cinematic Israeli aesthetic. Likewise, this is a deeply unconventional film, with a dominant theme of stagnation and an inability to make progress due to either self-destructive or outward forces that don’t comfortably show everything working out in the end, with only slight material gain made by Robi via a donation from his absent mother. I look at this movie and I see the difficulty of getting out of a rut, of coming of age again as an adult as you continually make steps to try and become the person you are meant to be only for it to come crashing down and mundane tragedy, forced to endure emotional constipation as second puberty racks your mind and your emotions.”

 

     No, this is not a great film; this is a film about a film-in-the-making that shows us what it is to become a filmmaker in a society that no one wants in a world that is always slightly askew from what you perceive reality to be. This film spins out of logic into the perception that any gay man knows to be his daily life, never quite what the ordinary he imagines, a vertigo that will never disappear no matter how hard he tries. How do you move forward?: you make a movie about how difficult it is to even move.

 

Los Angeles, July 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).