Cinema Night
Brash Australian MAN and earnest but out of her depth WOMAN with her script on a clipboard present a TV cinema programme.
MAN: G’day, and welcome to Cinema Night. Tonight we’re going to be looking at the latest chef d’oeuvre from that enfant terrible of the British cinema Ken Russell, namely his adaptation of Tales of the Riverbank, which he has entitled Hamsters in Love.
WOMAN: (coming in too soon) But this of course is only one theme in a work which –
MAN: Later, dear, later. At its press showing, Hamsters in Love had even the most hardened critics pushing the usherettes off their laps so they could watch the film. ‘Stunning,’ said The Times. ‘An experience to savour,’ said the Spectator. ‘I’ve only come in out of the rain,’ said a man who’d only come in out of the rain. Hamsters in Love, what is it? Well, it’s a film – a film which contains all the elements we’ve come to expect from Ken Russell. It’s a magnificent montage, a deeply moving statement, and – if one may use the term, and I think one may – an existential pot pourri containing all Russell’s unique blend of striking imagery, noise, and bad taste. Every character rings painfully true, from the pathetic figure of the artist-hamster struggling to fit into society, right down to the tiniest cameo role of the homosexual squirrel who tries to seduce him.
WOMAN: But this of course is only one theme in a work which manages to weave a complex
tapestry of interlocking motifs. In recent years Russell has found in television programmes a whole new world of total innocence, and with the blind inse’tivity of the fake artist, he has introduced into this clustered env’roment his familiar themes of sexual perversion and gratuous brutally. Here, as in his epic five-hour version of the Grandstand racing results, Russell has touched the very core of life, he has held the sickly world of talking pests up to scrutiny, and asked such impertinent questions as ‘Why does Johnny Morris keep putting on so many childish voices?’ and ‘Where did a rat learn to drive a speedboat?’
MAN: In a series of searing confrontations, Russell exposes the daily struggle for life in a televised ethos. It’s a world where dog eats dog, where badgers bite field mice, where weasels take little nips out of moles, and stoats have small hares cold for lunch on Sundays. The cut and thrust of the daily routine is most movingly brought out in that marvellous sequence towards the end where Hammy, under the Mephistophelean influence of the guinea pig, commits rape on what he takes to be a female hamster, but what turns out to be Great Uncle Bulgaria Womble. ‘Get your end away as often as possible,’ Russell seems to be saying, ‘provided you don’t stray onto the sets of rival programmes.’ Violence is, as always in Russell, a metaphor – for violence. Russell’s motto seems to be, ‘If it moves, cut it off and film the stump,’ and this, in that moving close-up of Roddy the Rat’s circumcision ceremony, is exactly what he does.
WOMAN: For me, the real key to the film is the image of Roddy’s speedboat. It’s not so much a speedboat qua speedboat as a speedboat percy. In the slow sensual way it noses towards the camera in that almost overwhelmingly beautiful – and phallic – opening shot, one feels he has perfectly captured the whole thrusting slowness of the rodent’s unusual cop’latry technik. If one may refer to previous works of Russell’s in this connection – and I think one may –
MAN: One may, yes.
WOMAN: – I was reminded of the spectacular climax to Blue Peter, released by Universal in 1973.
(long pause. MAN impatiently stabs WOMAN’s script to prompt her to continue)
WOMAN: – where John Noakes, after building a sacrificial effigy of Twiggy out of an old Sqezy bottle and the two halves of a dissected aniseed ball, rushes into the snow and, in a pathetic pr’yxysm of jubilation, exposes himself to the hibernating tortoise. One feels this somehow captures the whole pointlessness of existence, and it is an eloquent and yet such an economic symbol of the film’s tittle.
MAN: Hamsters in Love was filmed on location and in an Elmtree studio. The lyrical love scenes between Hammy and his bit of fur were filmed in the surrounding fields of corn, and the supporting cast includes, just for a change, Robert Vole, Oliver Reed – who spends most of his time bowing at the water’s edge – and Edward Fox as the villain of the piece.
WOMAN: Russell says his next work is to be an adaptation of The Galloping Gourmet into a rock opera called Tummy, and I shall be previewing this next week.
MAN: And I shall be looking at just some of the reasons why middle-aged film directors turn into hippies who think they can see profound metaphysical truths in silly little rock musicals. But that’s next week. Until then, g’day.
WOMAN: Good night.
In performance at the Edinburgh Festival, 1977. That’s the excellent Jane C. And I am wearing a pair of crimson satin flares over my dark suede zip-up desert boots. The butter-yellow safari jacket I acquired for my Bristol-Bordeaux Exchange trip in 1972. I can still fit into it, though my wife refuses to let me wear it out of the house, and even at the time, my mother doubted it’s practicality. I think it was the first occasion on which I actually heard the phrase “neither use nor ornament”, though I have heard it said many, many times since…