Director in a Caftan

A BBC current affairs show flickers onto British TV screens. The moderator introduces Ken Russell, director of The Devils, and Alexander Walker, film critic of the London Evening Standard. Crikey! another of those urbanely boring panel discussions. But wait. Russell and Walker are turning red in the face, shouting at each other. Walker attacks The Devils for "monstrous indecency . . . simplemindedness . . . gross harping on the physical. . ." Russell attacks Walker as "old-womanly . . . a carping critic ... hysterical . . ." Then Russell rolls up a copy of the newspaper containing Walker's review and swats him on the head with it.

A rather excessive way for a director to reply to his critics? Perhaps. But then everything about Ken Russell is excessive, from his appetite for food and music to the caftans, Mickey Mouse shirts, canes and monocles he sometimes affects. "This is not the age of manners," he says. "This is the age of kicking people in the crotch and telling them something and getting a reaction. I want to shock people into awareness. I don't believe there's any virtue in understatement."

Especially not when he makes his movies. In 1970 there was D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, with its male-nude wrestling, symbolic bulls and drowned lovers. Then early this year came The Music Lovers, a biography of Tchaikovsky, which, as Russell describes it, is "the story of a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac." This summer, there is The Devils, an account of religious hysteria in a 17th century French town; in it, a far from celibate priest is accused of bewitching an order of nuns, and is tortured and burned alive.

The New Twiggy. All of which has made Russell, at 43, the most provocative director in the business. Last week the Venice Film Festival canceled a public showing of The Devils in order to head off a threatened police raid, and L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, denounced Russell-a Roman Catholic convert-for his "perverted marriage of sex, violence and blasphemy." Says Russell: "They miss the point totally. The Devils is about the way church and state worked together to condemn an innocent man. These things actually happened. The critics don't like to recognize this, and they don't like it treated as I have treated it." A few do, however. A beleaguered minority have praised Russell's imagination, powerful pictorial sense and flair for heightened drama.

While the argument rages, Russell has been busy in London editing his new film. It is an adaptation of Sandy Wilson's 1954 musical pastiche of the '20s, The Boy Friend, starring ex-Model Twiggy, 21, in her acting debut. "A natural," says Russell. "The greatest thing to hit the screen since Monroe." Russell says the script, which he roughed out in five days as "therapy" after The Devils, is at once "a typical stage musical of the '20s, an homage to the great film musical fantasies and a satire on all the backstage Hollywood musicals of all time."

Russell is a throwback to the oldtime Hollywood. His plump features and lank gray locks give him the air of a cherubic monk turned hippie. It is when he loses his temper that he blazes into the autocrat of movie legend. "He's doing a Von Stroheim again," go the whispers when he explodes over a misplaced prop or demands that costumes be sewn overnight. One long-suffering colleague, when asked what kind of childhood Russell had, rolled his eyes to the ceiling and replied: "He's having it now."

"Artists are explainable by what they produce," says Russell. Both sides of his own output-The Devils and The Boy Friend-are deeply rooted in his background. The son of a shoe-and boot-shop owner in Southampton, he was a "happy but lonely" boy who spent long hours in his favorite chestnut tree acting out stories in his head. At 17 he went to nautical college, distinguishing himself at a school musical by leading the cadets through a Carmen Miranda routine in drag. Sea life held no attractions for him, so he returned to Southampton, where he mooned about the house, painted, and discovered a passion for classical music, which he indulged by dancing naked round a blaring record player.

Russell studied dancing, became an actor, then decided that photography might offer more security. By the time he was 30 he was a successful freelancer in London. "Even then," recalls a photographer crony, "he had the Svengali effect of being able to get people to do anything."

Cleared Air. Soon he was dreaming up movies, and one of his amateur efforts landed him a job with the BBC. He made 29 films for television, mostly on creative personalities like Frederick Delius, Isadora Duncan and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Those, and others, have since been seen on public channels in the U.S. All used actors, dialogue or fantasy sequences to interpret the documented facts as Russell saw them. Some were superbly lyrical and imaginative. "I think the films finally cleared the air of all the dreary, reverential, schoolmasterly treatments that the word documentary implied," says Russell.

This week, after shooting four films in two years without a break, Russell plans to take his wife Shirley and their five children and set sail on a three-week cruise to the Mediterranean. Even on vacation, though, sex, violence and fantasy will not be far from his mind. He must think about his forthcoming stage debut at Covent Garden, where he will direct a new opera by Peter Maxwell Davies about a 16th century religious fanatic. He is also planning "a quiet little film" about Sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a fiery iconoclast who died on a World War I battlefield. Beyond that, there is a projected film biography of Sarah Bernhardt, with Barbra Streisand cast as The Divine Sarah. However the picture turns out, insiders are already predicting that the clash of the Streisand and Russell temperaments will produce some of the best entertainment in years.

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