Smash The Mirror: A reappraisal of "Tommy" the movie
A guest post from Keith Moon biographer Tony Fletcher on the love-it-or-hate-it Who flick
For months now, my friend, fellow author and podcast co-host Tony Fletcher has been threatening to write a reappraisal of the 1975 film Tommy as a guest post for Jagged Time Lapse, and it appears that my post last week about the original Tommy LP (and its fab new-ish half speed remaster edition) has finally kicked him into gear.
Tony, of course, is the author of the definitive Keith Moon biography Dear Boy (later retitled Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend), so whatever he has to say regarding any facet of “The Bleedin’ ‘Oo” invariably comes from a place of intense research as well as deep love; so even though I dig little about the film version of Tommy beyond Arthur Brown and Elton John’s brief cameos and Ann-Margret’s bean bath, I’ve nonetheless been very interested to read Tony’s take on it.
Speaking of Tony’s take — I highly recommend subscribing to Tony Fletcher Wordsmith, which covers a whole lot more than “just” The Who. Also, here’s your occasional reminder that all paid subscribers to Tony’s Substack and/or Jagged Time Lapse will be able to listen every episode of our monthly podcast CROSSED CHANNELS in full. We have a new one on Otis Redding dropping later this week, but here’s our most recent one on The Sex Pistols:
Now then — take it away, Tony!
I did not get to see the movie of Tommy upon release in 1975. Oh, I was a Who fan alright, thoroughly sold by the age of nine or ten, playing Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy in my bedroom every single night, and starting to work my way back through the catalogue as I could beg, borrow, and occasionally buy the albums. In doing so, I skirted around the original Who double album Tommy from 1969: as Dan noted this past week in his own reflection on that ground-breaking opus, there was something suspiciously laid-back and hippie about the overall package if not some of the individual songs. Unlike Dan, however, once I did finally get to it, my appreciation was total, and continues to grow; I consider it near enough perfect as a concept and realization of that concept. (I am always curious as to what Who fans who had been following the group since the mid-60s thought of it upon its 1969 release, and if any of them are reading along, please comment.)
I do recall begging my father, on one of the rare occasions we got together (my parents were divorced), to take me to Tommy when the film came out that summer of 1975. I was 11 by now, and Tommy had a AA rating in the UK, which meant you had to be over 14 to see it. My dad pointed this out, and I pointed out in turn we could always try. We went to the Leicester Square Odeon box office. An attendant took one look at me, asked my father, “Is he 14?” with the clear inference that I was evidently not, and my dad crumbled immediately. As he took me to a consolatory meal, I remember saying to him, “Why didn’t you just lie?”
Though memory is malleable, I believe my mother finally took me to the movie; she was more willing to fudge the truth on my behalf. She also bought me the full-colour book “The Story of Tommy,” co-written by Pete Townshend with Richard Barnes, which I still own, and in excellent condition. It’s inscribed from her as a gift for Christmas 1977 (by which point I was still not 14), and a page or two after her inscription, it contains Pete Townshend’s signature, which I had forgotten all about until prepping for this article; I would have got that autograph either at the ICA in August 1978, at the launch of the Who’s Who exhibition the day I met Keith Moon for the first and last time, but more likely when I interviewed Pete in October/November 1978 for Jamming!, both encounters detailed in my memoir Boy About Town.
All this is by way of saying that Tommy – the movie - is near and dear to my heart. I have seen it many times, and upon screening it for my girlfriend a year or so back, knew that it would make good material for a reappraisal, especially as it is coming up on its 50th Anniversary. It’s a film that some people love to hate, and which others love to defend; as these screen shots from IMDB confirm, there isn’t a lot of middle ground.
Critics point out that the film, directed by Ken Russell, who made it in-between biopics of the classical composers Mahler and Liszt, is relentlessly over-the-top, has some appalling singing, occasional lapses in acting, is not a patch on The Who’s original recording, and thoroughly dates itself as mid-1970s kitsch. To which my reaction is: Yes, agreed, but what are its bad points?
I mean, okay, Tommy is not exactly The Godfather, but viewed as entertainment (and Russell went on record that his films were designed to entertain first and foremost), it’s popcorn bonanza. Here are just some of the reasons to love it:
The director. Ken Russell was at the peak of his creative powers in 1973-74, when the film was commissioned and shot. He was both an enfant terrible and a hard-working perfectionist, prone to occasional seemingly psychotic outbursts (that’s him on The Kids Are Alright film, nearly foaming at the mouth as he declares to a TV interviewer how “only The Who can stop the rot” or words to that end), and yet, in Townshend’s words, he was “a very spiritual man.” (Russell came to Tommy having recently aborted a film “about Rabelasian monks.”)
Certainly, he carried enough credibility and respect that, supplied with Townshend’s raw materials such as linfluenced the 1969 double LP - which included psychedelic graphs, Meher Baba-influenced peak hippie imagery, lots of stuff about the divide between reality and illusion, and several pages of what Townshend calls, generously, a “Hesse-like tale of mystery and intrigue” entitled “Amazing Journey” that was mercifully whittled down to a proper Who/Tommy song of the same name - Russell rewrote the story so that it made sense. The other members of The Who, who had battled through Townshend’s ever-changing plot around a deaf, dumb and blind boy knowing that at least the songs added up to something even if the plot did not, were no doubt as relieved as the film-going audience to see that Russell made a functional storyline out of it all.
Crucially, the song “1921” was retitled “1951” so that the film could be set in the same post-World War II Britain in which Townshend and The Who’s original audience had grown up. Russell then insisted Townshend extend that song to allow for an explanation of the defining incident that turns the titular child in upon himself, something Townshend intended but never got around to doing so on the original LP.
(In short and this a spoiler alert if you don’t know the story by now: Tommy’s real father, Captain Walker, “presumed to be missing with a number of men” after his plane is downed in the War, (miraculously) comes home to the house that Tommy’s mother Nora Walker has set up with her lover, “Uncle” Frank Hobbs, a Greencoat from a Butlins-like Holiday Camp. The father catches the pair in a tryst, at which Frank, deliberately or otherwise strikes Walker dead; young Tommy, who has climbed from his bed after a visitation by the (ghost of?) his father, is admonished by Frank and Nora, “You didn’t see it/you didn’t hear it," and promptly locks away his five senses.)
Russell additionally used visual references to great effect: the Christian cross in the shape of a “T” for Tommy but also that of the WWII airplanes; the ball-bearings of wartime armaments manufacturing that double later as pinballs; the poppies that reference wartime sacrifice and heroin alike. Plus, Russell commissioned further explanatory songs and music from Townshend, and much of it is solid material.
The casting. The title role of Tommy was always going to be played by Roger Daltrey, who was himself at the peak of physical prowess, an undisputed rock God not yet forced to shear his curls by the soon-come onslaught of punk. So commanding is his presence that it’s worth remembering we don’t even see Daltrey for the first 25minutes, and don’t hear him sing a word until after an hour. But when we do, his voice is on fire, in all the best senses, and he largely owns the film, just as he did the role onstage. Who fans may have reason to prefer the format of the original Tommy double LP, but on songs like “I’m Free” and indeed, the entire “Listening To You/See Me, Feel Me” finale, Daltrey helps raise the material several notches in power.
But the truly inspired casting lies elsewhere, specifically with Tommy’s parents. By pitching up Ann-Margret with Oliver Reed, Russell not only ensured box-office appeal (both were A-List superstars at the time), but created a perfect cinematic dynamic. Ann-Margret is the classically trained vocalist given to overwrought over-acting, befitting of Tommy’s mother Nora under the fictional circumstances; Reed, who couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket (recalling his audition, in an interview I conducted in 1996 and which forms a two-parter on my Substack here, he said “When Townshend first heard me sing in the studios he looked up at Ken as if it was a joke”), is nonchalant and dismissive as Frank, a classically hard-drinking “Spiv” who knows a good thing when he sees it and knows how to seize upon it. While Ann-Margret plays Nora emphatically serious throughout, Reed imbues his role with something close to comedy. On screen, their contrast makes for appropriately contrary tension between the characters, even as they stay together to profit from Tommy’s eventual transformation back to some sort of recognizable normality that itself quickly mutates into Cult Messiah.
Ann-Margret and Oliver Reed are hardly the only good choices. There’s Robert Powell, who had recently starred in Russell’s Mahler and would soon go on, controversially, to play Jesus of Nazareth, as Captain Walker, the spiritual figure at the heart of the Tommy character’s eternal quest. (It’s an unintended example of the father passing the mantle to the son that Daltrey would go on to star in Russell’s Lizst.) And Barry Winch as the child Tommy is powerfully endearing, holding the movie together while we wait for him to grow up overnight and Daltrey to take his place. And then, of course, there are the musical cameos for which the movie is so famous:
Elton John, as the Pinball Wizard, has to top any such list. Strapped into giant platform boots for which he required access through a step-ladder, he dominates the screen during the song of that name, recorded in front of a chaotic live audience at the King’s Theatre in Southsea over the course of three days; this version of the hit single that previewed the original Tommy back in 1969, became a major hit in its own right, arguably the highlight of the double album soundtrack. (Elton changed the key, the introduction, the structure, yet never detoured from Townshend’s original musical vision; it’s a tour de force. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the only song on the soundtrack recorded independently, John using his own band and Gus Dudgeon as producer; The Who’s accompaniment in the movie is purely for visual effect.)
Keith Moon, as Uncle Ernie, is in his element, playing a pedophilic dirty old man with a comic malevolence as he sets about sexually abusing his lead singer. (This, you could posit, went some way towards revenge for when Daltrey had flushed his pills down a backstage Denmark toilet in 1965, following by beating Moon up for daring to complain; then again, Daltrey was thrown out of the band temporarily for his actions back then and had been a team player ever since.) It is not necessarily Moon’s finest moment on screen - that probably dates back to the film That’ll Be The Day - but it’s his most infamous and therefore enduring.
Paul Nicholas, a confidante of the Who and a minor pop star in his own right at the time, is no less threatening as Cousin Kevin, the sadistic bully who enacts every line of John Entwistle’s vicious composition with equal glee.
Jack Nicholson, fresh off the success of Chinatown, plays “The Specialist” in the key song “Go To The Mirror,” providing sexual heat for Ann-Margret’s Nora, and likely many women of similar age in the audience.
And then there is Tina Turner, who plays the seedy Soho hooker/junkie/pusher “Acid Queen” that Frank sees fit to take Tommy to, presumably hoping that by losing his virginity Tommy may find his way back to reality. When I first saw the film, I was still too immature to fully understand this inference, let alone all the reference points of the needles and the poppies, which run rather contrary to the simultaneous acid trip of the song’s title - but Turner’s quivering legs were enough to set my own pulses raving.
As befits a movie made up of distinct separate scenes, many of which would be called “music videos” in today’s parlance, Tommy also has a few misfires, of which none shoots more blanks than “Eyesight to The Blind,” in which Eric Clapton appears almost comatose as he blandly lip-syncs his way through the Sonny Boy Williamson blues while a congregation of genuinely disabled extras (they were called “cripples” at the time, per my The Story of Tommy) seek salvation from the Bernadette of Lourdes that is Marilyn Monroe, another connection I couldn’t make at the time. Clapton’s sleepy performance has been excused by the fact that he was coming off heroin, and that the brandy was flowing that day “like tea,” and even Oliver Reed, no slouch when it came to boozing as I can testify to from my afternoon in an Irish hotel bar with him, claimed to have been taken aback by the extent to which the rock world lived life in a boozy haze. But still, and for all that Arthur Brown serves to enliven as a madcap preacher, it’s a frustrating low point.
And talking of frustrations, even for this staunch defender of Russell’s vision, the finale has always fallen short. Russell relied upon extras from the local polytechnic, and though they know exactly how to act as an audience for the Pinball Wizard scene, readily invading the stage as Townshend smashes his guitar, they don’t have the trained gravitas to act as the willing Tommy acolytes who then turn on their cult leader when they recognize they are being taken for a financial ride.
It’s not all their fault: the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It” sees the followers switch from devotees to detractors in a heartbeat, without a defining incident as Russell insisted upon for “1951.” The metaphorical rampage through the (outdoor) temple is therefore not only half-hearted and poorly acted, but the Tommy character’s subsequent and sudden Messiah-like resurrection so as to race to the mountaintop feels unduly rushed, as if it all this action has to take place within the same length of “Listening to You” rather than extending the song to benefit the film.
But then Tommy is not just a movie. It never was. It was a ground-breaking rock musical of a film the same way that Tommy the LP was a ground-breaking rock opera of a double album. It came to the screens at a time when rock music was the prevailing cultural rage, and, at least in the UK, where the film was shot, the accountants and lawyers and HR departments had not yet taken over, allowing the shooting of Tommy to be beset by legendary incidents the likes of which would probably get the movie shut down in the modern age. For example:
Writhing around in foam, baked beans and chocolate during one of two songs especially composed for the film, “Champagne”, Ann-Margret cut her hand on the jagged glass of the TV screen she’d just smashed with a bottle. Only when the foam turned pink did the crew realize there was a problem, and filming was stopped to rush her to hospital, where she received 24 stitches and various scenes had to be rescheduled accordingly. (In one of those coincidences that seemed like fate, this accident occurred the very same day she finally received news that she’d been awarded £620,000 for a serious fall she’d had a Las Vegas nightclub years earlier that had required plastic surgery and almost ended her career.)
During one of the multiple takes for the stage-invasion scene of “Pinball Wizard,” Townshend threw his guitar a little too high and hard, and gravity took full toll as it came crashing down on a female student extra’s head. More blood, more stitches; fortunately, rather than seeking damages, the girl came back on set claiming she felt “honoured” and settled for Townshend’s gift of the broken guitar. Hopefully, and unlike the “Sally Simpson” character (ably played by Ken Russell’s young daughter Victoria, who went on to become a costume designer), the wounds were not permanent. (The Who gave a private performance for the extras who requested in lieu of payment; it came fast on the heels of their 1974 show at Charlton Athletic football stadium and was, according to all who attended, one of The Who’s better shows.)
During the ballroom scene from Bernie’s Holiday Camp filmed at an appropriate venue on Southsea Pier, a small fire started – not knowingly tied to the filming but not disproven either – and the fire quickly spread out of control, leading to the destruction of much of the pier and all of the entire wardrobe vans full of the extras’ belongings.
Hiring a gang of Hell’s Angels from Sunderland to act out a fight scene between fictional rival gangs that would dissipate into peace and harmony when the newly “freed” Tommy flew over them in a hang-glider, Russell and crew were supposedly shocked – though perhaps should not have been surprised – when the gang members decided to fight for real, not just kicking and punching as if out to maim each other but wielding bike chains with intent to cause GBH. Undeterred, Russell kept to his usual demands for “one more take,” leading his presentation with an honorary leather jacket emblazoned with the words “One Last Time” in studs on the back from the gang once filming concluded.
Russell’s insistence on multiple takes was, indeed, the stuff of legend. He had Daltrey run through cornfields – barefoot – 34 times. For the scene in which Daltrey finally “smashed the mirror,” thrown through it by an angry Ann-Margret and seen crashing into baptismal water below, Russell had him endure a 16-foot dive on his back – over twenty times. On one of these occasions, Daltrey swallowed too much water and struggled to resurface. Three crew members had to jump in to rescue him.
A willing trouper throughout, Daltrey suffered the ignominy of being trapped inside the “Acid Queen”’ junkie contraption with, for separate takes, stick insects and butterflies, neither of which made it to the final cut though both “shit all over me and left,” in his own words. Understandably, he drew the line at the snakes that ultimately did some writhing of their own around the empty canister. (One of them escaped.) Nonetheless, Daltrey flew his own hang-glider, ran barefoot up the mountain for the scene’s finale, and also went unshod running through a scrapyard full of burning pinball machines, during which his hair caught fire and he was “burned all up my arm.”
And this is only the on-set mishaps. Read my interview with Oliver Reed for the account of him and Keith Moon being caught at sea in a rowing boat and swimming back to shore at dawn – a separate incident from when the pair of them went out with Townshend on the band-leader’s new boat and almost met with a similarly waterlogged demise.
The box office results indicated that all the chaos was worth it. For its $5 million budget (raised by producer Robert Stigwood), Tommy returned $35million in the US and Canada alone, where it topped the box offices for weeks on end. And haters can hate, but Ann-Margret was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress and won a Golden Globe under the same category, while Pete Townshend was nominated for an Oscar for Best Scoring, and Daltrey nominated for a Golden Globe for Debut Actor. Keith Moon received no such nominations, though it didn’t prevent him further determining that he was destined for the Silver Screen and relocating to Los Angeles with visions of Tinsel Town glory. But that’s another story.
As for the soundtrack album, it reached number two in the US charts in 1975 and went platinum, a stronger showing than the Who’s original double LP from 1969. History, rightly, has switched the albums back around in terms of critical respect, and nobody should sit down with the 90-minute Tommy soundtrack and expect a classic – remember, it does feature Oliver Reed’s singing, or attempts thereof, and many times over, without the benefit of accompanying visual effect.
That said, there are several stand-out recordings beyond those previously mentioned. I’ve always been taken by the rendition of “Sally Simpson” with Nicky Hopkins on piano and Eric Clapton on guitar each threatening to steal the performance from each other. Indeed, the brilliant Hopkins seems to be on almost every song, enlivening “Christmas,” “Cousin Kevin,” and “Amazing Journey” to name but a few more. This latter song is reworked by Townshend from its acoustic place at the heart of The Who’s double LP and given such a ballsy ensemble performance one could swear that it’s Moon on drums. It isn’t: the part is credited to Tony Newman. Moon is present, however, on “Sparks,” as are John Entwistle and Townshend, the three playing members of The Who delivering a recording closer in intensity to the live renditions of the era, with Moon on particularly vivid form. One can only regret that he was disinterested in recording too much else for the soundtrack and that so much of it went to Kenny (sic) Jones instead.
It was somewhat Townshend’s hope at the time that by allowing Tommy to be made into a film, he could let go of the project. Its runaway success on the screen instead breathed yet further life into the rock opera, and made The Who not just more popular than ever, but richer too, enabling them to buy Shepperton Studios in London and set about both The Kids Are Alright and Quadrophenia as movie projects. Keith Moon rather upset things by dying just as these films were reaching fruition, butwhile The Who’s creative legacy would never be the same again, Tommy became the gift that kept on giving.
The original rock opera has just opened on Broadway, with weekend prime seats available for $289.50. If you have that kind of money, be my guest (or actually, let me be yours), but in the meantime, the film is available for rent on Prime for under $4 or the equivalent in your local currency. For my money, I already know which offers better kitsch value, better (if unintentional) laughs, more superb one-off cameos than any other music film I can mention, and more reasons to be grateful that the mid-1970s happened… but once.
A strange coda of sorts: Years down the line, after I had written the Keith Moon biography of course, I was interviewed for a French DVD release of Tommy. As a result, my name appears on the back cover alongside - and in the same type size as - those who actually starred in the film: Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret and Oliver Reed. This was a long an unexpectedly amazing journey from standing outside the Leicester Square Odeon as an 11-year old begging my father to lie about my age. Unfortunately, I no longer own a PAL format DVD player and so I am reduced to paying to rent the movie like all the rest of us mortals.
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I think it would be a great idea to have a Tommy themed costume party!! I, of course, would be the one covered in beans over by the hors d’œuvres table!!
What a post! I went to Leicester Square in 1975 to experience Tommy in what was called ‘quintaphonic sound’. The film was an almost overwhelming experience and - well - brilliant. Yes, some of it is terrible, but the Tommy movie lives in its own universe.