I Love The Music Lovers

For a while there, we were getting Ken Russell films on blu-ray fast and furious.  Then it slowly petered out.  But the BFI is back with another HD debut, 1971's The Music Lovers.  Hopefully, it's not a one-off.  I'd love to see blus of Dance Of the Seven Veils, Lisztomania, Savage Messiah, Salome's Last Dance, Lady Chatterley, Mind Bender and of course The Devils.  In Search Of the English Folk Song would be fun, too, and maybe a collection of his early BBC shorts.  But this is a major one off the wish list.

The Music Lovers is one of Russell's best composer films, possibly the best, which is really saying something.  Specifically, this one's about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, played by Richard Chamberland.  The great Glenda Jackson plays his troubled wife and Russell regular Christopher Gable plays his DL gay lover.  Yes, this is a surprisingly progressive story for 1971, and yes, Russell does present us with a supremely English Russia, though he does a nice job capturing some of the proper architecture in his sets.  Look for Bruce Robinson, writer and director of Withnail & I and The Killing Fields, in a supporting role.  It's at times one of Russell's more grounded theatrical ventures, but at other times it goes as colorfully bombastic as you can imagine.  And as always, one of the film's greatest strengths in Russell's ability to invoke imagery to match the maestro's composition, and to intuitively sync the man's biography with his work.

In the US, all we got was a barebones DVDR from MGM in 2011, which was better than nothing at least.  The UK got almost the exact same disc from Final Cut Entertainment that same year, but at least it was a properly pressed DVD.  The back of its case it's "4:3 Full Frame," but fortunately no, it's properly 16x9 2.37:1.  That's been my go-to disc until now, as the BFI has just released a brand new, special edition blu-ray.

2011 Final Cut DVD top; 2024 BFI BD top.

The BFI booklet's "About the Presentation" page only says that they got the master from MGM, so I'm guessing this isn't a fresh new 2 or 4k scan, or they'd tell us so.  Still, it's clearly a newer master than the DVD.  The colors are better separated and the framing has been refined to a more precise 2.35:1. 
Film grain is light when it's present at all, and the edges look a little tweaked (some of those highlights seem overly cranked), again suggesting an older HD master, but it's certainly clearer than the DVD (which has worse edge enhancement) with more vibrant colors and a generally satisfying image, albeit nothing cutting edge.

Final Cut's DVD just has the original 2.0 stereo track.  BFI upgrades that track to LPCM and throws in a "bonus" DTS-HD 5.1 mix.  The blu-ray also includes optional English subtitles, which the DVD does not.

Our special edition starts off with an audio commentary by film historian Matthew Melia, and its rather excellent.  I think we've been getting burned more and more by modern "experts" who take a very lazy approach to commentaries, where they come with only a few basic facts and just wing it for two hours, wandering off into tangents about their childhoods, unrelated films or whatever springs to mind in their free associations.  This, on the other hand, is a nice reminder of the value of a real expert who's prepared and here to inform.  Then there's a vintage, audio-only interview from 1988 with screenwriter Melvyn Bragg, which also plays as a second commentary over the film.  Unfortunately, he doesn't mention The Music Lovers once, and only takes one question near the end about his work as a screenwriter at all (where he talks about his disappointment with his 1968 film Isadora being shorn of approximately thirty minutes).  Instead it's all about his years producing The South Bank Show, which is still somewhat interesting, at least if you've ever seen the show. But unlike the Melia commentary, I'd only recommend listening to it if you're familiar with his that program.

Besides those, though, we get plenty more goodies.  First is an amusing interview with Russell's son, who talks about working as an extra in this and other of his father's films, plus his frustrations with The Fall Of the Louse Of Usher.  Then there's a short film of Ken Russell's strange, original ballet Charlotte Brontë Enters the Big Brother House (the story of Brontë's life as told through the prism of the reality show Big Brother).  The film consists of a behind-the-scenes 'making of' followed by the entire ballet itself, edited for film.  Those are the treats.  Then, for more serious Tchaikovsky fans, we get three 1950s newsreels about him and a brief 1940 film of an excerpt from Swan Lake.  There's also a stills gallery of costume designs, the theatrical trailer and a 40-page booklet.  In short, it's another must-have in Russell's filmography on home video.  Let's hope BFI never stops pumping out releases like this.