TheLittleSongbird
Salome's Last Dance is one of those films that will fascinate people or repulse them very like director Ken Russell's directorial style. First viewing I disliked it, seeing it again in a better mood just recently it was much better than remembered, though for me one of Russell's weaker films. A few things stop it from being a masterpiece. Russell does go overboard with the excess at times- not unusual for Russell- and some of those excessive images are disgustingly ugly, especially with Salome licking saliva off her face. Russell also writes himself in an acting role as a photographer and is rather embarrassingly bad and in a somewhat creepy way. Imogen Millais-Scott I had mixed feelings on, she is gorgeous, seductive and age-appropriate, though with a tendency to mug. Even with the excess, Salome's Last Dance does maintain the spirit of Oscar Wilde's play Salome with its beauty and ability to shock. The film is expertly filmed and the production values are a mix of the hypnotisingly beautiful and the decadent, which is hardly inappropriate(Strauss' opera Salome, which I personally love, has those qualities too). The music is a hodgepodge of classical music, and a wonderful hodgepodge at that, Rimsky-Korsakov and especially Debussy the prime composers and they further add to the beautiful yet shocking atmosphere. They are performed very well and mostly fit within the film. The script is witty and uproarious, Herodias has some truly hilarious lines, and the story is interestingly structured with a good touch of the theatrical and the cinematic. You cannot take your eyes away from the dance scene either. Most of the acting is better than its given credit, Glenda Jackson and Stratford Johns especially. Jackson is a little bizarre but also very regal and authoritative and Johns is suitably wry and mischievous, making a potentially tiresome character interesting. Nickolas Grace is a witty Oscar Wilde and Douglas Hodge a mostly effectively warning John the Baptist though he does over-compensate a bit. Overall, easy to see why people will dislike it, it's far from perfect but has interest points and entertainment value. 6.5/10 Bethany Cox
bandw
Oscar Wilde's play "Salome" is staged within this movie as Wilde himself looks on from a couch in a male brothel. I cannot determine if Wilde's play is a bomb, or whether it is this amateurish production that is such. I have rarely been as irritated by a performance as that of Imogen Millais-Scott in her portrayal of Salome. I was grossly put off by her constant mugging. And after a dozen or so times of her saying, "I want to kiss your mouth, John the Baptist," I felt that if she were to say it again, I would scream. She did, and I did.How Glenda Jackson wound up in this mess is a puzzle. What a waste. Nickolas Grace plays Wilde as a walking and talking epigram machine with no depth. Compare his Wilde with Stephen Fry's in "Wilde" and you will see how paltry Grace's performance is. Douglas Hodge, looking eerily like the late-stage Michael Jackson, plays John the Baptist (in the "Salome" play) with an overwrought energy that gets on your nerves. I felt like cheering when Glenda Jackson said, "Shut him up." If you find flatulence and belching humorous, then parts of this film will entertain you. If not, be warned that that is how desperate things get.The music is a hodgepodge of overworked classical pieces.After the play within the movie ends we see tears coming to Wilde's eyes. I could not figure out if he was thinking, "God, did I actually write that horrible thing," or "That was so bad as to make one cry."I have to give this a star for the sheer spectacle of it - I give it credit for being uniquely imagined. And another star for the dance scene, even though a "body double" was used for the crucial climax.In summary, I quote Glenda Jackson's exhortation to members of the cast, "Shut them up, they bore me."
mickmca
This tiresome movie is a gutless snuff film wannabe. Its prancing, simpering misogyny would never have succeeded if it weren't gauzed up with fashionable "sexual preferences."Russell manages neatly to solarize Wilde's Salome, capturing and exaggerating everything in it that is opposite to the elements that make Strauss' Salome one of the great operas. Glib, arch decadence is a steamy, mechanical dead end, and this movie is the deadest. It has all the wit of poop jokes and pornographic caricatures of the Mona Lisa.D. H. Lawrence was contemptuous of decadence. The "marriage" of Lawrence and Russell was a rape, folks. And Lawrence was dead.
sin-a-ma
Sick, twisted, bizarre, blasphemous, shocking, and perverse. In short, everything I look for in a Ken Russell movie. The 'professionial' critics really missed the point on this one.
AD
