On Spike Milligan, Ken Russell, and ‘the Richard Lester style’

The Milligan in his prime.

When I interviewed Unkle Ken Russell (his chosen social media handle) in 2008, I asked him a question that couldn’t be “illustrated” by the film in question, because it was under lock and key at that time on the BFI website. That film, the 1959 TV short “Portrait of a Goon” with Spike Milligan, is now available in various places online, and so I can return to the discussion about Unkle Ken, “the Richard Lester style,” and the one and only Spike Milligan.

Let me preface this discussion by noting my deep admiration for Lester — the two Beatles films, The Knack..., The Bed Sitting Room (a dazzlingly, wonderfully weird end-of-the-world comedy based on a Milligan play), and Petulia are all seminal films of the Sixties. Although his visual/editing style, which is credited as being the “beginning of the modern music video” (since Soundies were probably the first Golden Age music videos), was not as original as it seemed in 1964. Tracing influences is something I love to do on the Funhouse TV show and on this blog, so I once again want to “follow the trail” of a style back to its inception.

The Goons: Sellers, Milligan, Secombe

The “Richard Lester style” seemed to appear on the scene full-blown in the Beatles’ big-screen debut, the comedy A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Lester was not unfamiliar with madcap anarchy— his first big-screen comedy was the 1959 short “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film,” starring two of the three stars of the milestone radio comedy show, “The Goon Show,” Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The film was scripted by Milligan, Sellers, Mario Fabrizi, and “Dick” Lester, and is now credited as being directed by Lester and Sellers, along with the performance artist-inventor Bruce Lacey (who was profiled in a short made in 1962 called “The Preservation Man” by none other than… Unkle Ken!).

John Lennon was reportedly very happy Lester got the assignment to direct the Fabs’ first feature, because of his love of the Goons and his familiarity with Lester’s short. One other, sorta important figure in the Beatles’ career had an intersection with the Goons — their 1962 LP “Bridge on the River Wye” was produced by some guy named George Martin. (The cast on the LP included two younger Goon fans, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook.)

Brian Epstein, Richard Lester, producer Walter Shenson,
and four likely lads.

Lester’s approach in Hard Day’s Night was what was later called “an inventory of effects” (in another context, by Marshall McLuhan). Jumpcuts, oblique angles, sped-up and slowed-down action, breaking the axis (and the fourth wall). He certainly would’ve been familiar with silent comedy (the wellspring for visual invention), avant-garde shorts, Golden Age cartoons (esp. the Looney Tunes ones), and chaotic features like Hellzapoppin’ (1941).

“… Standing Still Film” has a much simpler approach. All the bits take place in a field and are filmed in long shot. The only two disjunctive techniques used are speeding up the film (from silent comedy; often confused with the way the films look when shown at sound speed) and a soundtrack that clashed with what is happening onscreen (loud bird chirping noises especially seem to have come out of the avant-garde playbook). The paucity of means — the film was made for just 75 pounds — surely led to the simple, anarchic (yet simplistic on a visual level) style of the short.

There is one element that connects this rather “flatly” shot short to the full-blown flowerings of the Lester style with the Beatles, namely the wild imagination (and surprisingly tight scripting) of Spike Milligan, who was cited by all the important U.K. comedians of the Sixties (and many of the Seventies) as a key influence. And yes, Spike was admired and loved by hoards of British musicians as well.

The setting of moments like the "Can't Buy Me Love" scene —an open field — retains the "foolish behavior in open spaces" concept of "Standing Still." This concept was openly stolen by "Laugh-In," which, in its earliest episodes, actually had recreations of "Standing Still" gags, including a character being summoned to the camera, whereupon he is punched in the face by a hand in a boxing glove.

Milligan was one of two comedians who suffered for his brilliance by being “put away” for a time (the other being Jonathan Winters). At its best, his humor was absurd, non-linear and, most important, it was fast — to the extent that, even if it was scripted, it seemed ad-libbed. It’s no wonder that any filmmaker who tried to adapt his work for film and television felt they had to work in a similar groove.

To provide some background for the Lester/Goon connection, here is one of the surviving episodes of the TV series “A Show Called Fred” from 1956, which starred Sellers and Milligan among others (for whatever reason, the third Goon, Harry Secombe, was not included in any of the non-Goon-titled endeavors by Spike and Peter; contracts reportedly held him back, since he was a professional singer when not Goon-ing). The show is directed by one “Dick” Lester. (Born in Philly in 1932, he moved to England in 1953.)

The cast of "A Show Called Fred." (with a bearded Spike.)

“Fred” isn’t as miraculously weird as “The Goon Show,” but it does show Spike and company crafting a program that plays with the medium. The camera pulls back to reveal the studio during certain sketches, with other BBC cameras in view and crew members standing around. At one point (starting at 14:25) a sketch called “The Count of Monte Carlo” explodes into a weird journey one character takes off the set and around the studio, ending up in a BBC cafeteria (or a set intended to be a cafeteria).

To provide some context for this weirdness, we should note that other experimental humor was being presented at this time, but it was independent of Spike and he was independent of it. In America, Ernie Kovacs had been playing with the medium for several years by ’56 (but none of his work was seen in the U.K.). A closer (geographically) connection was that the Theater of the Absurd (which “A Show Named Fred” is very close to, in terms of its constant commenting on itself) had begun in earnest in 1950 France (with Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano).

Waiting for Godot premiered in England in 1955, but Spike’s cousin in surreal absurdity, Eugene Ionesco, didn’t have a breakthrough on the British stage until 1960, when Orson Welles staged Rhinoceros with Olivier in the lead.

Here is Spike’s Cathode Ray of the Absurd:

Back to Lester and the Goons: “Running Jumping...” was first shown in the U.S. in November 1959. A month later, on Dec. 6, another Milligan movie appeared, Unkle Ken’s promotional short “Portrait of a Goon,” produced for the culture program “Monitor.” The proximity of the projects makes it unlikely that either director saw the other’s work, and yet both films have an identical pace and rhythm (that of the Milligan).

Russell’s short was made to promote Spike’s book Silly Verse for Kids. The film is a fascinating glimpse into Spike’s mind, as the carefree, jumpcut-riddled comic sequences (narrated by Spike) frame what is, essentially, a serious interview in which Spike speaks about humor and childhood quite eloquently. He laments the loss of childhood silliness and notes that humorists are different than the average person in that they realize that “in this moment of tragedy, half an hour from now, lots of us will be laughing at it. But right now the snobs won’t laugh at it. But they will laugh at it later on when it’s been rewritten by somebody else like me.” Around such declarations are images of Spike cavorting in a park in what look like ad-libbed moments.

The most interesting thing about comparing the Russell short and Hard Day’s Night is that they both contain jumpcuts, a technical “mistake” that became de rigueur in modernist cinema after Godard’s Breathless (1960) hit cinemas. Russell couldn’t have seen the film when he made his short. (Godard’s debut feature was released in December of 1960 in the U.K.) Certainly Ken had seen the “trick films” that grew out of Melies’ work, though, where magical images were achieved via jarring edits that severed the rules of continuity in time and space. (For his part, Lester used some of Godard’s techniques in his 1965 comedy The Knack and How to Get It.)

When I interviewed Unkle Ken, he was directing the off-off-Broadway show Mindgame by Anthony Horowitz at the SoHo Playhouse. At one point the Playhouse had been the Thalia Soho, which had screened a program of Russell shorts, including “Portrait of a Goon.” I was thus inspired to ask him about the short and “the Richard Lester style.”

I am very happy that the BFI finally took the short out from under lock and key and put it on their social media accounts, which led to a fan posting it on YouTube.

So, on the list of things comedic that Spike had a hand in originating, let us now add the “Richard Lester style.”

Ken Russell on “the Richard Lester style” and Spike Milligan

I’m editing the last half of my 2008 interview with the late Ken Russell for upcoming Deceased Artiste episodes of the Funhouse TV show, and thought I’d share the clip embedded below. By way of explanation, a program of Russell’s early homemade shorts and some of his later oddities (including a screen test he shot for Twiggy) played at the Thalia Soho in the late Eighties. (The theater, now known as the Soho Playhouse, was indeed where I was interviewing Russell, whose only theatrical production, Mindgame, was mounted there.)

Among the offerings was “Portrait of a Goon,” a short that Russell made in 1959 for the TV show Monitor. The film is currently locked away from public view on the academics-only BFI site.

Chronicling a day in the life of the mighty Spike Milligan, the short surprised me because it included quick cuts, odd camera angles, and other aspects of what we now call “the Richard Lester style.” Lester famously directed Milligan and Peter Sellers in “The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film” (1960). The story goes that, when Lester was hired to direct A Hard Day’s Night, Goon-fan John Lennon was very impressed with this prior credit of Lester’s.

Watching the Russell short I began to think that, while Russell was certainly using that style a year before Lester, that perhaps its true source was neither “Unkle Ken” nor Richard L., but Spike himself. Although he never directed a film, Milligan’s work on The Goon Show on radio and in plays like The Bed Sitting Room (later, of course, adapted for film by Lester) indicated his love of momentum and jumping from situation to situation.

Whatever the case may be, two things remain inarguable:
—Richard Lester is an incredibly talented filmmaker (as was Russell, who at his best was a visionary)
—he was basing his style in part on the rhythms of silent comedy and the jump cuts introduced by Godard in A Bout de Souffle.

But, when one sees Russell’s “Goon” short, one realizes that Spike was indeed the *other* auteur behind the style that, after A Hard Day’s Night, became the standard way to edit rock music on film — and in commercials, and music videos, and…..



NOTE: To see the style pass down to a bunch of folks who would *never* credit the Spike, check out the first season of Laugh-In, which included blatant visual rips from "The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film." (Hey, if they could rob from Ernie Kovacs, why not Lester/Milligan also?)

"Enfant terrible" forever: Deceased Artiste Ken Russell

I want to craft a nicer, longer tribute to “Unkle Ken” (as he was known on his Facebook account) for the blog or the Funhouse TV show, but in the interim I’ll just reiterate what I said in the two episodes that aired in 2008 which were based on my interview with Mr. Russell. I have loved his work since it first seared itself onto my retina as a teen, but only recently was I reminded of just how incredibly talented he was, upon re-watching his BBC dramas about the lives of great artists.

He was a wonderfully indulgent and undeniably brilliant artist who was very generous with his time (I planned a half-hour interview with him that quickly extended into nearly an hour). He had sadly become “unbankable” in the last two decades, but that was no major problem to him — the ideas continued to pour forth, and he just had to shift his vibrant images into other media (opera, theater, shot-on-video/micro-budgeted features, cable productions, even self-published books!).

The biggest discovery I made coming back to his films as a middle-aged man was the emotion that bursts out of the best of them. Russell was dubbed an "enfant terrible" throughout his life and had a reputation for being wildly indulgent and slightly crazy. There was definitely some of that in his make-up (madness is always a part of genius), but he also was an artist who had a deep emotional involvement with his best films. His masterpiece The Devils was perceived as a loud, brash, blasphemous film, but it is actually a passionate cri de coeur against religious hypocrisy from a man who really did believe (Russell discussed with me how his beliefs swerved from Catholicism to a pantheistic form of nature-worship when he stayed for a time in the famous Lake District).

In an interview included with the recent box-set of his BBC work, he said that he came up with the images in his music films by sitting in a darkened room and simply listening to the music of the composer in question. This practice, which I have no doubt is true given the many lyrical moments in his films, runs counter to the “madman behind the camera” reputation he acquired, and I think it comes closest to giving us the best picture of the true Ken Russell.

It’s evident to me that the reason he was so nice to admirers and interviewers was because he was still a fanboy himself, paying tribute in his own way to those artists whose work had moved him and brought meaning to his life (he spoke of his favorite film, Savage Messiah, as fulfilling a promise he made to the memory of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska). He was larger than life, in every sense of that phrase, and I’m very proud to have spent some time in his presence. New, colorful filmmakers may emerge in the years to come, but “Unkle Ken” cannot be replaced.
*****

There are only two small fragments online from my far-ranging interview with Russell (with more to come in the future). First, him speaking about his off-Broadway (and American theater) debut, Mindgame:



And his approval of people putting his older, "MIA" films online (at the time we did the interview many of his films were on YT, including Savage Messiah and the uncut Devils):

Ken Russell's masterpiece The Devils now on iTunes

I’ve already professed my love for the work of Ken Russell in these pages, and still have more of my interview with “Unkle Ken” to come in this format and on the Funhouse TV show. In the meantime however, it has been brought to my attention that his masterpiece The Devils has finally been made available in this country in a sorta, kinda, near-to-complete version.

The film is owned by Warner Brothers, which is still, to this very day, scared of putting it out in its complete form, for fear that it will outrage Catholics and other dogma-loving Xtians. The truth is that the film is one of the finest explorations of religious hypocrisy ever, in any art form, and if someone is bothered by it, then they need to double-check their own religious beliefs. The documentary made for British television about the controversy surrounding the film constituted the first time that the censored “Rape of the Christ” sequence had been shown publicly (the same night the docu was shown the film was aired in its entirety). In that documentary a Jesuit notes that that scene is about blasphemy taken to the very limit, but the sequence that Russell intercut it with — in which Oliver Reed performs the ceremony of the mass with his lover and offers her the sacrament of communion — redeems the “Rape” sequence, showing what constitutes real faith as opposed to hypocrisy.

So the good news in this instance for U.S. viewers is that The Devils is finally available to be seen in its restored version. The bad news is that it is missing part of the “Rape of the Christ” sequence (which is what I assume takes it down three minutes from 111 to 108 minutes), and is only being made available by the oh-so-skittish Warner folks as a digital download on iTunes. No DVD, no Blu-Ray, none expected.

It’s very interesting to consider that of all the films that caused moral outrage at the turn of the Seventies, the rest of the pack — A Clockwork Orange, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Deep Throat — have all been perennially available on American home media on VHS and then DVD. The Devils thus validates itself by being so hard to locate (the best complete copy that has thus been circulated is of that single airing on British cable TV). It obviously has as much to say to our own era as it did back in 1971. Religious hypocrites will never go away, and they hate to be called out on their utterly ridiculous, offensive, and dangerous behavior (some might hit the nail through the palm with “un-Christ-like”). So check out the Russell film through the download, or through the bootlegs (I’m sure it’s circulating on Bit Torrent and Rapidshare, as the British cable TV version was up on YouTube in its entirety for a few months at one point), or when it appears at a local repertory theater. It’s a dynamic work that continues to say a lot about the publicly pious.

Here is where I found out about the iTunes download. Thanks to the great “Movie Irv” for passing this on. UPDATE: As of today, 7/8/10, the film has been pulled, and according to online sources, was up for less than a week. It was indeed missing the entire "Rape of the Christ" sequence, but supposedly was a crystal-clear restoration of the film. C'mon, Warner Brothers, what are you so scared of?

Ken Russell playing a Mindgame off-Broadway (the Funhouse interview)

I recently got the chance to interview the oldest enfant terrible working in cinema, Mr. Ken Russell. I was intimidated going to the interview, as I've been watching his movies for the better part of three decades, and had gotten the impression that Mr. Russell was a current-day Von Stroheim (temperamental, capricious, prone to outbursts). The man I met was a brilliant, cultured, polite old Lion who knows his way around an anecdote. He was gracious, dodged no topic — including the not-exactly-complimentary review given his new play in The New York Times — and wound speaking to me for nearly double the length we had arranged. The chat will air on the Funhouse in installments and, as is always the case with the interviews I've done for the show, is allowing me the opportunity to re-view many of Mr. Russell's finer works, including his lesser known BBC biopics and his hands-down masterpiece The Devils. As a preview of the talk, I give you these two clips.

First, "Uncle Ken" talking about the play "Mindgame," currently playing at the Soho Playhouse in Manhattan.



Next, Russell offers his take on YouTube and the phenomenon of file-sharing rare movies.