Since Ken Russell's "Mahler" is available for free on the world wide web, I thought I watch and comment on it.
Who chose the opening music? The film is off to a good start.
Just as it helps that Kirk Douglas looked like Vincent van Gogh in "Lust for Life," so it helps that Robert Powell looks like Gustav Mahler in "Mahler."
What a wonderful metaphor for life's journey is the train journey. Once almost it is a cliche, it has fallen out of favor of filmmakers, maybe because no one travels by train anymore.
Mr. Russell, whatever you are trying to say in the opening, I am afraid I cannot take it seriously, because the opening makes me laugh everytime I see it.
5:17 Boy in sailor suit
Outside of the scenes of hallucinations in his films, this scene is one of the most confusing of the scenes in all of Russell's films. For what is Ken trying to say in this scene? Here you have a fictional scene in a factual film about Mahler, taken from a factual scene in a fictional film about Mahler (i.e. Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice.")
And Visconti does it better. Not that Russell cannot do boy as sex object. See his "Salome's Last Dance" with Russell Lee Nash as the Pageboy or his "Lair of the White Worm" with Chris Pitt as the Boy Scout, but here Visconti does the scene better. Is that because Ken is a better originator than copyist, or is it because a boy in a swimsuit works better than a boy in a sailor suite?
To be continued . . .