Glenda Jackson

Guided throughout by the swells and dips of Tchaikovsky’s music, Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers examines the tragedies of Tchaikovsky’s life through opulent and fantastic musical sequences running alongside a narrative of the composer’s life between 1875 and 1881. Touching on his disastrous marriage with Antonina Miliukova, his relationship with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, and his repressed homosexuality, The Music Lovers is anchored by magnetic central performances from Glenda Jackson following her Academy Award for Women in Love, coupled with Richard Chamberlain as a neurotic Tchaikovsky.Read More »

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The inimitable comic team of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson star in this nimble tale of international intrigue from master British filmmaker Ronald Neame. Based on Brian Garfield’s best-selling novel, the blithe thriller centers on Miles Kendig (Matthau), a disillusioned retired CIA agent who, with the help of a chic and savvy Viennese widow (Jackson), threatens to publish his memoirs and expose the innermost secrets of every major intelligence agency in the world. Despite being in major hot water with his former colleagues, Kendig refuses to get in line—he’s having too much fun. Set to the sounds of Mozart, this lighthearted sendup of the paranoid dramas of its era is an expertly crafted, singular take on the spy movie.Read More »

A few unusual characters and their unconventional therapists cross paths resulting in hilarious interactions.Read More »

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An adaptation of an HE Bates story, set in an isolated Wiltshire farm in 1942. With her husband a prisoner-of-war, lonely wife (Jackson) strikes up an intimate relationship with a young soldier (Deacon), a farmer’s boy who hates the army. When he impulsively deserts, she hides him, disguised in drag as her sister. The inevitable tensions of their life are increased when two soldiers from the nearby camp discover ‘the girls’, and the lecherous sergeant (Reed) takes a fancy to the one in drag. The relationship between the wife and the deserter is built carefully and convincingly, but in going for laughs as the bullish sergeant, Oliver Reed lets some of the potential tension slip away. As with many of Bates’ stories, the plot is in any case resolved suddenly and melodramatically.Read More »

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Two separate people, a man and a woman, find something very stirring about the sea turtles in their tank at the London Zoo. They meet and form an odd, but sympathetic camaraderie as they plan to steal two of the turtles and free them into the ocean.Read More »

“Vulgar, excessive, melodramatic and self-indulgent: Tchaikovsky’s music is indeed all of these things, yet gloriously so, and the same goes for Ken Russell at his freewheeling best. The director’s first composer biopic for the cinema approaches Tchaikovsky’s scores as the expression of extreme emotional turmoil.”

The Music Lovers is about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, feverishly wrapping his music around his childhood, his career, his sexuality, and his marriage into a tangle.Read More »

By Peter Hanson
Saturday, April 7, 2012

A closely observed character drama with a few thriller elements thrown in for added tension, The Romantic Englishwoman has all the hallmarks of director Joseph Losey’s best work: evocative European locations, immaculate performances, subtle writing, and an undercurrent of menace. So, even though the story is nominally about Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson), the dissatisfied wife of successful novelist Lewis (Michael Caine), it’s also about Thomas (Helmut Berger), a German freeloader who claims to be a poet but really makes his living as a drug courier. These characters muddle through life, the Brits narcotized by their boring routine and the German energized by the dangerous unpredictability of his existence, until their collision produces an emotional explosion with lasting repercussions.
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Ken Russell’s celebrated and controversial film is a lyrical take on love and death as experienced by a Britain ravaged by World War One. Based on D H Lawrence’s acclaimed novel, it tells the story of two couples trapped between the pressure to follow convention and the urge to explore a Bohemian lifestyle. Set against the lush English landscape, the protagonists engage with nature in a direct and sensuous way, each searching for love but unsure what it means. Featuring stunning performances by Alan Bates, Jennie Linden, Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson (whose role earned her an Academy Award), Women in Love is opulently designed, beautifully shot and is an undisputed landmark of British cinema.Read More »