It would be convenient to be able to say that Ken Russell's "Savage Messiah" is bad strictly on formal and technical grounds, but that would, I think, be fundamentally a lie. It is very poor technically; but that's not all that makes it bad….
Is there any other movie director with the flair and imagination and, yes, the force of Ken Russell who has so little actual command of what is generally considered "film technique"? "Savage Messiah" starts by lunging into the middle of a situation and then just keeps throwing things at you. It's more hurried than his other films, and not so visually lush. You feel as if it were rushing through the projector at the wrong speed and with the sound turned up to panic level. Russell edits with a cleaver, and the frenetic intercutting is choppy and rhythmless. Nothing is prepared for, and the disjointed scenes are played as if they all had the same value; he charges from one to the next, and his inventiveness gets buried under the avalanche. (p. 225)
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