But Captain Walker reappears at their family home, his face badly burned, and, in a fit of madness, Frank kills him. Walker is an RAF pilot on leave and, when he is reported missing, presumed killed in action, Nora remarries holiday camp entertainer Frank ( Oliver Reed), who after the war becomes a strip club manager and a drunken, negligent stepfather to her little boy Tommy. I can’t believe that anyone making this film believed that gay and paedophile were interchangeable, but it was a clumsy irony.Īnn-Margret and Robert Powell play Nora and Captain Walker, a wartime married couple seen first where the film is to climax: in Borrowdale in the Lake District, the location for a number of Russell’s films.
#ELTON JOHN PINBALL WIZARD BOOTS TRIAL#
The Uncle Ernie scene was the one I found most upsetting when I saw this originally as a teenager, though watching it again now I realise I had failed to clock a very dodgy touch: Uncle Ernie is reading Gay News, with its “Obscenity Trial Triumph” headline.
#ELTON JOHN PINBALL WIZARD BOOTS TV#
(Dennis Potter’s BBC TV play Brimstone and Treacle was banned for something comparable.) Tommy has lost his senses due to a trauma relating to sex and violence as a child, and finally retreats into the seraphic mystery of being a passionately worshipped public figure. This is a character even Roald Dahl would have flinched from imagining: cracking an egg into his glass of 70s warm beer and then proceeding to “fiddle about” with the blind, deaf, dumb and Christ-like young Tommy, played by Roger Daltrey. It is 44 years since it arrived in cinemas, and we were all shocked at that extraordinarily horrible scene with the paedophile babysitter Uncle Ernie, played by Keith Moon. K en Russell’s bizarre and ineffably seedy and fetishistic rock opera Tommy, based on the Who’s 1969 concept album, is now on rerelease.
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