I have never been a fan of Ken Russell's films. We watched his 1988 film Salomé's Last Dance for our cinema discussion group. It's a recreation of Oscar Wilde's play Salomé, with the conceit that the performance is staged for Wilde in a brothel. Ken Russell himself plays a photographer/pornographer, so we have layers of meta. The acting style of both the frame story and the play is campy and over-the-top, and on that level the film succeeds, but I found the humor not always successful and the performances shreiky and grating. Maybe it also leaves me cold because I find the Wildean source material misogynistic. Both on the surface and symbolically, female desire is tainted and destructive, and Salomé is murdered in the end ("Kill that woman!"). I was never a huge fan of that particular strain of decadent symbolist modernism, although I read an awful lot of it for my PhD exams.
One thing I do like about the film is the way the credits are displayed as Oscar Wilde flips through a book of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, giving us the opportunity to see this suite of amazing illustrations before the play is performed.
I also watched the Alla Nazimova silent film of Salomé, whose production design was heavily influence by Beardsley's illustrations. It is not intentionally camp the way Russell's film is, but it is extremely stylized and aesthetically daring for its time.
Alla Nazimova was a fascinating figure: born in Yalta, she came to the US after studying with Stanislawsky, and was a huge success in the theater. She then moved to Hollywood where she also met with success both as actor and producer/director/writer (although not always credited for her work). She was a lesbian (or possibly bi) who had relationships with many celebrated women in Hollywood. She purchased an estate that she called the Gardens of Allah, where she threw lavish parties, and later turned into a hotel. At the end of her life, she had lost most of her money and rented one of the villas at the hotel. The buildings were torn down, but Frank Gehry purchased the site and is building a complex on it that he says will, in some way, be inspired by Nazimova.
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