Ken Russell's Adamania
Uba, Gerald R.
Special Film Review/Gerald R. Uba 9 Ken Russell's "Adamania' • • The heavy publicity which had preceded the March 9th premiere of Ken Russell's Adamania was followed by even more extensive...
...The only actor whose performance is of near-equal quality is Donny Osmond in his supporting role as David Hume, singing his new hit song, "It's Not Because I Love You, It's Only a Correlation...
...Russell also devotes considerable attention to Smith's recurring dream, in which a mysterious invisible hand kept appearing to him...
...Unfortunately, the news reports concentrated on the numerous casualties and widespread property damage, obscuring the emergence of one of the greatest art works of the month...
...Sp: Ken Russell and Truman Capote...
...The epithets and fist-fights had begun as groups supporting divergent schools of monetary policy (both apparently led by short bald men) had been waiting outside to enter, and the chaos carried over into the theater...
...When the Friedmanites pelted the screen with pennies, the Austrians scrambled futilely to recover them in the darkened building...
...Adamania, based on the life of the founder of the Classical School, Adam Smith, premiered simultaneously in New York and Edinburgh on the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Smith's magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations...
...In one, J.S...
...B /o The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith...
...After several successful biographies of famous composers, Russell has turned his camera toward the legendary economists...
...His Lordship, played by Robert Redford, appears in an earlier scene as group leader of a Royal Cambridge Air Force bomber squadron which ravages Chicago and Vienna...
...The story ends, as it must, with Adam Smith being strangled to death by his beloved Invisible Hand, as J.M...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 17...
...And in the true Russell style so faAdamania Produced and directed by Ken Russell...
...And next month we will have another noteworthy contribution to the genre with Andy Warhol's Galbraith, starring John Vliet Lindsay...
...Warren Beatty Adam Smith Ann-Margret The Mother Donny Osmond David Hume JackNicholson..Bernara'Mana'eville Jack Palance Edmund Burke Michael J. Pollard Karl Marx Burt Reynolds John Stuart Mill Barbi Benton Harriet Taylor Robert Redford John Maynard Keynes Jane Fonda Indira Gandhi Dick Gregory Id...
...Economics is not known for the flamboyance of its practitioners, and Adam Smith's personality was a paradigm of dullness...
...In another, Idi Amin and Indira Gandhi do to each other what each has done to Uganda and India...
...Mill and Harriet Taylor debate whether copulation is morally permissible or politically justified even in situations where only one partner experiences orgasm, or whether compensation is necessary for an equitable distribution of pleasure...
...At any rate, it's hard to see how Russell could top this, though he is already at work on his next economics film, Ricardo and Malthus and Marx and Lenin, with Mike Nichols and Elaine May...
...Mandeville leads Smith to an Edinburgh brothel, where the history of economic thought is depicted in a seriesof symbolic rooms...
...The delicate changes in tone as the ice melted were almost too precious for my ears...
...The anachronism may be disturbing, but the effect is profoundly moving as a thundercloud in the shape of the fiscal multiplier moves across the horizon to envelop the plane, which is never seen again...
...Special Film Review/Gerald R. Uba 9 Ken Russell's "Adamania' • • The heavy publicity which had preceded the March 9th premiere of Ken Russell's Adamania was followed by even more extensive coverage of the rioting in and outside the theater...
...Keynes' nemesis, the wily, cunning, inscrutable Milton Friedman, does not appear on-camera, but in one view of the Scotland country-side, an aircraft can be seen in the distance trailing vapor in the air to form the equation, "PQ = MV," and we all know who is the pilot...
...The subject forced Russell to strain to the limit his explosive genius...
...Warren Beatty's subjective approach is superlative in his portrayal of the sex-crazed megalomaniac...
...Amin miliar to us, a puckishly mischievous Kar Marx darts in and out, spitting and hurl ing offal at Smith, and quoting him out of context...
...Note should also be made of John Cage's music score, which features a lengthy, hauntingly evocative period of complete silence, except for the brothel scene when ragtime tunes are performed with broken chopsticks and jackboots on steel oil drums filled with ice...
...However, much has been made—and Russell makes the most of it—of the fact that Smith never married and lived most of his life with his widowed mother...
...The movie begins with Bernard Mandeville, like Virgil guiding Dante, taking Smith on a tour through a pin factory, all the while pursued by a pack of running dogs who occasionally eat one another...
...Rather surprisingly, given Russell's well-known, eccentric directorial style, Adamania is scrupulously accurate historically, depicting Smith as an intensely repressed schizophrenic who invented the science of economics in order to relieve his cramped libidinal distress...
...Keynes looms, sneering, over our-hero's convulsing body...
...Other than a personal expression of disgust, there is nothing I wish to add about the rioting...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
