Mahler

Ken Russell made several films for the BBC on artists and musicians like Fredrick Delius, the composer, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter and poet, and one of the founders of the Pre Raphaelite movement. The Rossetti film features the late Oliver Reed in an engrossing performance. This Mahler film is quite good. I feared watching it because I thought Ken Russell would make a circus of Mahler's tempestuous life, but it's a fairly controlled foray, except for the aforementioned sequence with Wagner's widow, BUT she was well acquainted with Hitler, and she never met a Nazi she didn't like, so the scene with her was founded on fact.

Robert Powell, and the lovely Georgina Hale, give beautiful performances. I looked in their credits and see THEY ARE BARELY WORKING TODAY. Maybe their own choice or a preference of stage work. I can't believe they would pass up today's movie money. They have not appeared as far as I can see in any major movie project for years. I don't get it. Russell, if he worked with the editor fitting the music to the film, shows a real feeling for the music. Even today Mahler's music is a specially acquired taste, and if much of it sounds bizzaire today, think what it sounded like to listners in 1906. A special kudo must go to David Collings as the insane composer Hugo Wolf. An acting gem. Also no current acting credits. David where are you? We need guys like you, Robert Powell, and Georgina Hale.

Though more reserved than Ken Russell's usual work, this film still has much to recommend it. The music, of course, is superb, and the acting is restrained. Fans of Russell's outrageousness will find a few choice sequences (especially the one where Mahler converts to Catholicism to placate Cosima Wagner), but if you've got a friend whom you want to introduce to Ken Russell's usual style of lunacy, this would by the one to start with before graduating to "The Music Lovers" or "Gothic".

If you are in the camp of liking Ken Russell, you are going to love this movie. If you like Mahler's compositions and think you're going to get a straightforward biopic (more on this later), you're in the wrong place.

This film is beautifully shot, the acting is over the top in many cases, the imagery will at times be disturbing, the metaphors will run deep, like all Russell's movies.

I just heard of Georgina Hale's passing in January of this year (2024) so was drawn to watch this film again because she was fantastic. I know she won a BAFTA for it, but she should have been given more recognition outside of the UK for this role.

I want to return to the term "straightforward biopic" now. By that I mean the cookie cutter, sanitized tripe that moviegoers normally eat up like Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocket Man, A Beautiful Mind, etc., that take real people who had very interesting lives and then manipulate, fabricate, and distort to give us our feels but no substance. You're better off just watching a documentary in most cases.

If you're going to do a biopic, I say go all in like Ken Russell does. While you may get his version of the story, at least you're going to be in for a beautiful and wild ride that will also make you think.

Yes, you had to have developed an appetite for Ken Russell's visions. Mahler works beautifully for me. I happen to like Mahler's music and historically, Russell, captures the juice of this man's genius.

Russell moves behind the music, into the skin of Mahler, his wife, Alma, and the tragic circumstances that surround them.

Mahler would have smiled when experiencing Russell's image of him. Thomas Mann's book, Death in Venice, is about Mahler, and Russell includes the railroad station scene, with the young boy and the business man, courting a bit, and then the camera, goes to Mahler, who understands whats going on here, and smiles, in amusement. Clever touch for Russell, but is most likely lost on the general audience. Not to say Mahler liked little boys, but his sexual orientation was ambiguous, at best.

Alma was like that, and the officer, whom she was having an affair, was most likely that way? Mahler went to see Freud over this affair in reality. Russell always takes us inside the psychological drama and visualizes, the inner Hell, Mahler feared regarding his wife and his coming death.

Alma had affairs after Mahler's death, and was a star f...ER, and had marriages and affairs with Europe's most brilliant geniuses, for real. She loved bright men, but loved herself, the most, I think? Later Erich Wolfgang Korngold, wrote a violin concerto for her, in Hollywood.

The film's tracking of the creative process regarding the music, is most likely right on, though the little composing hut, was not on the lake shore, but on a hill top, overlooking the lake.

Over all the film is historically correct, and emotionally, shows it as it most likely was for them as a famous couple. Alma did harbor jealousy, and stopped composing her music. Of late a CD has been released of her music and her music is acceptable, but pales compared to her husband's giant compositions.

I would have liked for Russell to include Richard Strauss's music, and their personal friendship. Both composers often talked about their troubles with their music and their wives. Strauss and Mahler are often similar in their musical genius, and understood each other's vision musically. It would have been nice to have the two together more in this film's history.

You have to have a taste for Mahler and Russell, to really get the humor and the brilliance that lies just beneath of surface. At least, Mahler, did not turn out to be another TOMMY...ha Bravo to Ken Russell and I am so glad he came along in my life time. Cast was perfect as well.

The life of Gustav Mahler could potentially be turned into a brilliant film if the right combination of great actors and a good screenplay is achieved. As for Ken Russell's "Mahler" film, it is a close call, but ultimately it gets thumbs down. Robert Powell does a good job playing the protagonist, but everyone one else in the film is average or mediocre. But the main weakness of "Mahler" is the screenplay. The narrative is disorganized and jumps all over the place. First we see Mahler at the end of his life, then we see him as a child, then we see him at the end of his life again, then we see him as the young and ambitious composer willing to do anything to get ahead in the music world, then switch back to his meeting with a doctor in Paris, then to a cottage where Mahler tells his wife Alma (Georgina Hale) that she should abandon composing music, etc., etc. Disoriented? Don't worry. You are not alone.

But worse than the scattered presentation is the undercurrent of silliness running through the movie. If you are going to do a movie about Mahler, then present your subject matter in an intelligent and serious way. But Russell does not do that. He has this tendency of getting carried away. At best, Russell's over the top filmmaking could generate incredible laughter. But if the joke does not work, then the result is incredibly embarrassing. Having Gustav Mahler fantasize about his wife Alma as a cocoon is not only strange, but also absurd. If Russell was trying to make a joke out of this sequence, then the joke did not work. Another scene has Alma Mahler playing a topless stripper for several Nazis, one of whom is her lover. I guess no one told Ken Russell that the Nazi party did not exist in 1911. But perhaps the most ridiculous scenes, where Russell goes way overboard, involve Gustav Mahler's conversion to Catholicism. First Gustav lowers his trousers to Emperor Franz Joseph after the latter asked him to do so. This scene was inserted to bring up the composer's Jewish identity. Then Gustav Mahler has this fantasy encounter with Cosima Wagner who is dressed -- get this! -- as a dominatrix with a swastika on her leather pants. Was this scene necessary? Apparently, Gustav has to become Cosima's submissive to convert to Catholicism and get a job at the Vienna Opera House. When watching this scene, I could not help but think that Russell was portraying not Mahler's fantasies, but his own, and that his inspiration came not from the early 20th century, but the sleaziest strip clubs and dominatrix clubs of London.

The result is a film that has some interesting scenes, but is otherwise dragged down by silly fantasies. This film is filled from beginning to end with Mahler's compositions, and yet we are given no insight into his genius or his humanity. Mahler was probably one of the finest composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Russell makes Mahler the subject of a freak show, in which the protagonist is put on display and humiliated. Perhaps the director is trying to make a joke or maybe he is trying to tweak the noses of professional film directors who take their craft seriously. Maybe Russell is even making fun of Mahler and his obsession with conformity. Whatever Russell is trying to do, "Mahler" plays like a joke in poor taste.