Ken Russell got into film through photography and television, but his movies show a fascination with the theater. Whether adapting a musical like The Boy Friend, or using actors and the stage as an image as he does in the opening of The Devils, Russell’s imagination seems fired by theater, by pretense and camp, by people putting on new roles. Hence 1988’s Salome’s Last Dance.
It’s an adaptation of Oscar Wide’s 1891 one-act play Salome, which dramatizes the story of the death of John the Baptist. Russell’s work engages with great artists of the Western canon who were a scandal in their times, like Wilde, so this is logical territory for him. Russell also favors grand themes, sex and god and death and love, sprinkled with an awareness of class, treated with some irony; and all of those things are in Salome. The movie, made on a tight budget of around $1 million, is unsurprisingly very much a Russell joint: transgressive, extravagant, self-satirizing, well-acted, and quietly a technical triumph of filmmaking in its staging and visual conception.
Russell imagines a framing sequence for his film in which Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) and his lover Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge) visit a brothel on Guy Fawkes Night. The owner (Stratford Johns) has a surprise for Wilde: he’s prepared a staging of Wilde’s banned play Salome, with Douglas in the role of John the Baptist, the brothel owner as Herod, and a young chambermaid (Imogen Millais-Scott) as Herod’s daughter Salome. The audience will consist of Wilde alone.
What follows is a roughly faithful presentation of the play. John the Baptist, prisoner of King Herod of Judea, prophesizes the coming of the son of God; Salome, daughter of Herod, overhears John and is attracted to him. When John rejects her, Salome dances for her father and extracts a promise from him to fulfill any one wish she has. That wish involves a head, and a silver platter.
Russell adds a number of distinctive touches. He opens the production with Douglas as John being (implicitly) sodomized with a massive dildo. He gives himself a cameo as a photographer named Kenneth. He adds fart jokes. And his visualization of Salome’s climactic dance involves both a male and a female dancer, performed to the tune of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
But look past the sexuality, past the actors in strange fetish gear, and you see that Russell’s done a lot of excellent work with a relatively confined space. There are three main performance spaces: the stage, with a painted backdrop of a terrace in Herod’s palace and a full moon rising in the sky; the luxurious Victorian chamber before the stage, in which Wilde sits on a couch with a bottle of champagne; and a small space to Wilde’s right representing the interior of the palace, where actors wait for their cue to cross through Wilde’s room to the stage.
Add a cramped backstage space in the wings and a dumbwaiter shaft in which John the Baptist’s imprisoned, and that’s the entirety of Russell’s setting for most of the 87-minute movie. It works incredibly well, using contrasting colors, medium shots and close-ups, and complex blocking to make the area feel much larger than it is. The story moves in and out of multiple levels of reality, now in a Near Eastern palace and now a Victorian whorehouse: from one empire to another.
The acting is excellent, especially Millais-Scott as a disturbingly youthful Salome (medical issues prevented her from going on to have the career she ought to have had). There’s little sense of watching amateurs presenting the play; the film doesn’t insist on its own internal reality. This was the right choice, allowing the reality of Wilde’s play to dominate (to the point where Wilde’s upstaged by his own characters, and he wanders off to canoodle with one of the actors).
Along the same lines, Russell’s actors play for realism, rather than the ritualistic rhythm the usual English version of Salome suggests. Wilde wrote the play in French in 1891, and then it was translated by Douglas and the translation rewritten by Wilde, but the play was banned from the English stage in 1892 and ultimately presented first in French in 1896—by which time Wilde had been imprisoned for sodomy. Russell commissioned a new translation from his wife Vivian, which tones down much of Wilde’s florid yellow-1890s language; compare the Douglas/Wilde line “Is that the Queen Herodias, she who wears a black mitre sewed with pearls, and whose hair is powdered with blue dust?” to this movie’s equivalent: “Is Herodias the one with the red eyes, the ruby lips, the ruby hips, and the red rubies?”
The effect is to acknowledge the decadence of Wilde’s text and time, but also to insist on the modernity of the story. There’s a feel to the production like Beckett or Jean Genet, with irony and myth and symbolism overwhelming reality. Setting the production in a bordello doesn’t just point up the sexuality of the play, but also brings out themes of class and power. Wilde, often depicted as a victimized John-the-Baptist figure, is here domineering and himself class-conscious.
Salome’s Last Dance is a movie as only Ken Russell can make, technical precision mixing with deft tastelessness to present a story where the campness and the grand themes feed on each other. Russell went on to direct Richard Strauss’ opera Salome, whose libretto is a German translation of Wilde’s play, a few years later. It didn’t go over well with the opening-night crowd, according to Opera Magazine, which observed that “Ken Russell returned thanks for their demonstration of displeasure in his own fashion, by bowing with his behind towards the audience.”