The Reprobate issue 0

an intriguingly tragic tale, where – suitably –
the truth is often somewhere between blurred
memories and individual interpretations.
Stringing all this together is an interview from
the 1990s with Ellis, now bitter and resigned
to the fact that his career is essentially over (a
clumsy attempt to reinvent himself as a teen
idol in the mid-1980s – when he was in his
early 40s – together with an endless series of
new names failed to reignite his popularity),
which gives the film a central narrative frame
and allows us to hear his own take on his life.
The soundtrack is interspersed with Orion
tunes, skilfully mixed to give the film the sort
of grand theatrical sweep that is rarely found
in documentaries. Along the way, the film
speculates if Ellis and Presley might actually
be related – Ellis was adopted, and Vernon
Presley was a known philanderer – but it
smartly avoids digging too deeply into the
mysteries of his past. Finlay knows when the
myth is more interesting than the reality, and
keeps some things left unsaid. But despite
that, the film feels as thorough a story as you
could hope for.
You come away from Orion feeling incredibly
sorry for Ellis, who was screwed at every turn,
right from birth. If there had been no Elvis,
maybe he would have made it. Or at least he
would have failed on his own terms. As it was,
he never had a chance.
Grand, beautiful and affecting, Orion is a
cinematic triumph – the film that should surely
push Jeanie Finlay into the big leagues of
documentary filmmaking, and one of those
rare non-fiction films that has as much drama
as any fictional film.
VALENTINO
Blu-ray. BFI
Review: David Flint
Although his reputation rarely acknowledges it,
Ken Russell was the king of the biopic for over
a decade in the UK - from his relatively straight
forward dramatized biographies of famous
composers for the BBC in the 1960s, through
the likes of Mahler and Lisztomania, his films
told increasingly fictionalised, sensationalised
and revolutionary life stories, mostly of
classical composers. Russell also had a taste
for the 1920s, in person and on film, and an
eye for the period drama, and so Valentino –
which has often been dismissed as something
of a lesser work from the director – actually
makes a whole lot of sense when seen
within the broader context of his career.
While Russell is still seem as the shocking
enfant terrible of British cinema, it’s worth
remembering that not all his films of the time
were The Devils and Tommy. It wasn’t all
Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked
or a nude Glenda Jackson rolling around a
train carriage. Russell had an eye and a taste
for the shocking and the outrageous, but that
wasn’t all he was capable of by any means.
When we look back at some of his finest
work – Women in Love, The Music Lovers
– it’s notable that these are not exercises in
hysterical cinema, but well crafted, serious
costume dramas - with their share of shocking
(for the time) content, perhaps, but not at all
sensationalist or extreme.
I say all this because if we simply stick to the
cartoon image of Russell as pop artist and
censor baiter, then Valentino might seem a
touch restrained and disappointing. In fact,
it’s neither, even if the director himself would
come to see it as a mistake.
Made in 1977, this is, however, very much an
end of the line film. It was Russell’s last British
film for some time. The creatively curtailed
British film industry of the 1980s would have
no room for anyone as extravagant as Russell
(Derek Jarman perhaps came close, but he
was gay and made uncommercial films, two
factors that would make him acceptable to the
funding bodies who controlled much of what
was made in the decade). Russell himself left
London after making this film, presumably
seeing the writing on the wall and hightailing it
to the North.
t’s perhaps appropriate then that Valentino
is about the end of an era – the classic silent
film era, of which Rudolph Valentino the actor
was a leading light. His death caused mass
hysteria among women (and a fair few men)
worldwide and within a couple of years, the
silent film too was dead. There was no room
for a star like Valentino in the Hayes Code
controlled talkies.
Russell’s film is a highly fictionalised version of
his rise to fame. The basic facts are adhered
to, but Russell exaggerates or extrapolates
to make the story better – he was always a
biographer who knew that fiction often seemed
more real than fact, and as Tony Wilson said
in 24 Hour Party People, when it comes
down to the myth versus the truth, always
go with the myth. Here, Valentino (played,
with clever casting, by ballet dancer Rudolf
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