There are, I am sometimes convinced, two Ken Russells: The disciplined and gifted director of such films as Women in Love, Altered States, and Tommy, and the orchestrator of wretched excess in films like The Music Lovers, Gothic, and this one. Despite the fact that Salome’s Last Dance encompasses almost the entire text of a play by Oscar Wilde, it seems shapeless and without purpose. Russell has devised a production without inventing a goal. At the end of the film, there are some shocks and surprises, some foreshadowing of Wilde’s long fall into despair, but they seemed tacked on as a favor to
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