Upon witnessing a horrific incident at a young age, Tommy Walker (Roger Daltrey) is struck deaf, dumb, and blind. Over the course of the amazing journey that is his life, Tommy becomes a pinball champion, finds fame and fortune, is exploited by his mother (Ann-Margret) and stepfather (Oliver Reed), is miraculously cured, and becomes an unlikely messiah.

CRITIQUE

Despite the fact “Pinball Wizard” was imprinted on me at a young age (perhaps even in the womb), and despite the fact I’ve owned more than a few copies of the album Tommy over the years (I’m a sucker for a good remastering job), any mention of the album or this film version initially brings to mind a comment someone made in my presence roughly twenty years ago. I was at college, in my room with my roommate and my girlfriend at the time. My roommate, a diehard Elton John fan, mentioned something about the version of “Pinball Wizard” Sir Elton performs in the movie. My then-significant other piped in and said her parents had gone to see the movie but had walked out during a scene where the Prime Minister of England rolls around in baked beans. To this day I have no idea how I managed to keep my mouth shut. Now on with the show.

The Who’s first stab at a full-length rock opera--written for the most part by Pete Townshend, with a couple of key contributions from bandmates John Entwistle and Keith Moon as well as one cover tune--is a near-great album, ranking behind the even better Who’s Next and the even better still Quadrophenia (which was adapted into a terrific movie) on the list of the band’s greatest studio recordings. It works far better as a piece of music than it does a narrative, with the performance and individuals songs compensating for the somewhat bloated, meandering, unfocused story it attempts to tell.

Ken Russell’s film version tells the story better (except for the climax, which doesn’t work as well when it’s literalized), but the music in the movie is bloated. The movie is a good thirty-five minutes longer than the album, expanded by Russell and Townshend (who also moved the setting from the 1920s to the 1950s, which makes a lot more sense) up to the length of a feature. Some new material was created expressly for the movie, and many of the songs from the album were lengthened.

Some of this works; I love how “Sally Simpson” (one of my favorite songs on the album) becomes a mixture of Southern gospel and rock excess here, and retooling the cover of Ronnie Hawkins’s “Eyesight to the Blind” into an extended jam for Eric Clapton was genius (as is the sequence Russell stages around it). But some of the new stuff is obviously just filler; the sequence in which the woman who wasn’t the British PM rolls around in baked beans (a visual no doubt inspired by Daltrey’s dip in a bean-filled tub for the cover of The Who Sell Out, the band’s first attempt at a sustained narrative) adds nothing (although Ann-Margret certainly looks great doing it), and moving “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About” to a later point in the story--and putting them back-to-back--doesn’t make much sense (although Paul Nicholas’s performance of the former is fantastic and Moon’s work in the latter is blackly hilarious). There’s a slight demo-material feel to the piece as a whole, as if the movie’s soundtrack represents what Townshend had cobbled together before he and the band whittled it down into a tighter piece.

Like so many of Russell’s movies from the ‘70s and early ‘80s (my first exposure to the director’s work was an HBO airing of Altered States, which weirded me out), Tommy is an all-out assault on the senses. The visuals (photographed by Dick Bush and Ronnie Taylor, edited by the great Stuart Baird) are bright (often garishly so) and flashy, the compositions almost never static.

The soundtrack, which in some theaters was presented in an early (and very expensive) multi-channel format dubbed Quintaphonic, is loud. Sitting through this wall of sight and sound is a little like being subjected to the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange, only without the lingering side effects. But Russell’s sensory excess is a good match for the material, which is often bombastic, pretentious, and naïve.

Really, you can’t take a story in which a totally uncommunicative boy has his first sexual experience with a prostitute who loosens her clients up with large doses of LSD and play it straight. (The Acid Queen is played here by Tina Turner, who’s as sexy as she is scary, which is perfect.) No, you have to do something like construct an iron maiden and switch the spikes for hypodermic needles, which is exactly what Russell does. But he completely blows the “Sensation” sequence, giving us a Tommy who hang-glides and uses his divine influence to break up fights between biker gangs. Roger handles the song better than Pete did on the album, but the sequence is so monumentally wrongheaded you couldn’t even play it as a joke and have it come close to working.

Nevertheless, the movie’s still a fine piece of work, just not as strong as the original album.

THE VIDEO

The 1.85:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--is good when taken as a whole, highlighted by moments when the image looks absolutely fantastic and marred by those when it looks a little rough. Russell’s wacko color scheme looks great, there’s a significant boost in depth, clarity, and detail over previous releases (even the Superbit disc), and moments such as poor little Sally Simpson’s escape through the family garden or the dizzying whirl of the Acid Queen’s shiny contraption are stunning. There is the occasional softness to be expected from a movie of this vintage, and some shots look flat. Grain can be uneven, often heavy and unnaturally coarse (check out the final shot).

THE AUDIO

Two lossless audio options are included here: a new DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track and a DTS-HD 5.0 Master Audio track that retains the movie’s original Quintaphonic mix (the details of which are elucidated in a pretty cool text insert that comes with this disc). The mix is pretty much the same in each, although the 5.1 track contains more info in the center channel, which sweetens the sound and brings it more in line with modern expectations; the drier sound offered by the Quintaphonic track is closer to what you’d find in a straightforward surround mix of a studio recording.

For a 35-year-old movie, the audio is fantastic, putting you right smack in the middle of the music; the lead vocal/power trio sound that was the heart of the band is spread across the front channels, while backing/group vocals and the synthesizers that Townshend employed as augmentation (an approximation of the orchestral arrangements he refused to allow producer Kit Lambert to add to the album) fill the surrounds. The low end is naturally more forceful in the 5.1 track, but it’s certainly no slouch in the Quintaphonic track. Every once in a while the audio will show its age, but it’s still one hell of an experience.

English, English SDH, and French subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The only extra here (if you can even call it that) is access to one of Sony’s movieIQ tracks, and for that you’ll need BD Live-connectivity. (I read somewhere that Russell recorded a commentary for one of the foreign DVD releases, but whether this is in fact true I have no idea.)

FINAL THOUGHTS