[...] a woman floats to the skies on her huge breasts, a pair of giant ears flap up to heaven, two knights with gigantic penises joust for a princess's favor, and an acrobat bounces across the stage on his two, gaily painted balls. [...] Panurge begins the dramatization of Gargantua 's gruesome birth, as if it were a pseudo-respectable sex education film: for the first time on any stage-'The Birth of a Baby. Russell may have realized that in such a weird and spectacular film it was imperative that some point of consistent human contact be kept, and that Panurge was a more accessible connection than the friar or the giant would have been.
If anyone were to film Rabelais it would have to be Ken Russell. For no other world-class director has quite the energy, the mammoth zeal for lively detail, and the commitment to indecorum that the assignment would require. As it happens, Russell once wrote a screenplay for an Italian production, Gargantua. In 1973 he went to Italy to look for locations, but the project was abandoned.1
The present report on Russell's unpublished screenplay is perhaps an academic exercise in metacinema. For between a Russell screenplay and a Russell film falls the fertile shadow of much inspiration and happy whim. "I am a great believer in inventing things on the set," Russell tells Gene Phillips.2 Still, the screenplay should reveal the general Unes of the director's approach. And as a little learning-albeit dangerous-is better than none, perhaps this report on an unrealized Russell will be received with the intrigued but tentative spirit in which it is offered.
The film was to open with a Breughelish medieval fair, teeming with life and colour, to the music of a pop band. We see a sun painted on a curtain, with a mouth through which juts a megaphone. Through the megaphone we hear the Prologue promise "a light confection/Free from badness and infection," intended so that "Joy shall be the son of Man."3 The first line of dialogue proper was to be Friar John's "Bravo! That's shitten well sung!"-which should have gone some way to assure literary purists that the Rabelaisian spirit was to be perserved.
The megaphone was then to be revealed to be the codpiece worn by Panurge, joker, scholar, wencher, wit, and manager of "The Panurge Marvellous and Magical Mobile Theatre. "After the opening title Panurge was to use the megaphone as a flagon from which to drink his wine, while he traced the freakish lineage of Grandgousier and Garganelle back to Noah's disregard for wine. Thus, in the first-and-essential-symbol in the film, art, phallic and artistic creativity, and wine, were to be combined.
The film continues-if we may for convenience suspend the conditional tense of the screenplay-as a theatrical presentation of the background to Rabelais 's story. Noah's family were afflicted with horrible swellings, Panurge tells his audience. Meanwhile, a woman floats to the skies on her huge breasts, a pair of giant ears flap up to heaven, two knights with gigantic penises joust for a princess's favor, and an acrobat bounces across the stage on his two, gaily painted balls.
Then Panurge begins the dramatization of Gargantua 's gruesome birth, as if it were a pseudo-respectable sex education film: "for the first time on any stage-'The Birth of a Baby.' " However, he is interrupted by three censors in the audience. One is a goose-seller who looks like Hitler, one a Texas Cattleman, and the third a Blacksmith who looks like Josef Stalin. The artists receive some support from the audience. For example, a chimney sweep helps stuff back Garganelle 's guts, while the crowd shout "Heave! Heave!" and the band plays "The Volga Boatman." But the critics have their way. The theatre is destroyed in a riot. The artists and their aide, Friar John, are sentenced to death.
They are saved by the real Gargantua, however. The 200-foot giant suddenly appears and washes the Gooseman away in a flood of urine. He then drinks a barrel of wine, but it's the barrel in which the three villains have been hiding. He suffers massive heartburn from their campfire. Panurge, the Fool and Friar John gather in a hollow ball so that Gargantua can swallow them to douse the fire.
While Gargantua waits to excrete his friends, his wife Badebec is in labour. The three heroes are discovered in her womb (having unexpectedly passed from Gargantua), where the fully -developed Pantagruel swings merrily on his umbilical cord. A huge explosion delivers all four.
So far Russell has been skipping freely through his source, simplifying the plot line but including enough of Rabelais to preserve the spirit of the original. Thus the fool acts out Gargantua 's tale about his experiments to replace toilet paper, and the nurses' amusement with his gradually rising codpiece until it is a full maypole which they can bedeck with flowers and dance around. The Gooseman punctures the great armfuls of balloons, labelled "Joy" in a multitude of languages, which Panurge brings onstage. It may be post-Frazer Rabelais, but Rabelais it remains. Nor should one object to the host of modern allusions in Russell's Rabelais. Far from being anachronistic impositions, they recapture for the modern film audience the kind of vernacular contemporaneity that Rabelais suddenly offered his readers. Russell delivers an equivalent to the shock, surprise and indecorum that Rabelais originally had.
With the birth of Pantagruel, Russell begins to take more significant liberties. His Gargantua runs off distracted because his brain has been occupied by the villainous Blacksmith and Cattleman. A Cardinal burdens Pantagruel with guilt for his father's madness and his mother's death, then smothers him in a dark, snow-ringed cell of mounting books. The church's education literally stunts his growth. While a voice tells him "I am the light of the world," Pantagruel is sunk in cold darkness. But he eventually decides, "Better a quick death of bright fire than a Ufe of perpetual darkness." He sets fire to his paper prison and crashes through the waU of fire, to find himself in a field of brilliant flowers.
The next stage of Pantagruel's education is the life of the natural peasant. He learns harvesting, baking, shearing, weaving, ploughing, until he again meets Panurge. Panurge instructs him in more aca- demie matters: astronomy, reading, writing, the mathematics of card-games (Black Jack), and theatre. The combination of the peasant's experience of nature and the scholar's experience of art are curing him from the harmful effects of his church-based education.
His religious stultification is ended completely when Pantagruel falls in love. Notably, this experience comes to him through theatre. While playing Romeo, Pantagruel falls in love with a beautiful girl in the audience. As life so often follows art in Russell's work, the girl happens to be named Juliet. From the force of his emotion, Pantagruel suddenly swells to his normal gigantic height.
Of course, the giant is now physically incompatible with his normal-sized lady. But Panurge recalls a magic herb, Godo, that could change Juliet into a giantess. The men rush off to find the herb:
Juliet: And where does that leave me?
Panurge: Waiting for Godo. Though it pains me to say it.
On the search for the hemp-like Godo, Panurge finds Heroine, a rich, sexy lady with whom he falls in love. Their relationship is not immediately successful. She spurns him. In turn, he ties her dress to the cassock of a lascivious priest, so when they walk apart both are stripped naked. In return, the lady rubs Panurge 's clothes with a bitch in heat, so he is pursued by hordes of excited dogs.
Relenting (or herself overcome by the natural processes of love and lusty attraction), the lady sends Panurge a vegetable basket with a blank note-paper. Brother John attempts a variety of ludicrous pedantries to interpret the empty paper:
Letters written in semen invisible to the eye when dry . . .
Crusaders captured by the sodomite Turks of times smuggled out secret papers written backwards in syphilitic pus . . . She might have used the blood of a bat . . . Or the message could mean simply that you are nothing to her.
Panurge 's tears produce an answer where his learning failed; a message appears, "Give me a ring sometimes-726-6621. "Although the message seems to be an anachronism, it actually invites Panurge to visit Heroine at the Ringing Island; the number places her location on the map. The Island is Russell's version of Rabelais 's L'Ile Sonnante, a fantastic place of many religions with a cacophany of church-bells. Before taking his theatre company to the island, however, Panurge speeds through his debate whether or not to marry (the debate which occupied almost all of the Rabelais 's Book III).
On the Ringing Island, a war has broken out between the forces of Lutherape, a caged ape spouting Lutheran sermons, and the forces of the resplendent Popinjay, an obvious parody of Catholicism. When Panurge performs a slapstick version of Christ, he incurs the wrath of the Inquisition. Our heroes flee disguised as a cardinal and nuns, only to encounter the ire of Lutherape and his followers. Meanwhile, Heroine is found delivering a Woman's Lib lecture, predicting that God will next manifest Himself as a woman. The Inquisition drags her off to be tortured as a heretic.
Disguised as nuns, John and the Fool hide in a convent, where they find JuUet, now a novice. She is not yet totally committed to the cloth. When she hits her thumb with a hammer she exclaims, "Oh shit! Oh Christ, I said Shit! Oh shit, I said Christ! Oh what the fuck, I don't want to be a nun anyway." To this dialectic, her Mother Superior's response is immediate, for she has been listening at a switchboard of speaking tubes in the shape of a sacred heart: "Sister JuUet, you are guilty of sins 8, 73, and 121 (b). For forgiveness go to the punishment block on your knees and perform penances 21, 72 (a) and 69." Another nun is severely castigated for having been raped by her confessor, Father Stiffstand. She is sent back to him to "Confess your sin and may his penance justly fit your gabbUng mouth."
In contrast to the sometimes ambivalent penances dispensed by the Mother Superior, the Popinjay sells a rich merchant 10,000 indulgences for $10,000. "Have you a St. Peter's credit card?" he asks. When Panurge appears before the Popinjay to plead on Heroine's behalf, he accidentally steps on His Holiness's shoes. Immediately the Popinjay sings "Don't You Step on My Red Suede Shoes." The Popinjay hears Pan urge's eloquent case, then drops a massive white turd on his face.
At this point the Lutherape forces rebel. The soldiers begin raping the nuns, while Lutherape himself goes about literally whitewashing the garishly painted statues. Amid the war between citizens and soldiers, Panurge, John and the Fool free Juliet and Heroine. They find refuge in a building in the shape of a heathen idol. There they find the peaceful religion of Flower Power. The worshippers are stoned on Godo. The Fool declines to indulge, but Panurge and Friar John sink into drugged visions.
In Panurge 's vision, Heroine is crucified by three American spacemen who put red electric light bulbs into her hands and feet. Panurge denies knowing her and runs away, terrified. Brother John in his vision finds a warring world ignoring Lutherape. Young men with their heads in paper bags kill each other, crying "Die, you Catholic bastard, die!" or "Die, you Protestant bastard, die!" Panurge's vision is of American technology superceding the old salvation, Brother John's of the Irish continuation of old religious warfare. Russell extends Rabelais 's reügious satire into contemporary analogues.
Panurge and John meet and separate to seek a sanctuary from the mad theology of man, based on hatred. Panurge goes to the Church of the East. Here a hammer and sickle frame a portrait of Lenin, the altar is made of explosive shells and sheaves of wheat, and the congregation have their mouths sealed with adhesive tape. When they raise their hands in ostensible adulation, it is because they are covered by two machine-gunners. When the priest turns around, he is found to be Stalin, the Blacksmith, with a gun. Friar John flees the buUets fired at him as an outsider. He smashes through a stained glass window of Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian astronaut. The meld of religion and new science that John saw in America in his hallucination, he finds again in the Church of the East.
Similarly, Panurge in the Church of the West discovers an American analogue to the bigotry his vision revealed to him earlier. He finds sweating Negroes imprisoned in giant Coke bottles, while others, chained, support a Cadillac. A choir of football heroes and majorettes sing "It's the real thing" to the American national anthem, as a police priest consecrates a bottle of Coke over the hood of the car. The congregants are served a communion of hamburgers and Coke, in their separate cars at the drive-in service. Panurge, his face blackened by the explosions of the war, is bashed on the head with a Coke bottle by the police priest, who turns out to be the censorious Cattleman: "We don't serve bums or blacks at this bar, mister."
Panurge and John meet again. As theirvisions revealed the failure of religion to bring men together, their experiences in the Churches of the East and West show the failure of the political systems that have superseded religion. They resolve to go home. They meet the tarred and feathered "Heretic," Heroine, who is so lost in her song that she does not recognize them:
Shall we gather at the river . . .
The bloody, bloody, bloody river.
Gather with the killers at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
The Fool shakes Panurge and John back to consciousness and they flee, just as a band of religious folk set about slaughtering the Flower People.
Heroine appears leading a procession of women with a banner, "Freedom for Women." Panurge is happy to see her but she knocks him down and tramples him. Juliet is now in Heroine's group, which enters the convent and drives off the men who are raping the nuns. Heroine's activism seems preferable to the morbid fantasies of the heroes. Lutherape and Popinjay kill each other in a duel with crucifixes.
The whole world seems to be fighting, when suddenly a red, blood-like rain falls from the skies. Pantagruel is spraying mouthfulls of red wine down on the fighting. The combatants dissolve into warm brotherhood as the wine courses through the veins. So even Heroine's militance, local in its effect, is superseded by the fraternal powers of the grape, the juvenescence of Joy. The battles both of religion and of the sexes end in love and laughter under the influence of the god's wine.
Pantagruel is heralded as the bringer of peace. He appoints Friar John governor, for he alone remained true to Gargantua 's principles of freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear. John is too humble to accept. He requests but to found an abbey after his own inclination, an abbey without clock or bell, and without the cruel vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but one where "Grace and honor, joy, delight, here shall reign both day and night, for joyous works are the greatest hymn of praise to God."
The crowd builds the abbey, which resembles a beautiful urn with a white-flowered plant growing from the top. Inside, Panurge and Heroine are a loving couple. Pantagruel hands a blossom from the plant to the weeping, little Juliet, who at but a nibble begins to grow. She bursts through her clothes to stand there before Pantagruel, a naked giantess at last. The earth quakes to the sound of their love-making, and the abbey begins to crumble. For in this best of all possible worlds, as the Fool observes, "This is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper but a bang!" The characters disappear in a cloud of dust.
It is fitting that Ken Russell should have been attracted to the Rabelais epic. Russell has always been interested in the dramas of giants and their failures, as we might infer from his attention to the gigantic talents of Delius, Rosetti, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Gaudier-Brzeska. His own works, like Rabelais's, tend to involve gigantic orchestrations of detail, frequently to represent the teeming fertility of the imagination. One recalls his visualizations of The Devils, Mahler, Lisztomania, and even The Boy Friend, for the most obvious examples. Rabelais's rambling lists are an equivalent to Russell's charged screen.
But the kinship between Rabelais and Russell runs deeper than style. Both artists seem to relish the detachment of the ironist. Both set in motion crammed dramas, but impishly refrain from making clear their own relationship to the action. Thus Rabelais raises the possiblitiy of alternative endings both in his Prologue and in Chapter 58, and he develops episodes that dramatize discrepancies in the characters' perspective (e.g. Frere Jean's and Gargantua's attitudes on war). Russell too prefers a film that proffers a rich variety of inferences, over one with a single didactic thrust. So, as artists of prodigal imagination and as mischievously detached ironists, Rabelais and Russell were a promising match.
From Rabelais's wealth of incident and discourse, Russell carved a celebration of pleasure and love and an attack upon the divisive negativism found in art, politics and religion. So his work was essentially faithful to the original.
But it also allowed Russell to make some of his personal concerns clear again. For one thing, Russell's film emphasized more than Rabelais did the eternal struggle between the Artist and the Censor/Critic. Thus the Hitlerian gooseseller attacks the giants' lusty appetites as "Filth! Disgusting! Revolting!" although he himself offers to wring his goose-necks "while you wait." The Cattleman also has a hypocritical fastidiousness: "Taint fit talk for man nor beast, let alone womenfolk." The Blacksmith attacks the opening pantomime in terms familiar from Russian criticism: "formalistic and lacking in creative optimism. It is divorced from reality and contaminated with decadent bourgeois tendencies." Russell was to have similar fun anticipating his critics in Lisztomania.
Similarly, Pantagruel's escape from the suffocation of a church education, first to the bright fields, then to the theatre and thence to love, has an obvious analogue in Savage Messiah, where Gaudier-Brzeska lectures the crowd in the Louvre-"Art is alive. Enjoy it. Laugh at it. Love it or hate it, but don't worship it. You're not in church"- and is forcibly ejected into a funeral procession! Russell earlier used Hitler as an image of the cold, murderous enemy of art in his Strauss television film, Dance of the Seven Veils, and again in Mahler and Lisztomania. For RusseU, art is the means by which man aspires to an expressiveness and a life beyond his normal capacity. Whoever interferes with that reach is an unconscionable oppressor.
As a result, Russell's film might have seemed more political than Rabelais' book seems to be today. Russell's Goose-man exhorts the crowd from a dais decorated with four geese in the shape of a swastika. His association with geese gives a new political meaning to Gargantua's use of the goose as an ass-wipe. Rabelais' purely sensual pleasure becomes a political gesture. Given Pantagruel's and John's speeches at the end of the film, pleasure-taking is a political objective and a political act. Gargantua and Pantagruel both base their political practices upon the guarantee of the widest possible pleasure among the populace.
Moreover, where Rabelais' Gargantua is driven mad by his wondering whether to be joyous over his son's birth or grieved by his wife's death, Russell's Gargantua is the victim of a political occupation. With the Cattleman and the Stalin in his head, his eyes spin like the fruits on a one-armed bandit. His right eye shows Old Glory and his left the hammer and sickle, while the two national anthems play in cacophony. "Shitski!" remarks the Blacksmith, and the Cattleman wins on the next spin. Russell's vülains do not disappear, but re-emerge as subversive forces even within the figure of gigantic wisdom and sympathy.
It might not be unreasonable to propose that Russell's political imagery is not a total imposition upon Rabelais, but something rather of a translation. For implicit in Rabelais' religious satire is a political dimension. In Rabelais' time the social power of the church was more like our government's control over us today than our church's. Russell's expansion of the political restrictions of our lives, particularly in the two drugged visions, which replace religious icons and rituals with figures from current political iconology, is a reasonable translation of Rabelais' quest for personal religious freedom into political terms.
Of course, Russell retains a good dose of religious satire pure and simple, too. His giant Pantagruel tries to hide his private parts with a dome and a cross that he plucked off a church; old habits die hard. The Catholic Russell4 contrasts two kinds of religious character. One is represented by Brother John, who saves the Fool from the Goose-man's rifle, who speaks, drinks and makes love with indiscreet zest, and who alone moves through the battlefield to care for the wounded. He accepts the humanity of God, so when he awakens dazed at the sight of Panurge he says, "Jesus, with all thy faults I love thee still." He finds in god and man alike fallibility and loves them nonetheless. So Russell develops in John the ideal that Rabelais described, the Utopian Abbey of Theleme, where for once people may do what they want.
Secondly, there are the characters that represent religion corrupted, the theology that thrives upon the abuse of life. Thus at the Mother Superior's table a horrible-looking scourge is placed at each table-setting. The Mother Superior recalls Vanessa Redgrave's deformed Mother Superior in The Devils, stuffing herself into a minuscule space to spy upon her fantasy lover. In his Gargantua, though, Russell plays the character for laughs, as in her attack upon the pregnant, raped nun: "Why did you not cry out? ... I would have done my best to come between you." Her religiosity is a futile attempt to repress and to conceal her lusty appetites for life and for sensation. In her abuse of the nun, religious, political and feminist convictions converge.
Then there are the religious figures who destroy the pleasures in life. Pantagruel's first teacher is a case in point, inculcating an unearned guilt and burying the child in darkness. So too the Inquisition's attack upon Panurge's slapstick crucifixion. The troupe is driven to a disrespectful dramatization both out of its appreciation for Christ's humanity and out of its distaste for the hypocrisy and cruelty of the formal church. Similarly, Lutherape declares he must balance each praise of God with an attack upon the Catholics, to escape the corrupted form of worship.
Finally, both warring religions are attacked for their greed and their cruelty. "When it comes to religion," Friar John observes, "methinks the beasts of the jungle are closer to God than Man." Russell's religion of the Flower People is an eternal alternative to religion, for it looks ahead to a movement in the twentieth century, yet in the heathen shape of the building it signifies a pre-Christian tradition. Like Gargantua's maypole, the Flower People's refuge combines the modern and the primitive resonances of archetype.
Given the oppressive inhibitions for which the political and religious villains stand, Russell's stylistic exuberance becomes an important aspect of his ethic. So indeed was Rabelais'. Russell clearly relished the floods of urine and the choruses of lip-farts that a fair adaptation of Rabelais would require. Sometimes Russell's scatology is subtle, as when Panurge, about to be swallowed, orders Gargantua to abstain from further food, "or on our own heads be it." More often the imagery would likely have been like the overflowing tv set in Tommy, a rich, dense effluence.
Russell's exuberance is also expressed in the formal indecorum of the work. All kinds of verse and film-types tumble together. Panurge dismisses the goose-man with a limerick and winds a nursery rhyme into his appeal to the Popinjay for Heroine's pardon. In the love-scenes between Pantagruel and Juliet, the film veers between literature and life. The lovers meet when Pantagruel is playing Romeo. He is so smitten that his stage-Juliet must dump a chamberpot on his head to return him to his role. (It fails.) In his passion, his Romeo speaks lines from Hamlet. For even fantastic giants are fulfilled and expressed by the magniloquence of the classics (however anachronistic they may be).
As well as tumbling together different literary styles and references, Russell worked in a variety of film inserts and parodies. At one point he suspends the action for a commercial for Godo. A silent montage covers the education of Pantagruel, with an animated cartoon for his astronomy lesson. "The Birth of a Baby," Panurge promised his thrill-hungry audience. And with the goose-seller dead, the Fool looks into the lens: "At last is the world made safe for democracy." As the Popinjay sang a Presley (or Carl Perkins, more accurately) parody, Brother John assumes the manner of a stage Irishman: "Could you be telling me, sister, where I might be after finding the Mother Superior?" Russell's stylistic parodies are an equivalent to the mercurial persona of Rabelais' narrator. And for all their seriousness of concern, both authors were animated by an essentially playful spirit, and both enjoy self-satire.
Of course, Russell's primary stylistic innovation was his anachronism, his irrepressible ranging through all forms and periods of cultural references. Russell makes anachronism a style. But Rabelais rummaged relentlessly through his Pliny and through hosts of lesser-known collectors of the fantastic. And invented his own. So Russell is quite in order to mobilize the analogical resources of his own culture, as in his Shakespeare quotations, and in Heroine's quote of Donne: "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love." In Babedec's womb the four heroes sing the quartet from Rigoletto; Gargantua bids the surgeons hasten before the chorus appears! Gargantua 's interior is a Daliesque landscape: "Huge fried eggs and slices of bacon hang limply over protruding rocks." More often than the classical, Russell quotes from the vernacular of popular culture. "Here's another nice mess you've gotten me into," Panurge tells Pantagruel. And in the Fool's portrayal of Gargantua's birth, an Al Jolson figure pops out singing "Mammy." Panurge defends his play against the Blacksmith with the very Blake quotation by which Russell might arm himself against his critics, and that Rabelais would gleefully second: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
Russell's film would have been truest to Rabelais' book in the irrepressible spirit by which it would have rolled over all f ormalistic cavil, to collect all it wishes to in its lust for life and joy. Still, there are some serious points of difference between the two works. For instance, Russell gives quite a different explanation for Pantagruel 's name (a reminder "of the noxious pan of gruel you brought into this world"). He expands somewhat upon the religious satire in Chapter 45, and adds the stoned fantasies, the villainous triumvirate, and the several mock crucifixions. Some readers may not accept my defense of Russell's political imagery, either, as an equivalent to Rabelais' attack on the repressiveness of church rule. But these differences are not as significant as the Rabelaisian energy of Russell's style, his essential humanism, and his specific satiric thrusts at Rabelais' targets-pedantry, hypocrisy, cruelty, bigotry, and both secular and religious vanity.
RusseU's Panurge seems a simpler character than Rabelais'. In the book it was Panurge who pulled the dog-in-heat trick against the lady; RusseU has her do it to him. So, too, perhaps the addition of feminist rhetoric and activity, to keep the film in the vanguard of social comment, as Rabelais was. In many respects, of course, Rabelais was a man of his time, so his Pauline misogyny is today inconsistent with his larger humanism and sympathy. RusseU's updating may seem to violate the source, but it actually clarifies an inconsistency. Further, he may have decided to keep Panurge wise, practical, and far more honest than Rabelais' character, in order to admit of easier audience identification, a problem more striking in a film than in a novel, perhaps. This may be why Friar John is given the series of ridiculous experiments with Heroine's letter, that were attributed to Panurge in the book. Russell may have realized that in such a weird and spectacular film it was imperative that some point of consistent human contact be kept, and that Panurge was a more accessible connection than the friar or the giant would have been. Panurge was simplified accordingly.
Of course, the present report is a description of the skeleton, not of the living body. RusseU's film would have abounded in witty riches beyond the outline in the screenplay, we can be certain. This may sadden us all the more, as we recall the delights in the screenplay and the marvels of the film that might have been. Some of the poütical and artistic concerns of Gargantua Russell was able to work into Mahler and Lizstomania, and some of the religious into Tommy. And like Gargantua, Gaudier 's love for Brzeska marks the beginning of his self-fulfilment and the power of his huge talent. But the Gargantua would still be a rich addition to the Russell canon.
For above aU it is RusseU's genius to visualize, to dramatize, with outrageous exuberance. In the book, Lanterne's Oracle of the Bottle may exhort us to "Drink." But in the film Russell would have had a world of bloody, vicious warfare bathed, calmed and melted into fraternal bliss by Pantagruel's wine. At first to the mortals the world would have seemed to be turning red from their own blood. But then the gift of the gods would have been recognized, and man taught again to beware of accepting the appearance of things, and to seek the true joy of life's pleasure instead of the false promise in internecine wars. The image of the giant's grand grape-fest is at once one of Rabelaisian heartiness and one from RusseU's Catholic faith, where a god's blood-like wine dissolves human disorder and brings peace in the heart, peace on earth. Working with Rabelais, RusseU's film would have had a beneficence and optimism that is missing from the songs, the drugged stupefaction and the manias of his Tommy. RusseU's Gargantua would have been an intriguing point in his development.
Footnote
NOTES
1 Colin Wilson, Ken Russell: A Director in Search of a Hero (London: Intergroup Publishing, 1974), p. 62.
2 Gene D. Phillips, "An Interview with Ken Russell," Film Comment, Fall, 1970, p. 12.
3 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from the unpublished typescript, Gargantua (Screenplay by Ken Russell, after the book by Rabelais), copyright 1973 by Produzioni Europee Associate, and dated 23 March, 1973.
4 "My Catholic background helps me to distinguish between normal religious practices and the bizarre things attributed to the nuns in The Devils" (Phillips, p. 17). And "Except for The Boy Friend, my films have been Catholic in outlook: films about love, faith, sin, guilt, forgiveness, and redemption-films that could only have been made by a Catholic" (Quoted in Gene Phillips, "The Early Films," in Ken Russell, edited by Thomas Atkins [Monarch Film Studies, New York: Monarch Press, 1976], p. 14).
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