The Planets by Gustav Holst is one of the best-loved pieces of twentieth-century music. Ken Russell has taken a brilliant recording of this work, with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, and illustrated the music with passages from a mass of documentary material. In true Russell style, his view of The Planets is provocative, entertaining and wonderfully watchable.
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NTSC Region 0 not PAL Format plays fine in the United States
Great movie!!Description on Amazon says PAL format (which doesn't play in the United States) but its actually NTSC format and Region 0 so it plays fine in the U.S.
D**Y
Another flawed film, with fine bits
I'm a big fan of the classical music documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC's Monitor program in the 1960s. I agree with John Bridcut that the 1968 Delius film Song of Summer was the best of these; Max Adrian's portrayal of the invalid composer is a comic masterpiece. There are so many: about Prokofiev, Bartok, Debussy, and, another favourite, Elgar.When the success of his feature films brought him larger budgets (Women in Love, for which he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, was only 2 years after the Delius film), he unleashed his imagination and began filling his films with an endless series of Russell tropes: Nazis, naked women, fire, crucifixion. It wasn't long before he was officially Over the Top. It can take a long time for Hollywood to run out of patience with a wayward director, but by 1983, when he was once again making classical music films for television, this time for ITV's The South Bank Show, the bulk of the money had run out. So Ken Russell's View of The Planets is a low-rent affair. A (very fine) recording of The Planets from The Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy is matched with "found", or stock footage, cleverly edited.Finally available on DVD and Blu-ray, the Holst film shows how far Russell had come since The Music Lovers, Mahler and Lisztomania in the 1970s. The means are very slender now, but Russell's imagination is often lit up. All the same obsessions are there, this time in a low-tech environment not too different from a YouTube amateur of today. There are still flashes of humour: the great Barbie Doll ending of Venus, and the surfing beginning of Mercury are both fine gags. But there is also great artistry in his Saturn sequence, a brilliant environmental satire of planned obsolescence. This is another flawed film with fine bits, by a director who specialized in just that.
A**R
Wonderful music
Loved it saw it back in the eighties
虎**屋
モンタージュ映画
奇才ケン・ラッセルがホルストの組曲『惑星』（オーマンディ指揮、フィラデルフィア管）をそっくりそのまま利用して、各楽章に合ったモンタージュ映像を作ったもの。テレビ放送向け映像。火星だとナチスドイツその他の軍隊の映像、金星だと女性の肉体美、土星だと死・老化と言った所。天王星で、ローマ法皇だのレーニンだの（大相撲の稽古風景もある）を使っているのは人をたぶらかすものという皮肉か？音源もそうだが、既成の映像を使っているので、あまり画質が良くない。DVDでもBlu-rayでも大差無いと思う。今度はオーマンディのコンサート映像の方を楽しむとしよう。
