This tiresome movie is a gutless snuff film wannabe. Its prancing, simpering misogyny would never have succeeded if it weren't gauzed up with fashionable "sexual preferences."
Russell manages neatly to solarize Wilde's Salome, capturing and exaggerating everything in it that is opposite to the elements that make Strauss' Salome one of the great operas. Glib, arch decadence is a steamy, mechanical dead end, and this movie is the deadest. It has all the wit of poop jokes and pornographic caricatures of the Mona Lisa.
D. H. Lawrence was contemptuous of decadence. The "marriage" of Lawrence and Russell was a rape, folks. And Lawrence was dead.
Russell manages neatly to solarize Wilde's Salome, capturing and exaggerating everything in it that is opposite to the elements that make Strauss' Salome one of the great operas. Glib, arch decadence is a steamy, mechanical dead end, and this movie is the deadest. It has all the wit of poop jokes and pornographic caricatures of the Mona Lisa.
D. H. Lawrence was contemptuous of decadence. The "marriage" of Lawrence and Russell was a rape, folks. And Lawrence was dead.