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Salome's Last Dance

1988, Movie, R, 89 mins

Salome's Last Dance: Review

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Ken Russell's most impressive offering in years presents Oscar Wilde's Salome as a play within a film. Wilde (Nickolas Grace) and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge), visit a local bordello, where a performance of his banned play Salome is to be staged. Playing Herod, the gluttonous king, is the bordello's proprietor (Stratford Johns). Other bordello residents fill out the remaining roles, including a Cockney servant girl (Imogen Millais-Scott) in the role of Salome, and Lord Alfred plays the prophet, John the Baptist. The play dramatizes an ancient biblical tale: Salome tries to seduce the imprisoned prophet and is repulsed. As a reward for performing the titillating "Dance of the Seven Veils" for her sexually besotted stepfather, Herod, she demands the prophet's head on a silver platter. The events that take place off the stage, however, are as important as what occurs on it. The play-within-a-film structure achieves a synthesis of real-life decadence, historical decadence, and that particular decadence that flowed from Wilde's pen. In an effort to stretch these boundaries even further, director Russell casts himself as a photographer who captures and frames the images, and as the stagehand who creates the sound effects--the aural counterpart to the imagemaker. Despite what are often called "excesses" in Russell's style, SALOME'S LAST DANCE is a film of emotional depth and warmth. leave a comment
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