Lee Montague

Both trifles and structure are tossed out the door by director Ken Russell in this film. Here, historical content matters not so much as metaphors, feelings, emotions, and interpretations, and pay close attention, as every word and frame is intended to be important. The film takes place on a single train ride, in which the sickly composer Gustav Mahler and his wife, Alma, confront the reasons behind their faltered marriage and dying love. Each word seems to evoke memories of past, and so the audience witnesses events of Mahler’s life that explain somewhat his present state. Included are his turbulent and dysfunctional family life as a child, his discovery of solace in the “natural” world, his brother’s suicide, his [unwanted] conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, his rocky marriage and the death of their young child. The movie weaves in and out of dreams, flashbacks, thoughts and reality as Russell poetically describes the man behind the music.Read More »

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The real coup here is the presentation of the one movie Gavin directed. It is called Another Sky, made in 1954, and shot largely in North Africa in black and white. It is the story of a demure governess named Rose who comes to work in Marrakesh, and who is gradually seduced by the heat, the mystery and the latent sexuality of the desert. It is a picture made under the moon of Paul Bowles, a friend to Gavin, and the author only a few years earlier of The Sheltering Sky, a novel that has much the same themes… I don’t say that Another Sky is totally successful, but as soon as you think of it as a British film made in 1954, then its boldness, its mood and its attempt at something novel fall into place. The French took up the cause of Another Sky a long time ago, but in the two countries where Gavin lived most of his life — Britain and America — it is hardly known. – David Thomson, reviewing a retrospective of Lambert’s workRead More »

Plot Synopsis by Sandra Brennan
In this Edgar Wallace mystery, the trouble begins when a Rhodesian jewel thief kills a policeman and simply disappears. Now it is up to an intrepid detective, a former cop, to solve the crime.Read More »