Movie Reviews : ‘Salome’s Last Dance’ Falls Flat on Its Face

In the languid and tedious “Salome’s Last Dance” (Beverly Center Cineplex and Westside Pavilion), flamboyant British writer-director Ken Russell imagines that Oscar Wilde’s favorite London pimp surprises him with a production of the playwright’s banned 1891 “Salome” in which Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge), is cast as John the Baptist.

As the play progresses in these highly improbable circumstances, Wilde sees himself and his Bosie in Salome’s tormented, destructive love for John the Baptist. As if this weren’t portentous enough, Russell has decided that the play should end at the very moment the brothel is raided by police and the proprietor (Stratford Johns), who also casts himself in the play as Herodias, and Wilde are hauled off in a Black Maria. (To be sure, Russell has added a surprise twist to Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils.)

All that Russell has really accomplished, however, is to create a contrived and mechanical framing device around a nearly lifeless filmed play (which Wilde, by the way, wrote in French; it has been translated into English by Vivian Russell). The costumes and sets are period-accurate lush and elaborate, but Russell predictably adds his by-now-trite sadomasochistic touches.

Not only is “Salome’s Last Dance” virtually devoid of genuine eroticism of any persuasion but also is so static that the play itself bores rather than involves. It’s possible to believe that lissome, husky-voiced Imogen Millais-Scott as Salome, a fiercely regal Glenda Jackson as her cynical mother Herodias, and the stentorian Johns as a Herod sorely tempted by his voluptuous stepdaughter might be able to bring alive the exotic “Salome” on the stage. But here they’re embalmed by Russell’s approach, which is to camp up what is already inherently camp pathos. (Russell himself gets in the act, casting himself as an ancient photographer recording the production for posterity.)

The final irony of this misbegotten “Salome’s Last Dance” (MPAA-rated R for adult themes, some nudity) is that “Salome” has already been effectively filmed. Inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s famous drawings, Alla Nazimova in 1922 produced a 35-minute silent pantomime version that has an aura of stylized, decadent chic that anticipated the experimental exotica made years later by such underground film makers as Kenneth Anger.