Lisztomania was written and directed by Ken Russel, so it's his baby for all the world to see. There is, surprise surprise, a lot of nudity. There are a lot of phallic symbols, even in heaven the pillars are giant penises. Richard Wagner is the villain of the piece, complete with vampire teeth to suck the creativity out of Liszt's neck while he plays it out on a piano. Sound weird yet? Maybe it was revenge for Liszt playing Wagner's new piece cut up with renditions of chop-sticks to please his teenage girl fans all screaming like it was The Beatles. In a very risky scene Wagner's reanimated corpse goes after Jews with an electric guitar-machine gun. The whole film is like this. It's worth seeing once, just to experience the weirdness. But it's not really that good. Occasionally boring. The music is middle of the road, both the classical and the electric. Daltry does sing in the film, and that's a bit middle of the road too. Oh, did I mention, Daltry and family, now deceased, fly in a spaceship from heaven made of a giant organ (not that kind of organ, though is a memorable scene with one of those as well) to earth to blow up Wagner in the midst of his Nazi holocaust. So everybody dies, but there's still a happy ending.

19th century castration fantasy--delineating the extravagance of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt's sex-saturated young life until his eventual death by the symbolic stabbing of a voodoo needle (a myriad of maladies in actual life)--done-up in the spirit of a naughty British schoolboy bored by his classical lessons and entertaining himself by looking up his music teacher's skirts. Writer-director Ken Russell's cartoon-strip nightmare begins promisingly, with a hilarious slapstick joust between Liszt and his lover's husband, the Count d'Agoult (it's a naked swashbuckler, like something from an inventive blue movie). But soon it becomes apparent that Russell's vision is going to be all a pastiche, from silent movies to "Frankenstein" to German Expressionism to bows of unassuming self-reverence. The surreality of Russell's concept doesn't even make sense in the mad forum he has created--there's a narrative thread, yet nothing hangs together--while the creative production design upstages most of the actors. *1/2 from ****

Roger Daltrey is supposed to be Franz Liszt and we are to believe that Liszt had some vague religious principles which required him to bed only nuns in his later years, that Wagner was a sailor-suited vampire who died and was reborn as Frankenstein's Monster/Adolf Hitler, that the world Liszt graced was a rock opera, and that the intended audience for this movie is the self-involved youth of the 1970s who were -- or perhaps are -- incapable of conceiving anything other than their own self-indulgent, pornographic fantasies.

I have read two books on Liszt and one on Wagner which extensively covered their relationship. I now know less about Liszt than I did before I saw this movie.

There are lots of busty women showing off their naked torsos in this movie.