If you ever thought Mahler sounds an awful lot like film music, well, a lot of composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age – Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold spring to mind – were forged in Mahler’s Vienna. They shared his sensibility, to some extent, and boiled it down into a pop cultural gulasch when they settled in Hollywood.

Ken Russell’s “Mahler” (1974) goes one step further in marrying Mahler’s actual music to the director’s poetic fancies and metaphorical musings about the composer and his life. So don’t look at it as strict biography, though there are certainly truths to be divined from it.

Next to some of Russell’s other composer biopics (“Lisztomania,” for example), this one is positively restrained by comparison. Still, Russell being Russell, he couldn’t help but interpolate a Nazi dominatrix – presented as a silent movie parody, no less.

Happy birthday (?), Gustav Mahler!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGq7TFoxB4E

Watch for Oliver Reed in a brief cameo as a train conductor. Allegedly, his payment was three bottles of Dom Perignon.