Whatever you may think about Mahler's music, which rose controvery from the start, this is another of Ken Russell's eloquent aces of musical films, not quite rising to the level of Tchaikovsky three years earlier, but still visually a masterpiece, where every scene and image is of supreme aesthetic beauty. The film was written by Russell himself, and he concentrates the plot to Mahler's final journey home by train to Vienna with his wife, going back by flashbacks to his earlier life with all its worst traumas, including his brother's suicide and his daughter's death. The perhaps most interesting sequence is his visit to the asylum to seek out his colleague Hugo Wolf, excellently played by David Collings, and his conversations with him, all lost mentally in an alien imperial character but as such even the more reasonable. The problems with his marriage with Alma is also thoroughly ventilated, and on this one railway journey, Ken Russell actually succeeds in comprising Mahler's entire life. His music is presented only in fragments, there is a ridiculous episode with Wagner's music interfering and disturbing, and Robert Powell is just perfect as Mahler, while the main credit of the film is the marvellous camera work and imagery.
