'TOMMY' TERRIFIC
From 1C The dazed Tommy is shrieked at (or rather sung at—nothing is spoken) by his mother and stepfather, "You didn't see it, you didn't hear it, and you won't say anything to anyone," and he becomes totally traumatized—growing up deaf, dumb, and blind.
He suffers the invariable torments of the handicapped, and his guilty mother endlessly takes him to doctors and faith healers, desperately hoping for a miracle.
In the film's two most incredible sequences, Ann-Margret takes him first to a shrine devoted to a sanctified Marilyn Monroe, where the priests, all wearing Marilyn masks, administer communion and offer salvation; the shrine itself is an enormous blowup of the skirt blowing sequence from "The Seven Year Itch." Marilyn has become the Golden Calf of commerce, worshipped by the maimed and crippled, the Bernadette of the 1960s. Eric Clapton is the preacher.
In the second sequence, Tina Turner as the Acid Queen tries to make a man of Tommy, and it's been a long while since the screen has witnessed a performance of such sheer animal vitality.
Eventually Tommy becomes Pinball Champ of the world, wresting the title away from Elton John, in another dazzling performance, wearing three-foot boots as befits the king of glitter rock.
Tommy's senses return as success comes, and he is greeted by the youth, ever desperate for a fresh panacea, as the Messiah. Tommy enjoys a brief season of veneration, flying everywhere on a kite as the current replacement for God, Jesus, and Marilyn, until the mob must inevitably find something newer yet. The apocalyptic ending is as expected as it is satisfying.
Young Winch and Daltry are enormously appealing as the young and older Tommy, Reed is excellent as the not quite totally evil stepfather, Ann-Margret is effective in some scenes, ineffective in others, Jack Nicholson is in for a cameo as a doctor, and John, Clapton and Miss Turner, simply super.
But the chief triumph remains Pete Townshend's, who wrote it, and Russell's, who found way to make of it a mind boggling experience.
