Return to Waterloo
Years ago I stumbled onto a VHS of the Ray Davies video "Return to Waterloo" for the low, low price of 99¢ (which meant more back in the days when videotapes were still being manufactured)! I decided to take a chance figuring I'd be getting some Kinks music video that would sit around gathering dust. What I got, however, is a wonderfully odd and surreal hour-long movie which is much akin to "Pink Floyd: The Wall" in design, structure and general execution. It's a travesty that this weird little movie's not well known outside of Kinks fandom.
The film follows a very plain-looking Realtor known only as The Traveler (Kenneth Colley) on a train ride. As the moments drag on, the Traveler has very vivid daydreams about his life, his ailing marriage, his runaway teenage daughter, and personal interactions with his fellow passengers. As the film progresses and we delve deeper into the mind of The Traveler, it turns out to be a very scary place. For starters, the man may or may not be a wanted serial rapist, and he may or may not have been molesting and/or murdered his teenage daughter. And did I mention there's a blind old lady (Myrtle Devenish) who goes all Norman Bates with a butcher knife? And a death-to-all-mannequins-by-briefcase sequence? And a barely-legal chick's butt-crack? (That got the attention of some of you...)
And a very young actor named Tim Roth who got the opportunity to sing a couple punk songs? Yep, that Tim Roth. It's clear from his intense performance that he was a young actor who was going to make a name for himself. The rest of the cast consists of people mostly only known for British TV appearances, including TV weatherman Michael Fish and Claire Rayner aka Aunt Agony.
Davies conceived the project while commuting from Guildford to London's Waterloo station to record an album. "I made a lot of studies of people on the train," he told Rolling Stone in 1985. "At one point, I thought of doing a book of poetry or short stories on the commuters." Soon after, he was commissioned by the BBC to do a special for Channel 4, and that became his project... which he was so consumed with that it caused a rift with his bandmates, and worry amongst producers, who were uneasy about the film's pitch-black overtones.
Made as a co-production between the BBC and RCA Home Video, the film debuted on the BBC in November 1984. In those days (pre-internet) there was usually a lag before films/albums made their way overseas, and this one was certainly no excpetion. On May 10, 1985 MTV debuted a tie-in TV special confusingly titled "Ray Davies: Return to Waterloo" (the same promotional title as the film itself) and the movie opened at selected American theaters a week later. Davies, who'd specifically designed the film to be aired as an hour-long TV special, criticized the theatrical exhibition. "The Traveler is a little man. He should be seen on a little screen." Fans, meanwhile, criticized the fact that its theatrical run was blink-and-you-missed-it. The movie was released on VHS/Beta/LD soon after, re-released as a discount tape in 1992, and one of those tapes was ultimately duped to DVD in 1999 paired as a double-feature with "Come Dancing with the Kinks." If ever there was an oddity screaming out for a special edition Blu-Ray release....
Now, Davies' obsession with this film probably shoulda/coulda ended in 1985, but it didn't. Davies later published a novel called "Waterloo Sunset Stories" in which he expanded the story and painted the Traveler to be far more of a villain than he had been in the film.
Naturally, I immediately fell in love with this little oddity of a movie and was elated to discover a soundtrack was available but it was out of print at that time (as so often immediately happens with soundtracks). A month later, I rather inexplicably stumbled onto a used copy on cassette. Sadly, I soon discovered it was a Kinks album that would ultimately sit around and gather dust. Oh, the irony. Now, I'm not the only one to criticize the LP. Rolling Stone's James Henke pointed out that three of the songs appeared on the previous Kinks album "Word of Mouth," and the remainder "are really on a par with the Kinks' usual material." The Village Voice's Tom Ward had numerous gripes, including the lack of lyric sheet and story synopsis included with the album, the omissions of "Ladder of Success" and the film's voice-overs during "Dear Lonely Hearts" and "Sold Me Out." See, it isn't just me.
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