TOMMY-ROT

TOMMY (1974)
dir: Ken Russell

TOMMY-ROT
Crazy #13, October 1975
w: Steve Skeates & Lark Russell
a: Marie Severin

This had been a stage play and album before becoming a movie. The line for the movie in the splash is similar to the cult following the character of Tommy had in the climax of the movie. The girl with the scar is a reference to a musical number about a groupie who is injured trying to meet him. “The Entwhistle” refers to John Entwhistle, bassist for The Who.

Tommy's father (Robert Powell) is shot down in World War II and the mother (Ann-Margret), pregnant with their child, later remarries Frank (Oliver Reed). When the father returns home after being assumed dead, Frank kills him. Tommy witnesses this. His mother and father tell him he did not really see what just happened and it renders him deaf, blind, and mute.

Years later, Tommy (Roger Daltrey) is fully grown and his mother attempts to cure him of his illness at a faith healer (Eric Clapton) who runs a church where Jesus is Marilyn Monroe. They take him to a brothel where the Acid Queen (Tina Turner) takes his virginity.

It is uncertain whether it is a symbolic sex scene or she is literally injecting him with drugs, but either way, he's still a vegetable. When the mother and stepfather go out, they leave him in what they think are safe hands, first with a sadomasochistic cousin (Paul Nicholas) and then a perverted uncle (Keith Moon)

Tommy, in his catatonic state, wanders off into a junkyard and discovers a pinball machine, becoming pinball champion of the world and making his parents rich. There's a musical number with Elton John. (see below).

The mother takes Tommy to a doctor (Jack Nicholson) who can't cure him but lusts after her. She's upset that she can't enjoy all her riches because of his condition and throws him through a mirror in frustration, which cures him, and the first thing he tells her is to give up her material possessions.

Jack Nicholson makes a reference to his movie Five Easy Pieces and the movie he and Ann-Margret were in together was Carnal Knowledge.

Tommy is now a celebrity and opens up a series of Holiday Camps like Frank ran at the beginning, and lets his followers move in with him, and everything is groovy.