Have returned to the Ken Russell at the BBC set with his 1966 film Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World. Written by Russell and Sewell Stokes, who knew Duncan in the last years of her life, some 40 years before the film was made, Isadora stars Vivian Pickles as the irrepressible Ms. Duncan, a self-taught dancer who flouted convention wherever she went and founded a series of children's dancing schools so she could transfer her love of dance to the next generation. To fund one of them she became the mistress of sewing machine magnate Paris Singer (Peter Bowles), who kept her from her public for a time, and later moved to Russia, where she fell into a disastrous marriage to poet Sergei Yessenin (Alexei Jawdokimov), whose inability to speak a word of English was matched by her inability to speak any Russian. This should give even the casual observer some idea of how she lived her life.

And what a life it was, touched by triumph and tragedy alike. Russell hits many of the highs and lows in the newsreel-like opening, which exaggerates a few incidents so he can pull back on them later and present a more nuanced interpretation of what went on. For example, some of Duncan's more reckless and scandalous behavior was triggered by the tragic drowning of her two young children. No matter what, though, she remained undaunted and had an ecstatic vision to match Russell's, who fulfills one of her unrealized dreams by filming Pickles and a horde of young girls cavorting down a hillside to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth. And helping him realize it was cinematographer Dick Bush, who was working with Russell for the first time and would go on to be one of his key collaborators in the years to come. And what a joyful collaboration it was.