Director Ken Russell and DPs Dick Bush and Ronnie Taylor shot early scenes in the film in natural light, and their use of earth tones and bone white made its domestic scenes look like a parody of kitchen-sink melodrama. After establishing this aesthetic, they flip to a more stylized look when the Acid Queen enters the story; Turner enters through the doors to a fake-looking theatre drenched in red and green lights, dressed in a red cloak and smiling broadly as Uncle Frank addresses her. Before she starts singing, we\u2019re primed for a lurid spectacle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Acid Queen sequence is over the top, but Turner anchors the scene with an assured screen presence. After the musical numbers performed by Eric Clapton and The Who\u2014all of whom mumble through their roles and try not to look at the camera\u2014Turner stares down the lens as she brandishes a comically large hypodermic needle. Her fleet-footed dancing moves read as seductive, which contrasts with her exaggerated facial expressions. At the start of the sequence, Russell shoots her in medium shots that last a beat longer than seems normal, allowing viewers to take in her intoxicating blend of beauty and terror. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At this point in her career, Turner was primarily known for her work in R&B, but she had a strong interest in British rock music. “There\u2019s a lot of good music to be covered,\u201d she told journalist Harvey Kubernik in 1975.<\/a> Her gritty interpretation of \u201cAcid Queen\u201d lacks the relative polish of Townshend\u2019s version of the song on the 1969 album, and her passion added to the immediacy and terror of the scene. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The song \u201cAcid Queen\u201d had another layer of prescience for Turner. When the film was in production, she was a year and a half away from leaving her husband and employer Ike Turner and going public with his domestic abuse. \u201cIt is often my job to sing that song with The Who, so she always comes into my mind,\u201d Pete Townshend recalled in his eulogy for Turner.<\/a> \u201cIt isn\u2019t easy to deal with. The song is about abuse at the hands of an evil woman. How she turned that song on its head! All the anger of her years as a victim exploded into fire and bluster and a magnificent and crazy cameo role that will always stay with me.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Turner had become a must-see live performer in the years leading up to her film debut, but \u201cTommy<\/em> was a whole new trip for me, getting into a room and turning into a madwoman,\u201d she told Kubernik. \u201cAt first, I didn\u2019t want to play the part of a prostitute. But it was a challenge and it called for drama. That\u2019s what acting is all about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the Acid Queen brought an exaggerated version of Turner\u2019s live persona from the 1960s and \u201870s to the big screen, Aunty Entity called for a different kind of drama. The antagonist in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome<\/em> took the strengths Turner developed onstage and honed them to a more nefarious end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Exiled to a post-apocalyptic desert, Mad Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) follows a pair of thieves to Bartertown, a trading post that runs on methane. When Max has nothing to barter, town founder Aunty Entity (Turner) forces him to fight\u2014and to covertly assassinate one of ther challengers\u2014in a no-holds-barred fighting ring called the Thunderdome. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the old clich\u00e9 goes, the villain doesn\u2019t see herself as the villain, a truism that Turner took to heart in her portrayal of Aunty Entity. In her first scene, she speaks in a whispery, flute-like tone and smiles sincerely at Max as she listens to his plight, looking him in the eye and stepping towards him with small, deliberate strides. Aunty Entity\u2019s polite tone contrasts with some of the more eyebrow-raising statements she makes when she explains to Max how Bartertown is run. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This contrast becomes a vast, but effective, chasm when Aunty Entity enters the Thunderdome. Directors George Miller and George Ogilve and cinematographer Dean Semler shoot the inside of the Thunderdome as a cavernous expanse with sharp, shiny objects catching the light, and frame Turner in low angles as she explains the rules of these fights. While she retains the clipped diction of her introductory scene, she speaks in a lower, more resonant voice, and she views the people of Bartertown with a harsher, almost contemptuous gaze. The way Turner keeps her graceful sense of movement consistent throughout the film, and the way she maintains her confidence and comic timing, makes the shifts between the different facets of Aunty Entity\u2019s personality believable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/turner2-1024x576.jpg\")
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