My favorite version of Tommy is the Ken Russell movie. There, I've said it out loud.

It has things no other version of Tommy has.

It has the nurse singing "Hear the joyful celebration in the streets....it's a boy born on this first day of peace!" This gives Tommy essentially the same birthday as Pete. I could never relate to the whole "Tommy (1917-2000)" thing, which I suppose made Tommy a surrogate Meher Baba figure, but Tommy as Pete makes so much more sense. The failed prophet, the guy who tries to share his enlightenment with us, but learns that enlightenment can't be given. Lifehouse, anyone? Or the guy who sings "I have to be careful not to preach...I can't pretend that I can teach" -- how Tommy is that?

It has Pete and Ken's authentic vision of postwar England -- a time when the whole country was wrestling with the aftermath of death and trauma, and slowly emerged to charismatic pop stars and new ideas and Swinging London, which moved into the Beatles chasing after the Maharaji and Pete following Baba. No American stage production could ever capture the details of living through those times like the guys who actually did.

(And I love the way young Tommy and his mother are seen at the war memorial which Reverend Simpson is still polishing when his daughter runs off to see the grown Tommy. And was Victoria Russell adorable or what?)

It has the best version of the story of Tommy's parents of any incarnation. Bear with me on this. It never really made sense to me that Tommy would be traumatized by his dad coming home and killing his wife's lover. Why would Tommy be upset by that? But in the Townshend/Russell version, Tommy thinks his mom and the creepy guy have killed his dad.

But it gets better: in the movie, I don't think Group Captain Walker came home at all. I think Tommy has a dream that his dad visits him in his bedroom, and he runs out to tell mummy the good news that daddy is back. He bursts in on his mother and her boyfriend having sex...and embarassed, they start shouting at him that he didn't see anything, nothing happened here, don't make a fuss about it. And daddy isn't there. His six-year-old mind totally gets it wrong and assumes they've killed him -- where's the body? a six year old doesn't think of that -- and are trying to conceal their crime. And THAT traumatizes him.

(This would also explain why Tommy, acheiving enlightenment, forgives them rather than, I dunno, turning them over to the police as his father's murderers.)

Yes, it was once fashionable for the Who fan to complain the movie has Elton John, and Oliver Reed's horrible singing. But it has the awesome Ann-Margret, singing new Townshend lyrics perfectly, and making Tommy's mom a vivid character instead of a nonentity. She and Robert Powell even LOOK like they must be Daltrey's parents.

Anyway, that's my rant. Argue with me if you want. :-)