Before becoming a film director with the musical remake of "Goodbye, Mr Chips", Herbert Ross had been both a dancer and a choreographer so if anyone was going to make a big screen biopic of ' the greatest ballet dancer who ever lived', aka Vaslav Nijinsky, who better then than Ross who already had his biggest screen success with "The Turning Point", a movie about two ageing, bitching ballet queens but while "The Turning Point" had proved popular with both critics and the public was that not down to leading ladies Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine? "Nijinsky", however, was a different kettle of fish entirely. The bitching ballet queens here were of the male variety and would audiences really buy a picture about a long dead male ballet dancer that many people might not have even heard of? But then, who can say what movies succeed and what fail. "Nijinsky" could potentially be an 'Amadeus' or a 'Heaven's Gate'.
In the end it was neither but a pretty, decorous scroll through Nijinsky's greatest hits with enough of his private life thrown in to keep the punters happy, (nothing like a little bit of scandal, be it gay or straight, to liven up an otherwise dull ballet picture). As Nijinsky, dancer George de la Pena is easy on the eye and certainly light on his feet, whenever Ross permits us to see his feet, but he wasn't much of an actor. As Diaghilev, Alan Bates is unusually stuffy while a supporting cast of mostly British thespians, (Alan Badel, Colin Blakely, Ronald Pickup, Jeremy Irons and Janet Suzman) do exactly what's expected of them while the talented Leslie Brown is utterly wasted as the dancer's missus. The film itself trundles along like the war horse it is and while it's never dull neither is it in any way memorable.
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