Tommy (1975).
It is Ken Russell's most seen film and divides both fans of the album and general cinema audiences alike but it shouldn't.
Ken's changes to the temporal setting and the characters are entirely justified by the act of adaptation.
For Tommy to be a contemporary messiah he had to be born after the second war instead of the first.
For Tommy to fix on the primal he must idolise his airborne and mostly absent biological father and not his adopted father figure.
His mother's actions make more sense too if she feels the full weight of guilt over the murder of Tommy's father and her son's retreat into an interior life.
Having the war hero remain a hero in his son's eyes allows Oliver Reed's Hobbs free reign to work a strip joint (an obvious downturn from a holiday camp) and employ the Acid Queen as an unorthodox method of 'curing' the boy and in doing so it makes him the sort of person who would be more likely to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin.
The surrealism and religious satire is even more free here than in Russell's previous work (even The Devils (1971) balanced it's more extreme imagery with historical reference and tonal counterpoint).
His employment of genuinely handicapped actors in the Eyesight To The Blind sequence and the later sequences in Tommy's Holiday Camp address Russell's genuine repulsion on the abuse of faith and the vulnerable for financial reward by his adopted Catholicism.
While it may be difficult to swallow Ken's bawdy representation of the sexual and physical abuse inflicted on the title character, it's also difficult to imagine how else he could have handled it within a cinematic opera (the rock aspect only underlines how ridiculous a straight adaptation would have been).
It's as much a Ken Russell film as any of his previous films.
A jobbing director might have brought nothing new to the project and staged a straight forward adaptation of the album without leaving any forensic trace of who made it. Ken took the source material, adapted it with input from the band but still made a Ken Russell film.
All balls are chrome.