Ken Russell seems to be the man for high school students of the '70s. His style is ultra-cinematic in the least demanding way—it can be called the TV commercial in excelsis, all split screens and star bursts and swiftly changing colors and anything else that's handy, all the time. For the adolescent, both young and old, who thinks that filmmaking virtuosity is all of filmmaking, he is ideal. His grotesqueries with the life of Tschaikowsky and with John Whiting's play The Devils were reticence itself compared with Tommy…. [For Russell's high school judgment of Tommy as "the greatest art work of the twentieth century,"] his film is the perfect cinematic equivalent. (p. 33)

Stanley Kauffmann, "Films: 'Tommy'" (reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.; copyright © 1975 by Stanley Kauffmann), in The New Republic, Vol. 172, No. 14, April 26, 1975, pp. 18, 33.