Mahler | 1974

Ken Russell's fantasia on the life of Gustav Mahler was intended to be filmed in the composer's native Austria but when financing fell through Russell pressed on, having to make inventive use of British locations.

The film is structured around a railway journey as the famed composer (Robert Powell) and his wife Alma (Georgina Hale) return from ‘Vöcklabruck’ to 'Vienna'. Ill and haunted by death, his life is imagined through flashbacks and dreams.

The rail journey was filmed on the famous Bluebell Railway, the carriage interiors too. This runs from Horsted Keynes to Sheffield Park in East Sussex, southeast England – and it's a favourite for period railway scenes in films.

At the beginning of the film, Horsted Keynes stands in for ‘Vöcklabruck’ station, where Russell sneaks in a cheeky pastiche of Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice. This station goes on, with changing nameboards, to stand in for most of the other stops, apart from 'Saint Polten', where Alma's lover Max (Richard Morant) boards the train, which is Sheffield Park.

The arrival in 'Vienna', where Mahler is greeted by Dr Roth (George Coulouris), needed a grander terminus, and this is Marylebone Station (tube: Marylebone, Bakerloo Line), Melcombe Place, NW1 in West London – another favourite location featured in A Hard Day's Night, Billy Liar and the 1978 version of The Thirty-Nine Steps (with Robert Powell again).

Mahler's idyllic 'Austrian' country retreat is Russell's' beloved Lake District in Cumbria, featured in many of the director's film and where he settled down to live.

The lakeside cabin was built on the northern shore of Derwentwater, south of Keswick, and it's the third largest of the lakes. This is inspired by one of the composer's several retreats, called Komponierhäuschen – composing huts – which remains at Steinbach on Lake Attersee in Upper Austria, to which Mahler retreated from 1893 to 1896. The Gustav Mahler-Komponierhäuschen was renovated in 1985 and now houses a permanent exhibition.

In need of peace Mahler sends Alma out to silence all distracting sounds. The 'Austrian' beer house where she orders a generous round of beers to silence the oompah band is the Austrian Cottage in the grounds of Fanhams Hall, Fanhams Hall Road, Ware in Hertfordshire, about 17 miles east of St Albans. It's now a hotel.

In one of his dreams, Mahler is dogged by the figure of death (who looks disturbingly like Alma) down a gloomily elaborate staircase and into a crowd of delighted admirers. Gloomy as it was in the Seventies, you might recognise this as the staircase of the old St Pancras Hotel attached to London's St Pancras Station. Unbelievably, this fantastic building came close to demolition but instead it was finally given a magnificent restoration to become the St Pancras London Hotel, Euston Road, London NW1.

This same lobby was used as 'Arkham Asylum' in Batman Begins and, more brightly, as the backdrop to the Spice Girls' Wannabe video.

Mahler and his sister visit their old friend composer Hugo Wolfe (David Collings). Broken by failure and now deep in delusion, Wolfe believes himself to be Emperor Franz Josef. The water feature of the institution where the 'Emperor' interviews Mahler for a post at court, is the Grand Cascade in the extensive grounds of Chatsworth House, the palatial home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, in Bakewell, Derbyshire.

Chatsworth House itself is featured in 2010's The Wolfman, with Benicio Del Toro, and you can see its pristine interior in Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and as itself in The Duchess, with Keira Knightley.

The fake interview does, though, highlight that Mahler can never be fully accepted into the music world while it's ruled by the venomously anti-Semitic Cosima Wagner. Hoping to avoid a similar fate to Hugo, the ambitious Mahler cynically decides to convert to Catholicism.

The religious retreat where he's accepted into the faith is Debenham House, 8 Addison Road, between Holland Park Avenue and High Street Kensington, West London.

The supremely photogenic house was the main setting for Joseph Losey's strange 1968 drama Secret Ceremony, with Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow, and also seen in the colourful period melodrama Trottie True, the 1995 Richard III, with Ian McKellen, and The Wings of the Dove. It even became the ‘Arabian Embassy’ for the dire Carry On Emmannuelle (that's not a typo – the strange spelling was a deliberate attempt to avoid copyright problems with a similarly-titled film)

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