ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which Carmelo Bene's Salom portrays the figures of Temptation and Punishment, leading the Biblical episode into the land of myth and tragedy, while Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance, vacillating between Transgression and Sacrifice, dives into farce and the grotesque. Carmelo Bene was an Italian playwright and director who deserted the stage from 1967 to 1974, years during which he devoted himself to the cinema. Ken Russell, English screen and television director, spent his whole cinematographic career filming transgressive characters. In Salome's Last Dance, Ken Russell's cinematographic adaptation of the play, a similar reversal seems to be prevented from the very outset, when identities are clearly defined as dual and artificial. A place of transgression, far away from moral censorship, it is the ideal shelter for Salome's carnal explosion. In Russell's Salome's Last Dance, such inversions blur the lines between stereotypical femininity and virility.
