I have long been aware of 1976’s all-kids gangster musical Bugsy Malone and now, having finally seen it, I just have a few lingering questions. One of these is “What the fuck?”. Another question is “What the fuck?”. OK, I have a long list of questions and they’re all “What the fuck?”
But, really, why was this movie made and who is it for? This is such a bizarre and unappealing concept. And yet, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see little boys as gangsters, and girls as gangsters’ molls and chorus line dancers, then I guess this is for you. I assume you will one day be on the national sex offenders registry, if you’re not already.
I know I tend to over-think movies I’m watching, but I just couldn’t lose myself in something I had so many nagging questions about. For one example: what are the rules of the world this film takes place in? I’m guessing that, if this was the real world, the kids would all be in the age range of elementary up through junior high school.
So…where do the kids come from? Scott Baio, as the title character, mentions his parents. Are they somewhere else and they sent him here after he was a toddler? For the love of all that’s good and holy, please don’t tell me the kids here are the offspring of other kids.
There’s a scene that bothered me more than it should where a girl opens a window and yells for everybody outside to keep the noise down, and there’s the sound of a baby crying from behind her. Is she supposed to be the mother of that baby?! I have read some contemporaneous reviews of this picture and I have yet to find one where anybody is asking questions like these.
Let’s assume the kids are sent from someplace else to do here. Where do they go when they age out of the acceptable range?
Which leads me to the especially strange rule of this world where you are apparently dead if you get “creamed”. This can happen via pie or a bizarre machine gun that shots crème puffs. I never bought into this conceit. At the end, the movie doesn’t either, as everybody in a speakeasy is covered in whipped crème, and yet they all start singing an upbeat Paul Williams song and all is forgiven. So, are these supposed to be zombie children having a sing-a-long?
All of the music here is courtesy of Williams and, while I don’t always like his work, you gotta give the man props for his innate composition ability. The numbers here aren’t bad, but it largely isn’t the kind of music I care for. I’ll concede the last number I mentioned is especially strong, and wouldn’t have been out of place in The Muppet Movie, for which he also did the score. All that said, there’s a number towards the middle that employs many 70’s affectations and it is horrible and out-of-place.
The child actors mostly range from barely serviceable to better-than-average. No surprise Jodie Foster is already on an entirely different plane than anybody else here, even at such an early age. It is a tad eerie how fully she is “Jodie Foster” at this point. It’s almost as if they shrunk an adult version of her back to pre-teen size. Even the second-best actors in this had yet to learn to do the kinds of subtleties she could do with her eyes and her line deliveries.
The director of this was Alan Parker, who would go to make Pink Floyd The Wall, which is somehow less crazy than this G-rated mess. I don’t know what he or anybody else hoped to accomplish here, but my skin crawled the entire time I watched this. Odd that never happened watching that later film, even with all of its intentionally disturbing imagery.
Dir: Alan Parker
Starring Scott Baio, Florence Garland, Jodie Foster
Watched on Paramount Presents blu-ray