I watched Bugsy Malone for the first time in years on Sunday with Tanushka and Amali - and enjoyed every minute. I still love that film, especially the songs. Since Sunday I can't get them out of my head - Bad Guys ("We coulda been anything that we wanted to be...with all the talent we had"), Tomorrow, the lament of the wold be dancer always sweeping the floor at Fat Sam's, Tallulah - how saucy are the lines delivered by 13 year old Jody Foster? ("No one but Tallulah will treat you finer, Tallulah got her training in North Carolina!")? The kid in me is still thrilled by the Splurge Gun used by Dandy Dan's gang, and of course the peddle cars! Poor old Knuckles blowing himself up with the home made splurge gun....
This time I noticed the homespun 'why don't we all just be good instead of being bad' philosophy which I guess works for a film aimed at kids. The film isn't supposed to be a treatise on Prohibition and the Depression. And those poor down and outs - why don't they just 'give it a try? - 'You don't have to sit around, depressed about the way that luck deceived you?' Oh yes, mass unemployment and poverty is caused by bad luck...but that's my grown-up head getting all analytical again, if only I could just stick with the nostalgia I feel for a movie I saw on its release when I was just 8.
That's probably why it affects me so much - it was the same impressionable age I saw the original Planet of the Apes. I mention Planet of the Apes because it was on straight after Bugsy on Film 4 on Sunday, creating a perfect double bill of films that helped form me in my early years.In total contrast to Bugsy, Planet is a very adult and strikingly original imagining of the consequences of human intolerance, leading ultimately to the destruction of human civilisation. I was deeply upset when I saw it with my father for the first time. I think he thought mistakenly that he was taking me to see a fun fantasy adventure, rather than a disturbing and violent science fiction classic. Planet of the Apes became an obsession of mine - in the school playground I constantly re-enacted the scene in which the humans are hunted by apes on horseback, the first moment in the film where the astronauts led by Charlton Heston are confronted by the terrifying reality of the upside down world they have landed on. When I was eight, I was truly shocked that three of the four astronauts could be killed before the end of the first reel.
This film, with its obvious parallels to the politics of race in the United States, informed me right up until the writing of my first novel The Vanishing Shore, which imagines a world that departs from our own about 1600 and sees its protagonist, an English intelligence agent, enslaved by an Asiatic people who live in the lands we now know as the United States. I also love the soundtrack to Planet by Gerry Goldsmith - the way he uses the ape hunter's horn as the emblematic note, and the strange swishing sound of time and space upturning the world we think we know.
This time I noticed the homespun 'why don't we all just be good instead of being bad' philosophy which I guess works for a film aimed at kids. The film isn't supposed to be a treatise on Prohibition and the Depression. And those poor down and outs - why don't they just 'give it a try? - 'You don't have to sit around, depressed about the way that luck deceived you?' Oh yes, mass unemployment and poverty is caused by bad luck...but that's my grown-up head getting all analytical again, if only I could just stick with the nostalgia I feel for a movie I saw on its release when I was just 8.
That's probably why it affects me so much - it was the same impressionable age I saw the original Planet of the Apes. I mention Planet of the Apes because it was on straight after Bugsy on Film 4 on Sunday, creating a perfect double bill of films that helped form me in my early years.In total contrast to Bugsy, Planet is a very adult and strikingly original imagining of the consequences of human intolerance, leading ultimately to the destruction of human civilisation. I was deeply upset when I saw it with my father for the first time. I think he thought mistakenly that he was taking me to see a fun fantasy adventure, rather than a disturbing and violent science fiction classic. Planet of the Apes became an obsession of mine - in the school playground I constantly re-enacted the scene in which the humans are hunted by apes on horseback, the first moment in the film where the astronauts led by Charlton Heston are confronted by the terrifying reality of the upside down world they have landed on. When I was eight, I was truly shocked that three of the four astronauts could be killed before the end of the first reel.
This film, with its obvious parallels to the politics of race in the United States, informed me right up until the writing of my first novel The Vanishing Shore, which imagines a world that departs from our own about 1600 and sees its protagonist, an English intelligence agent, enslaved by an Asiatic people who live in the lands we now know as the United States. I also love the soundtrack to Planet by Gerry Goldsmith - the way he uses the ape hunter's horn as the emblematic note, and the strange swishing sound of time and space upturning the world we think we know.
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