Bugsy Malone [DVD]

Alan Parker’s musical spoof of gangster films features an all-child cast with guns that fire cream. When gang warfare erupts between Fat Sam and Dandy Dan, hustler Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio), singer Tallulah (Jodie Foster) and newly arrived showgirl Blousey Brown (Florrie Dugger) find themselves caught up in the middle of it.
Writer-director Alan Parker’s feature debut Bugsy Malone is a pastiche of American movies, a musical gangster comedy set in 1929, featuring prohibition, showgirls and gang warfare, with references to everything from Some Like It Hot to The Godfather. Uniquely, though, all the parts are played by children, including an excellent if underused Jodie Foster as platinum-blonde singer Tallulah, Scott Baio in the title role and a nine-year-old Dexter Fletcher wielding a baseball bat. Cream-firing “spluge guns” side-step any real violence and the movie climaxes cheerfully with the biggest custard pie fight this side of Casino Royale (1967).
Unfortunately for a musical, Paul Williams’ score–part honky-tonk jazz homage, part 1970s Elton John-style pop–lets the side down with a lack of memorable tunes. Nevertheless, Parker’s direction is spot on and the look of the film is superb, a fantasy movie-movie existing in the same parallel reality as The Cotton Club and Chicago. A rare British love letter to classic American cinema, Bugsy Malone remains a true original; in Parker’s words “the work of a madman” and one of the strangest yet most stylish children’s films ever made.
On the DVD: Bugsy Malone’s picture is presented non-anamorphically at 1.66:1, with rich colours and plenty of detail. The print is excellent. The audio is stereo only and while full and clear seems to leave a hole in the middle of the soundstage. Extras include an informative commentary by Parker, eight pages of trivia notes by Parker and a very informative 12-page booklet, also by the director. There are three trailers, nine character profiles, two scored galleries, and more imaginatively, a multi-angle option to compare Parker’s sketches, their comic-strip realisation by Graham Thomson and the finished opening sequence. Quality over quantity make this a strong collection of extras, though recollections from the stars would have added so much more. –Gary S. Dalkin