I’m not sure if I can sufficiently describe how much the movie Bugsy Malone meant to me when I was a child. I didn’t see it in the theatre. It was playing on some local TV channel, and I watched the movie on the small fuzzy-image black-and-white television in the den downstairs. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was around the age of all of the kids in it. I wanted to be in it. I wanted to live in it. I tried to make my hair have a “spit curl” like Jodie Foster’s. It helped launch an interest in the era of the 1920s, the Jazz Age, speakeasies, gun molls. I was 11.
So how happy am I to see this piece in The Guardian, with quotes from director Alan Parker and star Scott Baio: How We Made Bugsy Malone.
//We made out at the Holiday Inn in Slough.//
I cannot tell you how hilarious that is to me.
Right????
That “starchy version of Cinderella” was undoubtedly The Slipper and the Rose — which I’m quite fond of (Richard Chamberlain! Margaret Lockwood! Annette Crosbie! Michael Hordern! Edith Evans in her last movie, and singing!), but it’s amusing to think of its set being invaded by Bugsy Malone hooligans.
hahaha I know, right??
And every time I hear Richard Chamberlain’s name now – I think of the way David Foster Wallace described him in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”:
He was comparing someone else to Chamberlain – some guy he met on the cruise ship – and DFW said, “He had that same rodentially patrician look.”
Rodentially patrician? I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s so … perfect.
I am willing to state for the record that Scott Baio in that movie was the personification of cute. Obviously too young for extracurricular activities, nevertheless a promise of youth and perfection.
Oh he was absolutely adorable. Huge crush on him! And Foster too, I guess – I had seen her in Candlestick (Candleshoe?) – … and she was older than I was, but still a kid and I thought – Oh. My. God. I MUST be like her.