In order to enjoy Bugsy malone you can do one of several things.
You can recall the 'dress-up' days of childhood when Mom's high heels and hats were in constsnt use and smoking was limited to candy cigarettes rolled round the tongue to pencil point.
If you're a movie buff, you'll get a kick out of the film identifying the Cagney gesture, the Robinson sneer, the Raft cool.
Or you can play the pundit; by our children we'll be taught and if war must be made, load the guns with marshmallows and make the heavy ammuntion cream pies. Whatever.
Certainly Bugsy Malone offers a cute idea: yoiugsters in a spoof of gangster movies and musicals of the 1930s.
It's all there; the gang power struggles between Dandy Dan and Fat Sam; the chorus line in the sleazy nightclub, the rub out and the hijack; the Ruby Keeler chlorine looking for a break that will take her to Hollywood.
Good fun, almost.
Bugsy just never gets beyond the curio to become the film it might have been. Thaere are just too many story threads that don't mesh; the clean up kid in the club that should turn into Bojangles, the youngster with the great right, and so on.
The kids are good and Jodie Foster is great. So good is she as Tallulah, Fat Sam's moll, that she makes the rest look amateur. That of course affects the balance of the project. As do some strange little twists - the lip synching of the Paul Williams songs seems off; when Bugsy is beaten up it looks like adults got into the act and it's ugly.
So what could have been a winning and unusual film experience turn out to be slight enterrtainment at best. The parody gets pipped at the post - becomes a paste-up of 'Our Gang' shorts.
Review of Bugsy Malone
