BUGSY MALONE Directed and Written by ALAN PARKER
One thing is sure: Bugsy Malone will get the drop on you. No amount of careful description or enthusiastic reassurance can make adequate preparation for it. Doubts will never be completely stilled, but then the movie's fine edge of surprise cannot be dulled either. It is altogether a unique and wholly improbable enterprise.
First of all, Bugsy Malone is a gangster movie, done in the vintage style. So far so good.
It is also a musical. Curious, but not without precedent.
Most everything is played straight.
Fair enough.
But it is played by kids. Entirely by kids. The average age of the cast is twelve.
At first the whole thing seems like an eccentric stunt. But as the film, done with care and affection, gets going, it works surprisingly well. Bugsy Malone is a jaunty, disarming, usually winning excursion into some of the nearer realms of movie fantasy, nostalgia and parody. Director-Writer Alan Parker manages to sustain this reckless undertaking because he makes it work as many of the best movies do: on a level of common fantasy. For every child smitten by the movies—for those who grew up and those still in the process—Bugsy Malone is a dream fulfilled. The kids are not just the center of the action. They are the action, all of it, romping through a safely enclosed world, meticulously imagined, flawlessly designed.
Bugsy Malone's real location is in a perfect playground of the imagination, and its plot is a loose arrangement of recognizable types and classic sequences. Long-lashed Bugsy (Scott Baio) is a good-natured mug who hangs around the speakeasy run by Fat Sam (John Cassisi). The saloon's songbird in residence, Tallulah (Jodie Foster), cracks plenty wise but is kind of sweet on Bugsy, who has eyes only for Blousey (Florrie Dugger), a girl with heavy Hollywood ambitions. Meantime, Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) is muscling in on Fat Sam's territory, making use of a deadly new weapon called the "splurge gun." Fat Sam, lacking this latest in weaponry, must defend his holdings with that most ancient and honorable of movie armaments, the custard pie. He also recruits Bugsy to furnish a little brawn and some badly needed brains. Bugsy, however, is frequently absent from duty, since he has taken to managing a heavyweight prizefighter named Leroy (Paul Murphy). Bugsy has high hopes that his boy's fistic skills will help raise a stake to take Blousey to Tinseltown.