On Screen

...But both reactions reflect the bizarre nature of Bugsy Malone, in which all the roles—written as adult parts—are played by child actors and actresses (including Jodie Foster, recently in Taxi Driver, as Fat Sam's Joan Blondell-like moll...

...So is the blatant machismo of Moore and Keach: They are virile adventurers, proficient with guns, cars and women...

...The ambition of these "heroes" was as quickly squelched by the mob's enforcers as it had been by the legitimate authorities in earlier films...

...The formula was repeated throughout the '30s in Warner Brothers vehicles for rising stars like George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield...

...Street People, in other words, is palatable because it neither intends nor invites any response more complex than simple-minded vicarious excitement...

...is typical of today's crime saga...

...Both films intend and invite us to be patronizing toward what we are supposedly too sophisticated to respond to honestly...

...Fueled by the Kefauver hearings in the Senate and afterward by the Joe Valachi Mafia revelations on Capitol Hill, similar treatments of the banality of evil continued in the gangster productions of the next 20 years, climaxing with The Godfather (1972...

...Warshow was writing about the movie mobsters of his youth—Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar (1930), James Cagney's Public Enemy (1931), Paul Muni's Scarface (1932...

...Later in that decade, though, the gangster movie was updated...

...the same actor who had portrayed so many Prohibition- and Depression-era outsiders was now a crooked insider...

...Just as concern about the "organization man" became part of the emerging debate over the effects of "mass society," the syndicate began to replace the solitary criminal entrepeneur in celluloid versions of the underworld...

...In Bugsy Malone—as in recent revisionist Westerns like The Missouri Breaks—mannerism supplants craftsmanship...

...Yet there is a tragic flaw in this ambition to rise above the crowd, for the racketeer increasingly becomes the target of both the police and his fellow criminals...

...My own feeling is that it will probably be less attractive to gay children than to pederasts...

...There is a gang war between Fat Sam (John Cassisi), the owner of the "Grand Slam' speakeasy, and Dandy Dan (Martin Lev), a suave crime lord intent on taking over Fat Sam's operations...

...Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only ambiguous skills," Warshow wrote, "the gangster is required to make his own way, to make his life and impose it on others...

...By the early '40s, the focus on alienation had merely intensified...

...Alienation—no longer an authentic reaction—has become simply a posture that patronizes the past...

...somewhat surprisingly...

...Frustrated by the facelessness of the individual in the big city, he sees crime as the rational way to establish his identity...

...Parker has taken his story, however, and turned it into a movie that is about as offensive as any I have lately seen...

...Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell has called it the "first film for gay children...

...Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio) is caught between the two while trying to raise enough money for his girlfriend, Blousey (Florrie Dugger), to travel to Hollywood for a crack at the big time...

...all are presented in a kind of cinematic shorthand that offers up mayhem in the most efficient manner possible...

...Significantly, that film dealt less with the Marlon Brando character than with his family and its assimilation into American life...

...For Parker's movie perfectly represents the spirit of dandyism, the epicene snobbery that, as Susan Sontag has suggested, uses camp humor as a "solvent of morality" to neutralize the bourgeois resistance to homosexuality...

...A low-budget joint Ttalian-American production, it is predictably ill-made and muddled...

...But since genuine justice was not on the side of either the solitary outlaw or the organized mob, moral questions became largely irrelevant...

...This seems to be equally true in the annals of the cinema...

...In Force of Evil (1949), for example, Garfield played a syndicate lawyer operating on Wall Street...

...The greater his success, the more precipitous his fall...

...Unlike the relatively guileless Street People, this film is pure artifice, an attempt to bury several old film formulas with an extravagant and undisciplined pastiche...

...At least in the case of Bugsy Malone, where attitudinizing replaces the moralizing of its forbears, the gangster film has followed the unfortunate pattern of modern cultural history...

...Although the stars are Roger Moore and...

...It is frequently claimed that in history, tragedy repeats itself as farce...

...Like his expensive clothes and automobile, his brutality is merely an expression of the kind of style required for identity in an amoral world...

...For instance, the "blaxploitation" films have been condemned for excessive violence and a supposed glorification of pimps, hitmen and drug dealers...

...This no-nonsense manufacturing of thrills is characteristic of the current gangster movie...

...And, as Bell sensed, this embodies an essentially homosexual attitude...

...the other actors mouth Italian and emit English, contributing no little to the confusion...

...The growing emphasis on organized crime gave a new slant to the tragedy Warshow perceived...

...Yet their protagonists operate in an ethical vacuum, a completely self-contained universe where discrimination between the individual and the mob is scarcely possible, where everyone is a criminal...

...That is why some of the objections to latter-day underworld epics seem to me to be completely misdirected...

...Stacy Keach...

...Although it is difficult to know exactly what possessed Parker to contrive this, some clues to his motivations can be discerned...

...He has given us an exaggerated and unnatural stylization, a parody that forever—and sometimes even unintentionally—sinks into self-parody...

...Thus it is a musical, and how many years has it been since the screen was last graced by gangsters who broke into song...

...in the end, "there is only one possibility—failure...

...Her observation could almost have been made with Bugsy Malone in mind: It is a parody, presumably humorous, of a genre once taken seriously (in Parker's youth), now performed by children...

...There is even a famous line ("I coulda been a contender") lifted from a film of the '50s, On the Waterfront...

...The story has something to do with a syndicate power struggle revolving around a $4 million shipment of heroin, but more important are the regularly spaced episodes of extraordinary violence and gore...

...Sontag goes on to say that the "insistence on not being 'serious,' on playing, also connects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful...

...That is not the case, unfortunately, with another new movie, Bugsy Malone, written and directed by Alan Parker...

...This effect is reenforced by the movie trivia and references that clutter the script...

...If Street People embodies the modern gangster movie's lapsed morality, Parker's offering signals its degeneration...

...All of this does not add up to much more than sophomoric self-consoiousness, yet it does seem to serve Parker's curious intentions...

...With The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), and subsequently in Point Blank (1967) and Superfly (1973), the gangster's alienation was acted out against the background of his own criminal—rather than civil?society...

...The final meaning of the city is anonymity and death...

...distance and detachment replace audience involvement...

...First of all, the film has a pervasive atmosphere of nostalgia...

...What saves the film from being a vulgar parody of masculinity and nothing else are the straightforward script, the direction and performances that proceed in steamroller fashion, without the slightest hint of irony or condescension...

...to machine-gun gangland executions...

...And although the "justice" that always prevailed owed as much to the Hollywood production code as to dramatic considerations (the Hays office permitted cinematic violence only if in the end the hoodlums were punished for their misdeeds), it struck a deeply responsive chord in the audiences...

...They awkwardly but doggedly allude to the gangster, prize-fighting and social-injustice movies of the '30s, as well as musicals of the '30s and '40s...

...The story itself is a reasonably inoffensive satire of the prototypical gangster film...

...The subtitle of the Muni film—Shame of a Nation?indicates how the moral message of these movies reflected their contemporary context: Loosely based on the lives of real Prohibition-era figures, they dealt with society's role in criminality...

...We witness 16 on-screen killings, ranging from strangling...

...The current Street People, directed by Maurice Lucidi...

...Indeed, here the outlaw's alienation and ambition should be understood esthetically...