Movies I Love - Bugsy Malone (1976)

Of all the movies I watched as a kid, few were more enjoyable to me than Bugsy Malone. Newcomer Scott Baio plays the title character and shares the screen with a very young and mature Jodie Foster. It's a bloodless gangster movie that substitutes custard pies for bullets.

 

 

The all-kid caste drives Model T peddle cars and use machine guns that fires custard. I love those cool little touches and they are found throughout the film. The music is fantastic with memorable songs that are sung by adults and not the child actors. I think that element goes a long way in creating the illusion that these aren't just a group of child actors playing dress-up.

 

I ran out and bought the soundtrack album despite the fact that I already had all the songs memorized.

Musician Paul Williams wrote the music and you can tell how much fun he had with it. Each song is full of great hooks and instrumentation. If I was still teaching Drama I would have given some serious attention to doing this production as the annual musical.


Trailer - Bugsy Malone by guy-paul

Set during the Prohibition, this gangster epic is made especially for children — with machine guns replaced with custard-shooting "splurge guns" and a cast made up entirely of pre-pubescent actors. With songs by Paul Williams and an impossibly young Scott Baio and Jodie Foster in the lead roles, adults will have no problem enjoying this classic movie musical that parodies crime films by creating a story where the only thing criminal is how cute the cast of crooks are as they wage their pint-sized war on rival families.

There are many cool songs in the movie but this one in the boxing ring is my personal favorite.