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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.

The movie is lavishly lit and wonderful to look at, a sumptuous blend of realistic sets slightly scaled down to kid size (wet streets, neon signs, shabby rooming houses and dingy soup kitchens) and refracted whimsy. At Fat Sam’s, the “house special” is soda pop, and the custom-built cars that haul the marauding hoods around are driven by pedal power. Lots of people get rubbed out in the gangland power struggle, but nobody dies. The splurge tommy guns, designed with the help of a gunsmith, shoot a substance that looks like deliquescent marshmallow. If anyone is hit by a fusillade of splurge—or, alternatively, with a custard pie in the kisser—their passing is denoted simply and rather sweetly by a frame freeze of their plastered visage. Ultimately, though, pies and even splurge become harmless in a raucous grand finale that finds the entire cast embroiled in an all-out battle of sweet shooting and pie heaving. No one perishes, and the gang war turns to open revelry when the combatants, richly creamed but unbowed, lay down their arms and join in a rinky-tink anthem to brotherhood.

The kids—many nonprofessionals —are mostly terrific. Some of the best moments in the movie come with their smallest gestures: Bugsy snapping the brim of his fedora; Tallulah cosying up to a customer, taking off his glasses and starting to tease him as the flustered fellow gropes desperately for his tortoise shells; Dandy Dan deflecting a compliment from his gang with an uncharacteristic— thus unconvincing— show of humility and a disingenuous demurrer. “Too kind, guys. Too kind.”

Parker recreates old movie clichés with shameless abandon: a car chase is routed through a barn, from which the autos emerge covered with straw and squawking hens. Fat Sam’s speakeasy has a janitor (played by a winning, wistful Albin Jenkins) who mops floors and dreams of being a tap dancer. Parker reproduces, in the character of Blousey. the goody-goody bitchiness that made the “nice girls” of gangster flicks such eminent candidates for strangulation. The hoofing is exuberant and surprisingly adept, even if Paul Williams’ musical score is a little slick. The whole movie has an innocence that is not entirely without calculation, but on balance it is a festive occasion.

Bugsy—currently doing turn-a way business in London and scheduled to open Stateside in mid-September—fits into that peculiarly British tradition of grown-up childhood literature. Consider Never-Never Land transported to 1929 New York City and Peter Pan sporting a chalk-stripe double-breasted. The imagination stretches but does not break. There is a certain bizarre continuity there, although Alan Parker, 32, sees his creation more modestly, as a sort of ebullient novelty. “I knew that if I were ever going to break into dramatic film,” he says, “I’d need an angle.”

Parker, a scrambler with strong currents of cockney in his speech, started out in the mail room of a London ad agency and within seven years was the head of his own flourishing production company. His specialty was commercials that recalled old movies. One showed a freshly forlorn figure at a railway station, trudging through clouds of locomotive steam, accompanied by the Rachmaninoff theme from Brief Encounter and making his melancholy way home to break open a Birds Eye Frozen Dinner for One. Parker made over 600 commercials in less than six years, hankering all the while to do something more expansive.

While preparing a film for the BBC about some Jewish children during World War II, Parker and his friend. Producer Alan Marshall, were toying with the idea of making their first feature. Parker kept his own kids entertained on long car trips with some improvised stories about a sawed-off gangster named Bugsy Malone.

The kid looked to them like a hot prospect. “It seemed like a natural,” says Parker. “A movie parents could take their children to and not fall asleep.” Recalls Marshall: “We’d talk to some money people, tell them we had a great idea—a gangster movie. ‘Terrific.’ they’d say. Even better, they liked the idea of a musical. Then we’d tell them, ‘Yeah, the best part is it’s going to be all kids,’ and they’d cough a little and say, ‘Right, lookit, we’ll see you around.’ ”

People who back movies are usually large on imitation and wary of innovation. The idea of an all-kid gangster musical must have seemed like an unprecedented long shot. There has never been anything quite like it, although, pressed, a film buff might recall a 1933 western curiosity called Terror of Tiny Town, acted by midgets. After meeting persistent, not to say astounded resistance, Parker and Marshall had to put up more than $50,000 of their own money to get initial work on the movie under way. Various film-investment outfits and Paramount supplied the balance of the nearly $1.5 million budget, part of which was spent acquiring 100 gallons of synthetic cream and over 1,000 pies to fuel the action scenes.

If financing Bugsy was a hassle, getting it all on film was a tag-team match of patience, precision, skill and sanity. Parker and company met upwards of 10,000 kids to fill Bugsy’s 200 parts. Children were pulled out of schoolrooms, selected from auditions and video-taped screen tests. They were cast within comfortable proximity of their own personalities. Scott Baio, from Brooklyn, made a handsome, steady Bugsy. The expansive John Cassisi, a neighbor of Baio’s from Bensonhurst, was chosen for Fat Sam after Director Parker spotted him in his seventh-grade class at P.S. 201. ” ‘You,’ he says, ‘I wanna talk to you,’ ” is the way Cassisi remembers it. “I thought he was the new dean or somethin’.” Paul Murphy, from a South London Jamaican family, fit the role of Leroy because he likes to box with friends. Making the movie meant sacrifices, however. Paul missed out on the neighborhood cricket matches and could grab not even a minute to watch the pros on TV.

Growing Pains. Once the cast was chosen, there was no telling whether they would stay suited to their roles. Costume Designers Monica Howe and Lorna Hillyard would buy real ’20s duds from thrift shops, then spend 50 times the price tailoring them to fit the kids, who, of course, just kept growing. During the eleven weeks of filming, trouser cuffs were constantly being lowered. The original Blousey literally grew out of her part. Two inches taller than Leading Man Scott Baio, she had to be replaced by her understudy, Florrie Dugger.

Special work visas had to be arranged for the American kids. When the shooting schedule overlapped the school term, the production was required to hire six teachers to hold classes. These sessions taught Harlem’s Albin Jenkins, nine at the time, to read and write.

There were only fitful flights of mischief (Baio and Cassisi broke a fire-alarm box that had steel emergency doors slamming shut all over their hotel). The kids responded to Parker as if he were a benevolent older brother but stood just a little in awe of Jodie Foster. At 13, and after ten full-fledged roles in features as diverse as Tom Sawyer and Taxi Driver, Foster (TIME, Feb. 23) was the savviest pro around and regarded herself as such. “I never think of myself as a child actress,” Foster says. “Only as an actress.”

Parker’s instructions to her were simple. “Give me a combination of Lauren Bacall, Mae West and Marilyn Monroe,” he told her, and she took it from there. “She knew more about making movies than I did,” Parker says now. Co-Star Baio—who broke many hearts among the girls in the company—says simply, “Jodie was funny, but really strong. One day I called her a name—dumb or something—and she gave me a karate kick. I went flying. Knocked over about five garbage cans and some ashtrays. Everybody came running, and she was standing there laughing.” During shooting of the film’s last scene, the pie throwing ran amuck and the kids let fly at everyone. The two hardest-hit were Jodie and John Cassisi, whose impersonation of the blustering, bossy Fat Sam had taken strong root.

Sweet Tooth. The kids went back home at the end of filming with little re-entry problem. They were celebrities among their friends—”I never get tired of people asking me questions,” Cassisi claims—and had departed with other dividends besides their salary (an average of $250 weekly for the leads, although all-pro Foster collected more). Scott Baio once saw Glenda Jackson and actually met Richard Chamberlain. “These England people, they were very gentle,” John’s mother Mafalda Cassisi remembers fondly. Jenkins, who is back now riding his skateboard down Harlem streets, recalls touring Buckingham Palace and learning that “Queen wouldn’t come out! She wouldn’t come out and say nothin’ to the people!”

Most, too, acquired a sweet tooth for stardom. Although Florrie Dugger insists that she wants to go into nursing, John Cassisi says that while acting, he was “in euphoria. You know, I’m only 14, and I think I own the picture.” He is already talking about turning pro, and so is his pal Scott, who is also keeping a veterinarian career in mind in case things do not work out. This slightly skeptical and eminently practical attitude probably has its origins in Scott’s first taste of traditional show biz heartbreak. “You know,” he says, “I wanted to keep my hat from the movie. But they wouldn’t let me.”

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