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Fifty years since Bugsy Malone hit cinemas, the gangster musical is still a childhood favourite. Its star, Jodie Foster, is now a two-time Oscar winner, and its songs are deeply embedded in the cultural canon (“We could have been anything that we wanted to be…”).
But Bugsy Malone also remains as joyously odd a concept as it was back in 1976: a pastiche of 1930s gangster flicks with a child cast, quirky show tunes, pedal-powered cars and cream pie-flinging Tommy guns.
David Puttnam, the film’s executive producer, recalls that the concept was so downright peculiar that it was hard to raise funds. When he and Alan Parker, the writer-director, went out to pitch the project, would-be investors quickly lost interest. “Their eyes would glaze over when we said everyone in the cast was 12 years old,” says Puttnam.
The concept presented another challenge. Parker, directing his first feature film, had to find and manage 200 children, for whom Bugsy Malone was a wacky summer holiday where (most of) them earned a respectable – for the time – £15 a day. They raced around Pinewood Studios in pedal cars, got up to mischief and played make-believe in full gangster get-up.
“They did run riot,” concurs Sheridan Russell, who played mobster kingpin Fat Sam’s finger-cracking enforcer, Knuckles.
The story follows the titular Bugsy (Scott Baio), a streetwise charmer and boxing scout. He’s also an associate of Fat Sam (John Cassisi), who’s fighting a cream-splattered turf war with Dandy Dan (Martin Lev). Meanwhile, Bugsy resists the advances of Fat Sam’s main squeeze, Tallulah (Jodie Foster), while romancing Blousey Brown (Florence Dugger), both showgirls at Fat Sam’s Grand Slam speakeasy.
Parker, who died in 2020, invented Bugsy Malone as stories to tell his children, keeping them entertained on long drives to their cottage in Derbyshire. Then a TV commercial director, he decided to make it into a movie, and his eldest son, Alex, suggested that the characters should be played by children.
Parker spent a year looking at 10,000 children; he watched tapes of school productions and visited schools in New York City. One of the youngest cast members was Dexter Fletcher, the British actor-director, whose performance as Baby Face at just nine years old marked his film debut. At a recent screening of the film at the BFI Southbank in London, Fletcher shared that his abiding memory of the film is the “traumatic moment” when the costume department cut off all his hair so he looked like the other cast members. Angry about his new look, his mother promptly bought him a wig.
Twelve-year-old Jodie Foster, however, was already a well-known child star in Hollywood. “A friend in LA tipped us off about Jodie,” recalls Puttnam. “She literally finished shooting Taxi Driver and got on the plane the next day to come and do Bugsy.” (After being nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her turn as Taxi Driver’s child prostitute, Foster went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress twice, for The Accused in 1988 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991.)
Needing children with authentic accents, Parker and Puttnam also went to military bases. Among the young stars they found was Florence Garland, then Florence Dugger, whose father was stationed at RAF Chicksands.
“They just happened to see me out there playing volleyball,” says Garland. “They asked me to come in and read something. Next thing I know, they take me to London and I have the part… I’d never acted a day in my life!” Garland ultimately played Blousey Brown but was initially cast in a different role. “The original Blousey grew too tall!” she adds.
Baio later said that he and Foster did some real-life smooching off set, though, unlike in the film, there was no love triangle. Garland wasn’t impressed with Baio. “I was very much a tomboy, still am,” she says. “All the other girls were like, ‘Oh, he’s so dreamy!’ Gimme a break… He was so cocky because he got the lead role. He strutted around like a peacock, which irritated me. I preferred Fat Sam’s gang and hanging out with the dancing girls.”
Baio didn’t match the movie success of co-star Foster. His best-known role was Fonzie’s cousin Chachi in the Seventies sitcom Happy Days and its spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi. He’s since become a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, and, in 2018, Nicole Eggert, Baio’s co-star in the sitcom Charles in Charge, accused him of sexual misconduct beginning when she was 14. Baio denied the allegations. A male co-star, Alexander Polinsky, then accused Baio of verbal abuse and physical assault during the making of Charles in Charge.
Garland, who was 13 years old during filming, gave up acting and swapped Hollywood for a career in medicine. But she had no doubt Bugsy Malone would be the hit it still is 50 years on. “I knew it would be a success,” she says. “Because kids loved it.”
At 16, Sheridan Russell was the second-oldest cast member. He had attended the Corona Theatre School in west London when he auditioned for the part of Knuckles, though, as Russell explains, Parker didn’t usually like stage-school children and preferred to find talented children from the real world.
Parker found his Fat Sam, for instance, when he visited a Catholic school in Brooklyn and asked who the naughtiest child in the class was. The 30 children in the classroom all turned and pointed at John Cassisi. He was, says Russell, just like his motormouth mobster character – all outsized personality and New Yorker brouhaha.
In his 2011 novelisation of the film, Parker described Cassisi as a “chubby little boy” who proved a natural on camera. “He spoke in Italian, apparently agreeing with his classmates’ conclusion. I took him off to a corner of the schoolyard and although he had never acted before, he yelled out the lines from my script with gusto… I knew right away that we had our Fat Sam,” wrote Parker. Cassisi later retired from acting and worked as an executive for Citigroup. In 2015, he was jailed for money laundering and receiving $500,000 (£386,000) in bribes.
Bugsy Malone was shot during the summer of 1975, with a Prohibition-era street constructed at Pinewood. “We could only afford to have one side of the street,” says Puttnam. “Alan Parker re-mortgaged his house and personally paid for the other side.”
The film – made for around $575,000 (£500,000) – also required 500 handmade costumes (unsurprisingly, the studio didn’t have an existing supply of child-sized gangster costumes), pedal cars and, of course, the splurge guns, which would shoot (or were supposed to shoot) cream pies. Puttnam likens the guns to the malfunctioning shark in Jaws. “The shark never worked in Jaws and the splurge guns never worked,” he says.
The guns were meant to shoot wax balls with lemon curd inside, but a test shot, fired at Alan Marshall, the producer, went badly. “It hit him with such force it gave him a huge red mark,” says Russell. They fixed the problem in the edit: the guns shot ping-pong balls while Parker threw the cream pies by hand.
“They weren’t tested on us,” says Russell. “No children were injured during filming!”
The children who were away from home stayed together in a hotel. Each morning, Russell arrived on set to hear about the previous night’s hijinks. “They would run amok in the evening,” he says. “You’d hear stories. ‘At 2 o’clock this lot were rioting and the fire extinguisher went off!’ Keeping them corralled wasn’t that easy.”
Jodie Foster wasn’t able to join in with the chaos – she had to sit through three hours of hair and make-up every day. “Which she hated,” says Russell. “She wanted to be in jeans, mucking around outside.”
The children also terrorised the crew of The Slipper and the Rose, a Cinderella film shooting at Pinewood at the same time, who regularly complained to Parker about his mini-gangsters. They did have chaperones, but it was Parker himself who received the sternest reprimand for frequently swearing in front of his young cast.
Puttnam, meanwhile, had another job. “We couldn’t get contagious illness insurance,” he says. “Our biggest fear, quite seriously, was measles or chickenpox. If anyone happened to cough or sneeze, I had to jump on them immediately. I was the illness checker.” He thinks it would be tricky to make a Bugsy Malone film now because its scantily clad dancing girls and pre-pubescent romances might trigger sensitivities about the sexualisation of children.
Of course, as crucial as the children were the songs, written by Paul Williams, co-writer of the Carpenters’ We Only Just Begun and the Oscar-winning Evergreen from A Star Is Born (1976). Williams was fascinated by the film’s concept. “I love the projects that are drawing outside the lines, thinking outside the box,” he says.
Williams was playing a Las Vegas residency at the time and met Parker at the city’s Foxy’s Deli. They talked all day about the story, which spoke so clearly to Williams that he came up with some of the now-classic lyrics on the spot.
“I remember sitting there and going, ‘Anybody who is anybody will soon walk through that door, at Fat Sam’s Grand Slam Speakeasy!’” says Williams. “Alan said, ‘That’s it! God, what if you forget the lines? Write them down!’ I said, ‘No, I won’t, I’ll remember this.’ And I did. That’s how powerful the story was for me.”
With shooting just weeks away and Williams stuck in the US, he wrote and recorded the tracks – including Bad Guys and (a personal favourite of Williams’s) So You Wanna Be a Boxer? – and sent them back to London.
Williams had recorded them with adult voices, which don’t match the child actors. With the time and budget constraints, Parker just had to go with it. “Jodie Foster is one of the greatest actors of this or any other generation,” says Williams. “And I replaced her singing voice! I feel guilty about that to this day!” The only child cast member to sing in their own voice was Bonnie Langford, who had a bit part as the bratty child star Lena Marelli.
“I think if we were doing it over and we had more time, I would want to hear what the children sounded like singing it,” says Williams. But watching Bugsy Malone now, the adult-sung songs are all part of the film’s dreamlike, cartoonish, old-time charm.
Bugsy Malone screened – alongside Taxi Driver – at Cannes in May 1976. The festival was sniffy about Bugsy Malone at first, branding it “too juvenile”, but it went down such a storm that Parker was carried out of the cinema on people’s shoulders. Taxi Driver, meanwhile, was booed when it won the Palme d’Or.
Bugsy Malone has had an incredible afterlife, partly thanks to Parker’s insistence that it remain free to perform in schools; he was notoriously picky about it being staged professionally. Mostly, however, it is a timeless paean to childlike imagination – and a reminder that we should all Give a Little Love from time to time.
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