Bugsy Malone (1976)

"My name is Tallulah..."

“I like my men at my feet…”

The 1970s, I think, was very much a time of revived styles. By the beginning of the decade, Swinging London’s obsession with off-beat Victoriana (Coldstream tunics, fairground typography and black basalt busts) transmogrified into a soft-focus, backlit Edwardiana— even if The Go-Between (1971) is, theoretically, set in 1900 and Laura Ashley set up her loom in 1953.

But hand-in-hand with 70s Edwardiana came the Twenties Revival— ‘Disco Deco’, actually as much to do with the American Depression of the 1930s as the Roaring Twenties. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is an early example. And then there’s Biba, The Boyfriend (1971), Ralph Lauren’s rumoured designs for The Great Gatsby (1973), Penguin’s paperback covers for F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sting (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Waltons (1974), Bugsy Malone (1976)— Alan Parker’s first feature film, released in the long, lost, hot summer of 1976— the Chicago Pizza Pie factory and Strikes 1926— a London hamburger joint decorated with sepia murals of the unemployed.

Disco Deco…

In the search for 'Disco Deco', I re-discovered the 70s wine bar look: exposed brickwork, bare floorboards, Thonet bentwood chairs, tea-dance palms, cast-iron twisty staircases painted white, and imagined soda fountains at the zinc-topped bar. And talking of soda fountains, 1970s SodaStream based its package design on the Prohibition-era ice-cream parlour, with dinky little bottles of pop in pressed glass, Deco graphics and a button you could press, actually not unlike Gatsby's "machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb."

“You won’t have any trouble. Just Fat Sam and a few dance hall girls…”

Which takes us to Bugsy Malone (1976)— as director Alan Parker himself described, "the work of a madman." It's truly bonkers. A British-made American gangster pastiche. Like The Untouchables, with Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Albeit a pastiche with children pretending to be grown-ups. For my ten-year-old self, this was the best thing in my life since Battle Comic. I mean, real pedal car Rolls-Royces! And real, working Splurge Machine Guns, which fired custard. I made my own Splurge Gun out of a cardboard box and a loo roll, filled it with soapy, foamy water (nicked from the kitchen cupboard) and sprayed my little sister, missing her by inches, leaving a huge wet, white splodge on the brick wall behind the garage. I hope it's still there.

 “Believe you's me, Fat Sam and his dumb bumbs ain't gonna stand in our way…”