Bugsy Malone (1976)

I remember when this thing was on Home Box Office in the '70's. Even back then, something bothered me about Scott Baio. I didn't really understand how being hit in the face with a pie was the child equivalent of being murdered with a machine gun. Were the kids supposed to be dying?

Bugsy Malone was a musical gangster movie performed entirely by tweenagers. I didn't like musicals anyway and the children's singing was dubbed by adults. I was thirteen at the time and didn't think about the fact that twelve-year-olds were playing showgirls, something some critics found disturbing.

John Cassisi who played gangster Fat Sam was convicted of money laundering and bribery in 2015 and sentenced to two to six years.

I remember Cassisi on the sit-com Fish, a Barney Miller spin-off starring Abe Vigoda. Fish retires from the police force and he and his wife run a group home for foster kids. The only thing I remember was Cassisi saying that he was bound to get adopted now that his face cleared up. It got a laugh from the studio audience, but I found it so sad.

Watching Bugsy Malone now, decades later, I feel kind of depressed what with children playing impoverished adults, frustrated singers and dancers and murder victims. The child actors were pretty good.

According to imdb.com, Scott Baio and Florence Dugger couldn't stand each other, had no chemistry and the scene where they had to hug had to be shot over and over because she didn't want to touch him. It was made in Britain and Jodie Foster was terrified of the English children. It was like Lord of the Flies. Corporal punishment wouldn't be banned in Britain for another ten years and now the British are beginning to prosecute teachers for sadistic abuse they committed in the 1970's. The English kids had to have been a bit warped.

It's now available on the Criterion Channel, introduced with an interview with Sophia Coppola.