Product: Filth to Fury [VHS]
Rating: 4.0
The Pistols back on their pedestals
From formation in a fetish store in late 1975 to implosion in San Francisco in 1978, the Sex Pistols were the Bashi-Bazouks of punk music, bringing the sound to millions of listeners. They came to embody the movement, whether as music of working class rage or songs of snotty adolescent rebellion.The members' personalities were wildly different, fistfights were frequent and the Pistols replaced Glen Matlock, their bassist and best songwriter, with Sid Vicious, a sad heroin addict who literally could not play his instrument, in early 1977. The band was only together for 26 months, and to paraphrase Gibbon, we should ask not why it broke up but why it lasted so long.The film's answer, basically, is the Pistols had nowhere else to go. Guitarist Steve Jones says he hated playing guitar in early rehearsals but stuck with it because he didn't have anything else. It took Vicious' slide in heroin addiction and manager Malcolm McLaren's mismanagement to finally lead to the last concert, where singer Johnny Rotten said, more with weariness than contempt, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?""The Filth and the Fury" is an enjoyable, interesting piece that puts the Pistols in the context of their times. It makes a few bold sallies toward objectivity (for the band's reputation as a scream against the British establishment, Jones says he didn't know who the PM was and just wanted sex) but is essentially hero worship, as all rock documentaries are.That's not necessarily a problem, but the movie strongly suggests the whole of England was against the Pistols, which not only downplays the support they had from music critics who were as sick of Emerson, Lake and Palmer as they were but suggests punk was being listened to all over the country. In reality, it had something more than a cult following, but not much; the fear of punk gaining a broader audience drove much of the opposition documented here.Director Julien Temple, in his otherwise awful DVD commentary, points out he made "The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle" in 1979 to dispel some of the hero worship the band had developed, thought it went too far and made "Filth" as a corrective. OK. But the movie puts the Pistols back on their pedestals, which means their influences (Alice Cooper, the Modern Lovers, the New York Dolls) and more durable bands like The Clash suffer in comparison. You'd think punk owed everything to the Pistols after seeing this, and that ain't the case.That said, it would take a filmmaker of rare incompetence to make the Pistols' meteoric story boring, and Temple has gift for both narrative and humor. Rotten has one ego trip too many in his interview, but both he and the other members of the band provide new insights and details about the Pistols' troubled life. McLaren is heard only through audio he recorded for "Swindle," and it may be unfair, but the evidence doesn't weigh well in his favor. You get to see footage of "Who Killed Bambi?" the lousy film the Pistols did (with an appearance by Sting) and a previously unseen 1978 interview with Vicious, who speaks with a surly eloquence.It's great storytelling about a singular moment in time. The Pistols may have an importance out of proportion to their recorded legacy, but "Filth" does justice to their peculiar place in music.