Product: Filth to Fury [VHS]
Rating: 3.0
An important but flawed documentary on a crucial band
For some reason, Julien Temple has made not one, but two documentaries on the Sex Pistols. The first and slightly better film was THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE, and tells the Sex Pistols' story more or less from Malcolm McLaren's perspective. This second film, besides being messier than the earlier one, is far less original. It actually culls considerable hunks from the earlier film, but despite this manages to be the mirror image of the other. Instead of telling things from the standpoint of McLaren, it is told from the standpoint of the band members, and they clearly don't like him at all.It is amazing that Temple, who has actually made some good films over the years, has managed to make two poor films on the Sex Pistols. One would think that making a good documentary about the Sex Pistols would be as easy as catching fish in a bathtub. They were so outrageous, so dramatic, their impact on society so huge that it would be simply a matter of casually editing already existing footage. But what we have in THE FILTH AND THE FURY is a visual mess, almost borderline incoherent at times, almost completely without any new insight into the Sex Pistols, and with the insertion of a host of images that aren't really relevant to the time or their story. Why, for instance, the absolutely endless excerpts from Laurence Olivier's RICHARD III. The pretentiousness of the film can hardly be overstated. For instance, in contemporary interviews, the members of the band are left in darkness, as if they were part of a witness protection program.One of the points of the film seems to be to minimize the role that McLaren played in creating the band, as if the four members of the Sex Pistols pulled the whole enterprise together. Besides being enormously self-serving, it overlooks a number of key facts. For instance, McLaren's time spent in New York earlier in the 1970s, getting to know bands and performers like Television, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and deciding that he would like to import something like that into London. Indeed, his first choice for the lead singer of the Sex Pistols was Richard Hell, who originated the fashion styles that were later associated with the Sex Pistols. Hell declined, deciding to stay in New York, but Hell's dress code provided the pattern for much of the clothing available in Sex, McLaren's boutique. Typically, the documentary leaves Hell out of the story entirely. The worst thing about pushing McLaren to the periphery of the story, as if he were lucky to be along for the ride rather than the owner of the ride, is that it leaves out the ideological context for the punk movement. Was McLaren the exploitative jerk that especially Johnny Rotten asserts that he was? It is entirely possible, but even if so it doesn't negate the formative role he played.Where the film excels and where it gets quite good is when the members of the band, especially John Lydon, talk about what went wrong with the band and with the punk movement. There is also some great footage of the Sex Pistols performing live, but very nearly all of this is dubbed with studio recordings. This is not merely dishonest, it considerably lessens the value of the film. Luckily, much of the American footage contains the original soundtrack, including the absolutely chilling "No Fun" from their final concert in San Francisco. The way Johnny Rotten keeps growling the words "No fun" while sitting in a crouch on the stage sounds more like a lesson in metaphysics than a confession. It is a stunning bit, made more complete by the visibly distraught Steve Jones to the side of Rotten.In the end, this is an important film for anyone interested in rock, punk, or the Sex Pistols. But one nonetheless feels frustration that a filmmaker with such extraordinary access to the band members had to mar his film with so much needless and irrelevant footage of British comedians and Laurence Olivier's RICHARD III. He would have done better to focus more distinctly on the band itself.