Product Description

Writer-director Alan Parker's feature debut is a pastiche of American movies, a musical gangster comedy set in 1929, featuring prohibition, showgirls, and gang warfare, with references to everything from to . Uniquely, though, all the parts are played by children, including an excellent if underused Jodie Foster as platinum-blonde singer Tallulah, Scott Baio in the title role and a nine-year-old Dexter Fletcher wielding a baseball bat. Cream-firing "spluge guns" sidestep any real violence and the movie climaxes cheerfully with the biggest custard pie fight this side of (1967). Unfortunately for a musical, Paul Williams's score--part honky-tonk jazz homage, part 1970s Elton John-style pop--lets the side down with a lack of memorable tunes. Nevertheless, Parker's direction is spot on and the look of the film is superb, a fantasy movie-movie existing in the same parallel reality as and . A rare British love letter to classic American cinema, remains a true original; in Parker's words "the work of a madman" and one of the strangest yet most stylish children's films ever made.