Herald rating: * * * *
Cast: The Sex Pistols, Sir John Gielgud
Director: Julien Temple
Rating: M, (contains sexual references)
Running time: 108 minutes
Opens: Thursday, Rialto Cinemas
Review: Graham Reid
Director Temple admits his first Sex Pistols film, Rock'n'Roll Swindle was a mockumentary deliberately designed by band manager Malcolm McLaren to confuse and irritate fans who were now slavishly turning the members into icons, just like those the Pistols tried to dispatch through their anarchic attitude and venomous pop.
The Filth and the Fury is the real thing however: an ambitious overview of the band which most importantly puts it back into the cultural conditions which spawned it and punk rock.
In Johnny Rotten's hunchback stage manner Temple sees a new Richard III (hence the interpolations from Gielgud's film adaptation with uncannily apt quotes) but elsewhere the truth was in the unemployment, the hopelessness a generation felt, and the excessive poncy rock which cluttered up Top of the Pops, revealed in all its shamelessness by period footage.
Temple was with the Pistols from the start and the footage he pulls out is thoroughly deserving of the word "historic."
The surviving band are interviewed today (Rotten betrays genuine grief at the death of Sid Vicious) and Vicious is seen in a lengthy interview describing the weight of his addiction. Some of this is moving, some unintentionally hilarious. The notorious Bill Grundy television interview is intelligently dissected.
But the real flinty action is in the live footage, the vehemence with which they were treated ("the whole world will be better for their non-existence," says a London councillor) and the chasm between their (non-) working-class existence and a Britain which, during the Queen's jubilee year, found it couldn't ignore the resentment they articulated.
A terrific film for anyone who ever raised a fist, voice or bottle to the risibly confrontational "I am an anti-Christ," or is simply curious about the crucible in which the brilliant Sex Pistols were created.
That rare thing: a great rock'n'roll film and informative documentary in one.
The Filth and the Fury
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