THE FILTH AND THE FURY (Fine Line) Featuring: Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Sid Vicious, Glen Matlock, Malcolm McLaren. Producers: Anita Camarata and Amanda Temple. Director: Julien Temple. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, nudity, sexual situations, adult themes) Running Time: 108 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In a lifespan of just over 24 months, the Sex Pistols managed to distill the entire history of rock and roll into one short-lived, phenomenally influential experiment. There were internal disagreements and lineup changes. There were distractions from meddling girlfriends and drugs. There were legal and fiscal wranglings with a shady manager and anxious record companies. There were cries of outrage from adults who just didn't understand the rebellious messages of this new musical form, accompanied by the certain knowledge that civilization as we knew it was about to come to an end. And finally, there was the inevitable transformation of rebellion and singularity into its own kind of conformity.
Anyone at all familiar with the Pistols would hope to high heaven that a film-maker wouldn't choose to tell their story in the measured tones of hero worship. No such worries under the direction of Julien Temple, who turns THE FILTH AND THE FURY into a multi-media Sex Pistols assault. Temple frames his archival footage of the band with modern day interviews with the band's four original members -- vocalist John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon, guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock -- and a 1978 post break-up interview with replacement bassist (and eventual heroin casualty) Sid Vicious. Their voices describe a band born out of the social conditions of mid-1970s England, a music of furious discontent that made the Sex Pistols as reviled by their critics as they were adored by their fans. They also tell of the factions within the band between those loyal to the Pistols' manager and self-described creator Malcolm McLaren and those who distrusted his business dealings and staged outrageousness.
Many of the stories told in THE FILTH AND THE FURY are by now the stuff of rock legend: the profane appearance on an English television show; the performance of "God Save the Queen" on the Thames during the celebration of Queen Elizabeth's silver anniversary jubilee; the one-song-and-out final concert at San Francisco's Winterland in January 1978. Julien Temple has already documented the Sex Pistols in 1980's THE GREAT ROCK 'N' ROLL SWINDLE, so there was the danger that THE FILTH AND THE FURY would feel not just like a canonization of a pioneering band, but a recycled canonization. Instead, Temple captures not just the energy of the Pistols, but their satirical sense of playfulness as well. That expletive-filled television interview is described as a drunken Steve Jones having fun at the expense of the equally drunk host; jabs at "progressive rock" contemporaries like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer are accompanied by footage of stop-motion dinosaurs. With music, animation and dozens of archival clips, Temple compiles a film that doesn't merely lay out a Sex Pistols chronology; it captures the atmosphere and the attitude of anarchy in the U.K.
That's not to say that it's instantly reliable as the definitive Sex Pistols story. SWINDLE may have been an obvious attempt at self-congratulation by McLaren, but THE FILTH AND THE FURY occasionally seems just as much like an ego piece for Johnny Rotten. The present-day interviews are conducted with the band members in shadow, an effective means of keeping the story in the "present" of 1970s England. They also allow Rotten in particular to "set the record straight" in a manner that sounds theatrically performed every time he opens his mouth. Rotten may very well be a more reliable historian of the Pistols than McLaren, but when he and Jones relate differing accounts of a hotel room snafu, it's hard not to here Rotten's version as a bit of overdramatization. Make no mistake, it's still tremendously interesting listening to Rotten's perspective on the rise and fall of the band. It's also a little hard to take when he actually begins crying over the tragic end of his friend Sid Vicious.
That's actually a fairly minor quibble with a film as vital and generally unpretentious as THE FILTH AND THE FURY (you don't get less pretentious than Steve Jones' crudely honest reason for wanting to be in a band). While Temple clearly appreciates the Sex Pistols as the defining force in English punk -- including footage of youngsters Siouxsie Sioux, Billy Idol and Pogues frontman Shane McGowan at concerts or singing Pistols songs -- he also confronts the bands members' dissatisfaction with how their legacy has been defined. Rotten in particular bemoans punk being "absorbed back into the mainstream," with middle-class kids wearing leather the real early English punks could never have afforded. He's also surprisingly philosophical about the band's disintegration during its 1978 U.S. tour. "The Sex Pistols had to end when it did," Rotten opines, "but it didn't have to end _how_ it did." Of course, he probably would be less concerned with the philosophizing than pure sensory jolt, and that's something THE FILTH AND THE FURY provides. It took the Sex Pistols two years to distill rock and roll into every one of its basic elements. It takes Julien Temple 108 minutes to do the same thing to the Sex Pistols. It's a story with the frantic, two-and-a-half-minute raw energy blast of a classic punk anthem.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Pistol whippings: 8.
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