Love Kills (Or Sometimes Just Lies Limp): Sid and Nancy 40 Years On

Sid & Nancy (dir. Alex Cox, 1986) 

An official theatrical film poster

 

 

I. 

 

Sid and Nancy - also known by the working title Love Kills [1] - was released 40 years ago. 

 

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 14 May 1986 and was first shown in London at the Limelight Club on 20 July, before going on general release in UK cinemas the following month.

 

It's a biopic directed by Alex Cox, who co-wrote the script with Abbe Wool, starring Gary Oldman as the Sex Pistol Sid Vicious and American actress Chloe Webb as his punk paramour Nancy Spungen [2]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Oldman is a talented and versatile actor - not one of my favourites, though I don't dislike seeing him on screen - but his initial decision to turn down the role of Vicious (not once, but twice) was one I wish he'd stuck by. 

 

For one thing, he was already 27 when filming took place in 1985, which makes him too old to play a character who died aged 21. Also, by his own admission, he had zero interest in Vicious and punk subculture, wasn't a fan of the Sex Pistols, and found the entire story surrounding Sid and Nancy banal. 

 

Ultimately, Oldman only accepted the role at the urging of his agent and after learning that he was being offered a £35,000 fee to star in the movie [3]. 

 

However, to be fair, he did throw himself into the part with all his characteristic intensity once he agreed terms. Amusingly, he lost so much weight in such a short period in order to play Vicious that he was briefly hospitalised with malnutrition [4]. And at least Oldman came from a relatively working-class background, unlike posho actor Louis Partridge who played Vicious in Danny Boyle's ludicrous six-part mini-series Pistol in 2022 [5].  

 

Oldman - who went on to become an Academy Award-winning Hollywood actor - now rarely mentions Sid and Nancy and casually dismisses his own performance in the film.  

 

 

III. 

If Oldman, at 27, was just a tad past it to play Sid, Chloe Webb, pushing 30 when she took on the role of Nancy - who died aged 20 - was way over the hill (certainly by punk standards). 

 

So again, whilst she does a reasonable job, I think it would have been better - or at least more daring - to have cast 20-year-old Courtney Love in the role - one for which she submitted a video audition and was genuinely passionate about. 

 

Cox was deeply impressed by Love's youthful enthusiasm - and her acting ability - but eventually caved in to pressure from the film's financial backers and investors who insisted on a more experienced actress in the role. 

 

He did, however, create and write the minor supporting character of Gretchen for Love (a fictional New York junkie friend of the punk couple) so she could still be part of the project and this marked her debut feature film appearance (several years before she formed the band Hole and met Kurt Cobain).      

 

 

IV. 

 

Although Sid and Nancy failed to recoup its production budget at the box office, the film was received positively by most critics [6] and has since developed a cult following. Strangely, however, it is rarely shown on British TV and I don't think I've seen it other than at the cinema back in August 1986 - when I was less than impressed, as this diary entry makes clear:

 

Sophie and I woke up late. After lunch, we set off on a nice sunny day to King's Road. Boring! Nothing (and no one) caught my eye. From Chelsea to Kensington Market and Hyper Hyper. Still found nothing to excite. Everything seems to have stagnated. But perhaps that's a good thing - a precursor to a change of some kind. Or maybe not.   

      Got to Leicester Square at five-ish. Had something to eat in Pizzaland and then went to the cinema. It had been my intention not to see Sid & Nancy, but felt a strange obligation to do so - and Sophie had bought the tickets. The two main parts were well-acted, so kudos to Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. Other cast members were less convincing - particularly David Hayman as Malcolm and Andrew Schofield as Rotten. 

      Ultimately, I came away asking myself what was the point of such a film other than to echo the 'Just Say No' anti-drugs campaign? The only thing worse than the ridiculous ending of the film was Joe Strummer's soundtrack. [7]

 

As I say, I don't think I've since re-watched the film - though I'd very much be interested to do so, one day, just to find out if it's as bad as I remember it. 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Director Alex Cox used the title Love Kills throughout the writing and development process. Why this title was dropped (or relegated to the status of a subtitle) in favour of the more prosaic Sid and Nancy, I don't know, but one suspects there was probably external pressure to do so coming from the film's producers (particularly after a letter was received from a party claiming to own the title 'Love Kills' and threatening legal action).

      Clearly, it must have been a decision made late on, because by then Joe Strummer (formerly of The Clash) had already written the film's title track and 'Love Kills' was released as a single from the film's soundtrack in July 1986. Fans of Strummer will doubtless disagree, but it's a shit track and, personally, I much prefer the song written by Dee Dee Ramone also called 'Love Kills' and also dealing with the tragic story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. This track can be found on the Ramones album Animal Boy (Sire Records, 1986). 

 

[2] For my own take on these star-crossed lovers, see the post titled 'I'll Put a Knife Right in You' (30 Dec 2020). For a rather more personal take on the story of Sid Vicious see 'Sweet Sixteen' (8 Feb 2022). And for a longer post in memory of Ms Spungen, see 'The Last of the Groupies' (26 April 2022).   

  

[3] I know there will be readers thinking that £35,000 doesn't sound like a lot of money, but it was considered a significant sum to pay a young and relatively unknown theatre actor at the time. Oldman has since revealed in interviews that he was only earning around £80 a week working with the Royal Court Theatre at the time - and that was in a good week (sometimes his income would fall to half that). Thus, for Oldman, £35,000 was a small fortune - one that allowed the purchase of a modest flat in London. 

      Readers need to also remember that Sid and Nancy was an independent British film - not a big-budget Hollywood movie. Total production costs were only around £2.7 million.   

 

[4] For those who might want to know the secret of such dramatic weight loss, apparently the knack is to live on a diet of nothing but steamed fish and lots of melon. 

 

[5] Don't get me started on Pistol ... See the post 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Castration' (30 Mar 2021). 

[6] Roger Ebert, for example, gave Sid and Nancy full marks in his review (25 Oct 1986). He concludes that Alex Cox has all the makings of a great director: "He and his actors pull off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it." The review can be found on rogerebert.com  

      Thirty years later, Peter Bradshaw writing in The Guardian (4 Aug 2016) was equally enthusiastic, insisting that Sid and Nancy is a "welcome corrective to bland punk nostalgia" and calling it "Alex Cox's Beckettian masterpiece about those two prisoners of futility" and undiagnosed dysfunction.  

 

[7] This is an edited and slightly revised entry in The Von Hell Diaries (Sat 23 August, 1986). 

 

 

Bonus 1: the original trailer to Sid and Nancy (1986) - enhanced version by HD Retro Trailers.  

 

Bonus 2: the trailer for the 30th anniversary Blu-ray edition of Sid and Nancy (Studiocanal, 2016). 

 

 

Three More Cool Cats: CC, Room 8, and Henri, le Chat Noir

Three Cool Cats: CC, Room 8, and Henri, le Chat Noir

 

 

Opening Remarks 

 

Some cats have so captured human affection that they've secured a place in the cultural imagination and achieved a degree of fame bordering on celebrity. To illustrate this, I recently discussed the cases of Félicette the Space Cat, Casper the Commuting Cat, and Oscar the Therapy Cat: click here.

 

Here, at the request of several cat-loving readers, are three further examples drawn from the modern period that particularly interest or amuse ...

 

 

CC (Copy Cat)

 

Just as many people know the name of Laika, the Soviet space dog, but are unfamiliar with the French cat Félicette, so it is that whilst most have heard of Dolly the Sheep, very few are acquainted with a shorthaired, brown and white tabby cat called CC - an initialism standing for either Copy Cat or Carbon Copy, depending on who you ask - even though she holds the distinction of being the world's first cloned pet, born in Texas, in 2001 [1]. 

Whilst figures ranging from Jean Baudrillard to Adam Gibson have expressed reservations about cloning as a technique - Doesn't anybody die anymore? - I'm pleased to say that CC appeared to be a happy, healthy cat who, in September 2001, gave birth to four genetically unique kittens (one of whom was, sadly, stillborn), fathered naturally by another lab cat, named Smokey, before dying peacefully, aged 18, in March 2020. 

 

 

Room 8 (The School Cat)

 

If asked to identify my favourite type of cat, then I would have to say one that comes from out of the blue; i.e., not a breed, but either a fateful event in and of themselves, or the herald of such - a kind of feline angel with whiskers rather than wings.

 

My little black cat is one such creature, who just turned up one day and decided to stay ... And so was an American pussy who came to be known as Room 8 ...

 

Room 8 wandered into a classroom at Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, California, in 1952 and decided he was henceforth going to live there during the school year; vacationing for the summer months, but always returning when classes resumed in the Fall. 

 

This happy (somewhat unusual) arrangement continued without interruption until the mid-1960s. 

 

Eventually, the news media discovered what was happening and they would send reporters and film crews to await the cat's return. This resulted in him receiving fan mail (up to a 100 letters a day) and becoming the subject of both a documentary film and a children's book. 

When age, sickness, and injury began to take a toll - he was hurt in a fight when older and suffered from feline pneumonia - Room 8 was taken in by a kind family living close to the school.

 

When he died, in August 1968, thought to be aged around 21, his obituary in the LA Times ran to three columns and was accompanied with a photograph. Past and present students at the school raised funds for his gravestone and CC was laid to rest at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, California. 

 

Finally, for those who find such details fascinating, Room 8's paw prints can be found immortalized in cement on the pavement outside Elysian Heights. 

 

 

Henry aka Henri, le Chat Noir 

 

Technically, Henri, le Chat Noir is a fictional cat created by the human William Braden, who wrote and directed a short series of films posted online that explored the existential musings of the former. 

 

But Henri was portrayed by a real (longhaired black and white) cat, Henry, belonging to Braden's mother, so I think it's legitimate to comment on his case here, particularly as videos featuring Henri have been viewed millions of times and received critical acclaim, making him one of the world's best-known and most celebrated cats.

 

Braden began his project whilst a student at the Seattle Film Institute. He was inspired by the American perception of French films as pretentious and self-absorbed. The first short, Henri (2007), was written, filmed and edited in eleven days. 

 

The second film, Henri 2: Paw de Deux didn't follow on YouTube until five years later in 2012, but it won the Golden Kitty Award for Best Cat Video On The Internet at the Walker Art Center's Internet Cat Video Festival. Critic Roger Ebert also declared Henri 2: Paw de Deux the 'best internet cat video ever made' [2].

 

Many sequels followed between 2012 and 2018 - seventeen short films in all. In the final film, Henri announced his retirement and thanked all his fans around the world for their support. 

 

During this period, two books were also published: Henri, le Chat Noir: The Existential Musings of an Angst-Filled Cat (2013) and Reflections on Human Folly (2016), both written (obviously) by Braden, but one likes to think with Henry's approval.  

 

I think my favourite description of Henri was provided by a journalist at The Huffington Post who wrote that he was 'like a feline Serge Gainsbourg, just without the singing, or the alcoholism, or the public scandal' [3].

 

It's actually a little disapointing to discover that in real life Henry was, according to Braden, a good natured and happy cat who never suffered a single moment of existential crisis and had nothing in common with the brooding character Henri he portrayed on film. 

 

In December 2020, Braden announced that Henry had been euthanized at the age of 17 because of a debilitating deterioration of his spine ... C'est la vie! as he fictional French self might shrug.      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] CC was genetically identical to Rainbow, the male cat who donated the genetic material. But the cats looked different because coat patterns and other features can be determined in the womb. Her surrogate mother was named Allie.  

 

[2] Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, (31 Aug 2012). 

 

[3] Written in a Huffington Post review (27 June 2012) of Henri 3: Le Vet (2012). 

Reflections on The Blue Lagoon

A sensual story of natural love ...

Having briefly served as a ship's doctor - a role which took him to various exotic locations in the South Pacific - the Irishman Henry De Vere Stacpoole decided to become a full-time writer.

In 1908, he struck gold with The Blue Lagoon - a romance novel about two children marooned on a lush tropical island who discover the joys of coming of age (nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean, know what I mean, say no more).

The work has been adapted for film many times over the years; firstly in 1923, and then, more famously and with the addition of sound, in Frank Launder's 1949 version, starring Jean Simmons and Donald Houston as the incestuous teen lovers living their paradisal existence in naked innocence.

Perhaps the most notorious cinematic version, however, is that directed by Randal Kleiser (1980), starring 14-year-old Brooke Shields and 18-year-old Christopher Atkins. The film contains full-frontal nudity and fairly explicit sexual content,* which perhaps explains its huge commercial success and the fact that it has lodged itself within both the popular and pornographic imagination.

The critics, of course, hated it - and I can't say I blame them. As Roger Ebert points out, The Blue Lagoon could have been an interesting tale of wilderness survival, or a thrilling adventure epic, but it's neither; worse, it even fails as a work of soft-core porn, although that's how the movie was teasingly (and deceptively) sold to the viewing public.

At best, we can say that by offering us a glimpse of underage sex wrapped in primitive purity and moral sentiment, the filmmakers got away with something that they would very likely not get away with today. But, ultimately, as lovely as the young actors are to look at, I'd sooner go swimming with the Creature from the Black Lagoon than sit through this movie again ...      

* Note: Shields was, of course, already notorious for her performance (aged 12) as a child prostitute in the movie Pretty Baby (dir. Louis Malle, 1978). However, whilst in The Blue Lagoon Shields performed many topless scenes with her hair glued to her breasts, all of her fully nude scenes were performed by a body double, Kathy Troutt; an actress, model, deep sea diver, and dolphin trainer, known to her many fans around the world as Australia's Original Teenage Mermaid. For his part, Atkins gamely performed his own nude scenes and posed for Playgirl in 1982 on the back of his new found fame, much to the delight of his mostly female (and gay) fan base.

On The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Its Critics

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by Billy Perkins

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the title roles respectively is, according to Quentin Tarantino, the greatest film ever made.

He's not alone in this assessment; many people love it and name it as the purest example of cinematic art brought to a moment of absolute perfection thanks not only to the performances of the three stars and the directorial skills of Leone, but also the magnificent photography by Tonino Delli Colli and the famous score composed by Ennio Morricone.

It's surprising, therefore, to discover that upon its release it was met not with universal acclaim, but, on the contrary, fairly widespread hostility and critical disdain. Not only was the violence found objectionable, but the length of the film led some to label it dull and interminable. Meanwhile, the fact that it was an Italian re-imagining of a classically American art form - a so-called spaghetti western - led even Roger Ebert in his original review to deduct a star purely on the grounds that, as such, it could not be art.  

It was Italian-born Renata Adler, however, who really took against the movie in her New York Times review from 1968, dismissing it as "the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre". This is particularly disappointing coming as it does from the pen of a woman with a background in philosophy and comparative literature.

Disappointing too is the review of Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, published two months after that by Adler. Kael - described by some as the most influential film critic of her generation - called the film, garish, gruesome and stupid. She particularly objected to what she perceived as the mindless sadism and fascistic nihilism of the film in which all noble and heroic elements of the traditional (American) western have either been omitted or spat upon. 

What this demonstrates, I suppose, is that even very smart, very well-educated critics can sometimes get things very wrong; particularly when confronted with the genuinely New (i.e. that which comes to us from the future and shatters the past). 

One recalls in closing Woody Allen's remark about Kael to the effect that she has everything a film critic needs except judgement: 'She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising.'

Who Killed Bambi?

Gentle pretty thing / Who only had one spring 

You bravely faced the world / Ready for anything

Whilst it's true that Steve Jones in his role as an amateur detective is only interested in finding Malcolm and piecing together the clues that might explain where it all went wrong for him and his fellow band members (tragically so, in the case of Sid Vicious), there is, nevertheless, another question at the heart of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which transforms the movie from an amusingly mythologized history of the Sex Pistols into a profound murder mystery and morality tale: with one big shout we all cry out - who killed Bambi?

It is, of course, a rhetorical question: when McLaren screams it into the faces of the assembled reporters at Henley Airfield, he's not expecting an answer. And neither is he simply giving reference to an off-screen incident involving the shooting of a deer by a decadent rock star, although, clearly, this scene - which belongs to the originally proposed film to be directed by Russ Meyer - is a non-too-subtle visual metaphor.   

So what, if anything, do we learn from Lesson 10 of the Swindle?

That innocence is easily lost? That it's a good thing to be disillusioned and believe only in the ruins of belief? That we should never trust a hippie? That the spirit of punk will never die; or that Johnny Rotten was a collaborator and that big business will always find a way to assimilate and market youthful rebellion? It's probably a (qualified) yes to all of these ...


Note: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, directed by Julian Temple, was released in cinemas in 1980; probably you can now find it on YouTube, or elsewhere online. Those old punks and film-buffs who are particularly interested, might like to read the script written for Who Killed Bambi? by Roger Ebert, which he has kindly made available on his website: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/who-killed-bambi-a-screenplay