La grande truffa del rock'n'roll

As I've had the sound track for many years, I finally took the opportunity to watch the movie. My initial response was that this movie seemed so sliced and diced, it made the editing of "Manos: The Hands of Fate" look like brain surgery by comparison. My guess is that Malcolm McLaren had multiple cans of Sex Pistols footage lying around, and was having a difficult time trying to make a film out of it. To get his creative juices flowing, he'd cut segments from every reel; roll them up; snort lines of cocaine with them, and finally tell Julian Temple "to fix that bit of film with this bit I just used". Whilst in the process, the coke inflated McLaren's ego, and he came up with the idea to make the incomplete "Who Killed Bambi" into a documentary explaining how he orchestrated everything!

This movie tries so hard to be clever, instead it just seems immature and uninspired. All there is going on, is that we have band members doing dumb things; McLaren claiming credit though without any proof backing up anything he's saying, and some decent footage of Sex Pistols shows.

Some many years later, the film was pretty much confirmed as a lie, in that time McLaren wasn't known to repeat the same method and end up with the same results. These days this film is considered a tongue-in-cheek mockumentary instead of a pile of crap. So, there really was no reason to make this film, other than money.

The only value this film has is that it contains archival footage, other than that it really didn't need to be told in the fictitious tale of McLaren. It would've done better if it was narrated to the audience like it was a scrapbook. But, because it's told in such a fictitious manner the audience is left possibly irritated, or numb.

I'd give it a 8/10 because it contains decent live footage of a band I love. But, I'd give it 3/10 because the movie is a lie; so poorly edited, and presented to the audience that it is supposed to be an actual film. I meet in the middle at 5/10.

During the Sex Pistols heyday, their manager Malcolm McLaren had an idea to market the band as a noveaux Beatles. From 19776-1980, McLaren spent the band's money trying get the film off the ground. He went through several directors and writers until he finally settled on Julien Temple (a young film-maker). Temple and McLaren himself shot hours and hours of footage, sketches and concert footage. After working on this project for almost four years and with nothing resembling anything like a coherent movie, Temple decided to make a collage out of the footage and re-shot and edited the useful film segments and made a surprisingly entertaining film (considering the tight budget and time restraints). By the time the movie was released, Sid Vicious was dead, John Lydon was in Public Image Limited and Paul Cook and Steve Jones were in a new wave band called the Professionals. Neither of them were even speaking to their former manager. So, at the last minute, Temple decided to make the movie about the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols.

As for the band members, John Lydon didn't want to have anything to do with McLaren's project. Sid Vicious went along because of the money he was promised, ditto for Cook and Jones. The three former band members participated in the film without Lydon. Most of the music for the soundtrack was composed by Paul Cook and Steve Jones, Sid Vicious sang vocals on a few tracks but the music was played by Cook and Jones. Watch for Nancy Spurgen, she makes cameos in several of Sid Vicious sketches. Several scenes from the movie that showed up on the double album soundtrack do not appear in the final cut of the film. Maybe one day they'll release a director's cut of the movie. Yes, that is the Great Train Robbery participant Ronnie Biggs playing himself in the movie. He even sings on a couple of tracks and he's not that bad of a lead vocalist.

Recommended for fans of British punk and of the Sex Pistols.

It really surprises me that anyone can say this is remotely important in the pantheon of Punk Rock. It's an incoherent abomination formulated by someone so submerged in his own world he forgot to tell a story of note. The story of The Sex Pistols has now, here in the new millennium, finally been laid down to some semblance of truth, a truth that thankfully shows the manager of the band to be the oblivious money grabber he was. When you watch director Julien Temple's brilliant documentary, The Filth And The Fury, and then come back to this mess of a picture, you wonder how in gods name it has achieved cult status.

Its worth (I own it) comes down to the songs and the videos of those tunes, I mean where else are you going to get to see Sid Vicious' videos? Ones that show us he would have made a great Punk singer had he not spiralled out of control and met a foggy heroin fuelled death. The animated ending as Friggin In The Riggin plays out is enough to warrant this as a small price purchase, but please folks can we have some focus, I lived it, I still live it in fact, but it's an appalling picture, badly edited, badly told and saved purely by the music alone. Music that the band's manager had no creative input into at all, he shall forever be nameless to me, where once he proclaimed to be a puppet master, time now shows him to purely be a Muppet and most definitely not a master of anything.

The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, 5/10 for the music alone.

At the risk of making you spend more money, I suggest that before you watch this movie, you should read John Lydon's autobiography, 'Rotten'. It gives a good account of that era and once you have read a bit into the history behind the film, it will mean a whole lot more. That doesn't mean to say that it ceases to be weird. The opening sequences are just about the strangest twenty minutes of film that I have ever seen. There are moments of brilliance though. Particularly Sid Vicious shoving a cake in some french prostitute's face is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. I generally think that Sid Vicious was an idiot (well, he was) but in this film, he comes across as an almost like-able, possibly insane character. The film seems to have a storyline of sorts but it all becomes confused in a muddle of history, punk rock and random sex. Malcolm McLaren comes across as a self-centred egomaniac (as usual) and Steve Jones is interesting as the detective on his trail. The trip to Rio seems to confirm Lydon's doubts about the whole thing. It was just a gimmick and what IS the point in glorifying the deeds of a man who helped to steal what was basically working class money? The song was crap anyway. This is a bizarre film so approach with an open mind or you will switch off very quickly as I did first time round.

Malcolm McLaren and Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle offers up a load of old twaddle about the (rapid) rise and fall of the Sex Pistols. It's basically McLaren literally flogging a dead horse and milking the Pistols for all he could. And acting like he came out on top, shining. Blah blah blah.

But who cares. It has great Pistols/punk footage and music. And that's all that counts.