RIP Alan Parker: The Eclectic Filmography of a Big Filmmaker

Not a whole lot of people know this — although I presume people who read some of his more thorough obituaries will soon become newly aware of it — but the late director Alan Parker, who died on Friday at age 76 was also a cartoonist. (He did enough for two books’ worth: Will Write And Direct For Food and Making Movies.) One of my favorite scrawlings of his —one could only call him a draftsman in the Thurber-esque sense of the term — shows a couple in a movie theater looking at a huge screen. In the middle of that screen is projected an image in a tiny, TV-square of a box. The caption is “Oh look, another Film 4 movie.” Or something like that. “Film 4” filling in at the time for the idea of a TV movie. (I’ve not been able to find the cartoon online, even on Parker’s own sophisticated website.)

Aside from amusement value, the cartoon is also a sort of Declaration of Principles for the late director — he liked his cinema BIG. Big images, big sound, big emotions. He was an impeccable craftsman who very rarely had any use for pussyfooting, or even regular subtlety. Although a distinctive director, he had little use for the preciosity of the “personal” filmmaker as such. Although he allowed that each of his disparate projects afforded him some opportunity to examine aspects of himself.

In the late ’60s, the era in which the London-born Parker came of age, the British film industry was pretty much a wasteland, so Parker learned his craft directing TV ads. In an interview with Robert J. Emery for his book The Directors, Parker said, “Looking back, I came from a generation of filmmakers who couldn’t have really started anywhere but commercials, because we had no film industry in the United Kingdom at the time. People like Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne, Hugh Hudson  and myself. So commercials proved to be incredibly important.” (Can the facile aspects of all those directors’ work be blamed, to some extent, on their having first used filmmaking as salesmanship? That’s an argument for another time.)

After making a couple of shorts and directing a story for the BBC’s esteemed Play for Today series, Parker made a peculiar splash with Bugsy Malone, a stylized pastiche of 1930s gangster movies with an all child-actor cast. Starring Jodie Foster opposite still-moppet Scott Baio (this is perhaps the only Baio performance in which he isn’t a completely transparent lightweight), the movie could have been a camp non-classic or a cutesy-poo treacle-fest (machine guns that shoot whipped cream!). But it was neither. Going slightly against the grain of what was considered palatable/acceptable at the time, Parker gave this kid’s stuff some unexpected spark in the romantic magnetism department. The movie is winning, but with a peculiar edge. It made the director one to watch.

1978’s graphic Midnight Express was a complete 180, except it, too, was eager to push boundaries. Not just of depictions of Turkish-prison depredations, but general good taste. (Remember the biting-off-the-tongue-and-spitting-it-out bit? Now you do.) Turkey itself has been living down the movie, based on a real-life account of a drug smuggler’s harsh time in Istanbul, since its release. Pugnacious Parker, in a 2017 documentary about that movie’s impact, was completely unapologetic regarding the movie’s racism.

While Parker was a product of the working class, his ideological stances could largely be those of an imperious Tory. He didn’t blink when his 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew accusations of attaching a white savior narrative — and an FBI white savior narrative, at that — to a story of the U.S.’s Civil Rights movement. A literate and cine-literate as he was, Parker was often an out-and-out sensationalist — for him one senses the movie was more about “burning” than about “Mississippi.”

It’s a similar deal with 1987’s Angel Heart. The outwardly risible story of a sweaty detective who takes an assignment from a hipster beardo named Lou Cyphre —no, really! And they’re played by Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro, respectively! — was rendered into a graphic lurid tale of erotica, evil and voodoo, with a very eye-opening sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet as a centerpiece. (Remember the reports that Bill Cosby was very upset about his Cosby Show charge Bonet going full frontal? How quaint. ) Parker sometimes comes off like a David Lean who was more entranced by John Hadley Chase than by Charles Dickens.

Despite intermittent awards nominations, these examples of Parker’s output led, to a certain extent, to his becoming the highly-competent, undeniably A-list director Critics Loved To Hate. None of which bothered him at all. “Critics suck. Get used to it. They would love to be doing what you do” runs one quote on Parker’s website.

The best run of his eclectic filmography runs from 1980 to 1984. Starting with Fame, the frank, innovative, literal High School Musical. When I first saw it I thought it actually gave Fosse’s All That Jazz a run for its money in terms of candidness and innovation. 1982’s Shoot The Moon was another leap in terms of getting raw emotions right in the audience’s face while maintaining the production perks of mainstream cinema. The divorce drama boasts career-high performances from Diane Keaton and Albert Finney; anyone who’s had their heart broken will have it broken again while watching Keaton dissolve in tears in a bathtub singing the Beatles’ “If I Fell.”

Imagine releasing Pink Floyd: The Wall the same year as Shoot the Moon; Parker actually did it. Still a high water mark of sensory overload, it’s the ultimate Horrors Of Being A Rock Star epic and a provocative poke around the theme of Mass Entertainment As Inchoate (At Least) Fascism. And finally, 1984 saw Parker’s arguable masterpiece, Birdy, a dream-infused tale of boyhood friendship and war trauma. All showed various angles of Parker’s signature style: a lot of moving camera, and cuts that had the impact of an exclamation point or sometimes a slap, or sucker punch.

His biggest movies of the 1990s were The Commitments, a scrappy Irish “making the band” tale that was the most conventional crowd-pleaser Parker ever handled. Taking on the monster musical Evita was the sort of challenge Parker no doubt relished; getting an entirely credible performance out of Madonna, who didn’t have the pertinent chops of the stage’s Patti Lupone, was a job he probably didn’t relish, and didn’t quite pull off. He said to an interviewer at the Brussels Film Festival in 2014: “I had to cast the role of Evita […] and you have to make a decision then: do you go with a singer who can act, or an actress who can sing? You probably have to compromise one thing or the other, you know.”

Unfortunately his final movie, 2003’s anti-death-penalty The Life of David Gale, was his worst, a shockingly meretricious stunt. That he wasn’t able to get anything done between then and now could be a reflection of his health — he is said to have died after a long illness — but it’s also possibly a reflection, and a poor one, on the movie industry of today. If it can’t find a use for an Alan Parker, what is it really about, anyway?

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.