Main Cast: Malcolm McLaren, John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon, Sid Vicious, Paul Cook
Release Year: 1980
Country: UK
Run Time: 103 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Let Malcolm McLaren show you how to achieve fame and fortune by making your pop group the most despised band in the world! This film about the brief but eventful career of The Sex Pistols primarily focuses on McLaren, their manager, as he presents his ten-point program on how to achieve success through chaos, ineptitude, and abusing the music industry. Despite some remarkable footage of The Sex Pistols' infamous Jubilee Day performance and clips from their final concert in San Francisco, there's surprisingly little screen time devoted to the group actually performing. Instead, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle offers McLaren's agit-prop philosophies on music, culture, politics, and the entertainment industry, as well as an amusing (if often inaccurate) account of the band's rise and fall. Along the way, we're also offered some curious animated sequences, "film noir" episodes starring guitarist Steve Jones, footage of the band recording with exiled British train robber Ronnie Biggs, and Sid Vicious singing "My Way" (he had been dead for over a year by the time the movie was released). The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle began life as "Who Killed Bambi?", a project written by Roger Ebert and directed by Russ Meyer, which closed down after two days of shooting when funding fell through. By the time McLaren and Julien Temple got it off the ground (with a radically different script), Johnny Rotten had left the group, which explains why the band's front man is hardly in the movie. The rest of the group broke up a few months later. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Cast
Malcolm McLaren - 'The Embezzler'
John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon - 'The Collaborator'
Sid Vicious - 'The Gimmick'
Paul Cook - 'The Tea-Maker'
Ronald Biggs; Jess Conrad; Liz Fraser; Mary Millington - Crook's Partner; Julian Holloway; James Aubrey; Johnny Shannon; Helen of Troy; Tenpole Tudor; Alan Jones; Irene Handl - Usherette; Peter Dean - Bouncer (uncredited); Steve Jones - 'The Crook'
Credit
Phil Austin - Animator, Julien Temple - Director, Richard Bedford - Editor, Don Boyd - Executive Producer, Jeremy Thomas - Executive Producer, John Metcalfe - Cinematographer, Adam Barker-Mill - Cinematographer, Nicholas D. Knowland - Cinematographer, Don Boyd - Producer, Jeremy Thomas - Producer, John Sanders - Sound/Sound Designer, Julien Temple - Screenwriter
The footage was filmed in early - mid 1978, between singer Johnny Rotten's departure from the band and their subsequent split. The movie was finally released nearly two years later. Notably, Rotten (who was listed in the credits as "The Collaborator") only appeared in archival footage and as an animated character due to his refusal to have anything to do with the film. Original bassist Glen Matlock also appears only in archival footage and briefly in an animated segment.
The movie tells a stylised and fictionalised account of the formation, rise and subsequent breakup of the band, from the point of view of then-manager Malcolm McLaren. In the film, McLaren claims to create the Sex Pistols and manipulate them to the top of the rock and roll industry, using them as puppets to both further his own agenda (in his own words - "chaos"), and to claim the financial rewards from the various record labels the band were signed to during their brief history - EMI, A&M, Virgin, and Warner Bros. Records. The 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, also directed by Julien Temple, retells the story of the Sex Pistols from the perspective of the band, thus serving as a response to and rebuttal of McLaren's insistence that he was the driving creative force of the band.
VHS and DVD Release
'The Swindle Continues in Your Own Home' was the tagline on the original 18 certificate VHS release from Virgin Video in 1982 (VVB 010). in 2005 the film was released on DVD by Sony/Shout Factory (catalogue number:2028859) with a Bonus 20min interview with Julien Temple. The VHS release gives an innacurate running time of 104 mins, in fact both VHS and DVD versions run 100 mins and 04 seconds, the only difference between the two is that the song 'I Thought I Saw A Puddy Tat' has been removed from the DVD soundtrack and replaced by a few sound effects and the DVD has an additional end credit - 1980 Sex Pistols Residuals, which makes it run 10 seconds longer than the VHS.
