Sid and Nancy
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| Sid and Nancy | |
|---|---|
 original film poster for Sid and Nancy. |
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| Directed by | Alex Cox |
| Produced by | Eric Fellner |
| Written by | Alex Cox Abbe Wool |
| Starring | Gary Oldman Chloe Webb David Hayman Debby Bishop Andrew Schofield |
| Distributed by | Samuel Goldwyn Company |
| Release date(s) | November 7, 1986 (USA) |
| Running time | 112 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $4,000,000 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Sid and Nancy, originally titled Love Kills, is a 1986 film directed by Alex Cox. It emerged during a period of renewed fascination in the life of the Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious. It stars Gary Oldman as Vicious and Chloe Webb as his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
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[edit] Production
The movie is largely based on the mutually destructive, drug-and-sex filled relationship between Vicious and Spungen. Vicious's mother, Anne Beverley, initially tried to prevent the movie from being made. After meeting with Cox, however, she decided to help the production. Some of the supporting characters are composites, invented to streamline the plot.
Oldman lost weight to play the emaciated Vicious by eating nothing but "steamed fish and lots of melon," but was briefly hospitalized when he lost too much weight. Vicious's mother also gave Oldman Vicious' own trademark heavy metal chain and padlock to wear in the film.
Courtney Love recorded an infamous video audition in which she exclaimed "I am Nancy Spungen." Cox was impressed by Love's audition, but has said the film's investors insisted on an experienced actress for the co-leading role. Cox would later cast Love as the lead in his movie Straight to Hell. Instead Love was cast in the relatively minor role of Gretchen (a part that Cox wrote specifically for her benefit), one of Sid and Nancy's New York junkie friends. Somewhat ironically, Love would be compared to Spungen later in life on account of her marriage to Kurt Cobain.
Webb and Oldman improvised the dialogue heard in the scene leading up to Spungen's death, but based it on interviews and other materials available to them. The stabbing scene is fictionalized and based only on conjecture. Cox told the New Musical Express: "We wanted to make the film not just about Sid Vicious and punk rock, but as an anti-drugs statement, to show the degradation caused to various people is not at all glamorous."
The original music is by Pray for Rain, Joe Strummer and The Pogues.
The film was rated R in the USA for drug use, language, violence, sexuality and nudity.
Prominent musicians made appearances in the film, including: Iggy Pop, The Circle Jerks, Edward Tudor-Pole of Tenpole Tudor and future Hole singer Courtney Love.
[edit] Reviews
The film received generally positive reviews from critics.[1] Roger Ebert gave Sid and Nancy a four-star review for The Chicago Sun-Times, writing that Cox and his crew "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.[2] In a subsequent article on Gary Oldman, Ebert referred to the movie's titular couple as "Punk Rock's Romeo and Juliet."[3]
Leslie Halliwell, on the other hand, had no praise for the movie: "Some have said stimulating, most have preferred revolting. Consensus, an example of the dregs to which cinema has been reduced." He also cited a line from a review that appeared in Sight & Sound: "Relentlessly whingeing performances and a lengthy slide into drugs, degradation and death make this a solemnly off-putting moral tract."[4]
In his book Sid Vicious: Rock N' Roll Star, Malcolm Butt describes Webb's performance as Spungen as "intense, powerful, and most important of all, believable." Issue #117 of Uncut Magazine (February 2007) ranked Gary Oldman as #8 in its "10 Best actors in rockin' roles" list, describing Oldman's Sid Vicious as a "hugely sympathetic reading of the punk figurehead as a lost and bewildered manchild." Conversely, Andrew Schofield was ranked #1 in the "10 Worst actors in rockin' roles" describing his performance as Johnny Rotten as a "short-arse Scouse Bleasdale regular never once looking like he means it, maaan." Commentary on the Criterion DVD dismisses the film's portrayal of John Lydon as wholly inaccurate. Paul Simonon of The Clash also criticised the movie for its portrayal of Lydon:
| “ | People have the wrong idea of [Lydon] -- like some sort of fat, bean-slurping idiot like in that Alex Cox film. That pissed me off, making him look like an idiot...John has a fantastic wit, a wicked sense of humour." [5] | ” |
[edit] John Lydon's reaction
John Lydon, better known as Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten, criticized the movie in his 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs:
"I cannot understand why anyone would want to put out a movie like Sid and Nancy and not bother to speak to me; Alex Cox, the director, didn’t. He used as his point of reference - of all the people on this earth - Joe Strummer! That guttural singer from The Clash? What the fuck did he know about Sid and Nancy? That’s probably all he could find, which was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The only time Alex Cox made any approach toward me was when he sent the chap who was playing me over to New York where I was. This actor told me he wanted to talk about the script. During the two days he was there, he told me that the film had already been completed. The whole thing was a sham. It was a ploy to get my name used in connection with the film, in order to support it."
"To me this movie is the lowest form of life. I honestly believe that it celebrates heroin addiction. It definitely glorifies it at the end when that stupid taxi drives off into the sky. That's such nonsense. The squalid New York hotel scenes were fine, except they needed to be even more squalid. All of the scenes in London with the Pistols were nonsense. None bore any sense of reality. The chap who played Sid, Gary Oldman, I thought was quite good. But even he only played the stage persona as opposed to the real person. I don’t consider that Gary Oldman's fault because he’s a bloody good actor. If only he had the opportunity to speak to someone who knew the man. I don’t think they ever had the intent to research properly in order to make a seriously accurate movie. It was all just for money, wasn't it? To humiliate somebody’s life like that - and very successfully - was very annoying to me. The final irony is that I still get asked questions about it. I have to explain that it's all wrong. It was all someone else’s fucking fantasy, some Oxford graduate who missed the punk rock era. The bastard."
"When I got back to London, they invited me to a screening. So I went to see it and was utterly appalled. I told Alex Cox, which was the first time I met him, that he should be shot, and he was quite lucky I didn't shoot him. I still hold him in the lowest light. Will the real Sid please stand up?"
"As for how I was portrayed, well, there's no offense in that. It was so off and ridiculous. It was absurd. Champagne and baked beans for breakfast? Sorry. I don't drink champagne. He didn't even speak like me. He had a Scouse accent. Worse, there's a slur implied in the movie that I was jealous of Nancy, which I find particularly loathsome. There is that implication that I feel was definitely put there. I guess that’s Alex Cox showing his middle class twittery. It’s all too glib, it’s all too easy."[6]
However, it should be noted that Strummer only met with Alex Cox for the first time after the completion of the film, at a wrap party. The pair's meeting involved discussion over soundtrack work for the film, not the film's script. [7]
In a later interview, Lydon was asked the question, "Did the movie get anything right?" to which he replied: "Maybe the name Sid." [8] Alex Cox claimed that Lydon's hatred of the movie was "understandable, given that it was based on incidents from his life and centered around one of his friends." [9] The other remaining Pistols have been far less outspoken about the movie than Lydon, although Lydon claimed that Paul Cook was more upset over the movie than he was. [10]
[edit] Soundtrack
The official soundtrack contains no songs sung by either the Sex Pistols or Sid Vicious.
| Song | Singer |
|---|---|
| "Love Kills" (Title Track) | Joe Strummer |
| "Haunted" | The Pogues |
| "Pleasure and Pain" | Steve Jones |
| "Chinese Choppers" | Pray for Rain |
| "Love Kills" | Circle Jerks |
| "Off the Boat" | Pray for Rain |
| "Dum Dum Club" | Joe Strummer |
| "Burning Room" | Pray for Rain |
| "She Never Took No for an Answer" | John Cale |
| "Junk" | The Pogues |
| "I Wanna Be Your Dog" | Gary Oldman |
| "My Way" | Gary Oldman |
| "Taxi to Heaven" | Pray for Rain |
[edit] Factual errors
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (November 2007) |
The film includes a large number of factual errors.
- One scene shows Spungen giving Vicious the chain and padlock necklace that would become his trademark. This was, however, given to him as a present by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders.
- Before the Pistols' first performance in the film, the X-Ray Spex song "Oh, Bondage, Up Yours!" is being performed. However, the singer is white and slender, with long, straight hair and no braces on her teeth. In reality, Poly Styrene had a healthy figure, short curly hair, braces, and is of Anglo-Somali heritage.
- Throughout the film, Vicious is seen wearing a red T-shirt with a Hammer and Sickle in the center of a pink circle. In real life, however, Vicious was known for wearing a T-shirt bearing the Nazi Swastika, which can be seen in the movie The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
- The inclusion of the Sex Pistols’ Today Show TV incident (with Bill Grundy) is out of place. The event occurred in December 1976, when Glen Matlock was the Pistols’ bassist, and Sid didn't join the band until three months later. Also, the dialogue of the interview as depicted in the film is different.
- The film features Sid playing at Winterland, San Francisco with "NANCY" carved onto his chest; this is a distortion of when Sid, jonesing for heroin, played at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas with "GIMME A FIX" carved onto his chest.
- The scene depicting the Pistols playing at San Francisco shows Johnny Rotten saying to the crowd “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, before the Pistols begin playing "Problems." However, Rotten actually said this at the end of the gig, just after the Pistols played their final song of the encore, "No Fun."
- Also at the San Francisco show, a lighting rig of automated moving lights can be seen waving around in the background. This kind of moving light was not invented until the early 80's.
- The movie shows Paul Cook and Steve Jones walking out of the band, leaving John and Sid. This is inaccurate because it was John who walked out on the other Pistols. Steve and Paul stayed with Sid and Malcolm McLaren, appearing in and recording songs for the movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.
- In the scene where Nancy succumbs to her stab wound in the bathroom, she dies face down on the bathroom floor. In actuality, she died in a sitting position under the sink.[11]
- Throughout the film a black girl appears that seems to be the secretary of Malcolm McLaren, Sophie Richmond. That girl was actually white.[12]
- In the scene right before Sid is supposed to play bass live for the first time with the Sex Pistols he is shown attacking a journalist (called Dick Dent in the film) with his bass guitar. In fact Sid did attack the NME journalist Nick Kent but this was long before he joined the Pistols, he didn't use a bass guitar, he used a bicycle chain.[13]
- In the crowd, the fans look like punks from the early eighties. Mohawks did not gain popularity until the early eighties, years after the Sex Pistols had broken up.
- In the beginning of the film, when Sid and Johnny are on the street in front of Linda's apartment, a 1984 Honda Civic "tall-boy" wagon can be seen parked on the same street, even though the film takes place in the late 70's.
[edit] Cast
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[edit] References
- ^ Sid & Nancy Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes
- ^ Roger Ebert's Four Star Movie Guide by Roger Ebert. (1988, Andrews & McMeel) p.280.
- ^ Roger Ebert's Four Star Movie Guide by Roger Ebert. (1988, Andrews & McMeel) p.383.
- ^ Halliwell's Film Guide: 11th Edition by Leslie Halliwell, edited by John Walker. (1995, HarperCollins) p.1033.
- ^ 3am Interview: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL SIMONON
- ^ Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by John Lydon, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. (1994, Hodder & Staughton Ltd) pp.150-151.
- ^ DEATH OF A PUNK - JOE STRUMMER (1952-2002) Clash co-founder dies of heart attack. :: hightimes.com
- ^ Rotten to the Core: An Interview With John Lydon
- ^ Alex Cox - SID & NANCY
- ^ Fodderstompf | Press Archives | Cut Magazine, November 1987
- ^ http://www.theviciousfiles.co.uk/site.jpg/seane%20of%20crime1.jpg
- ^ Sophie Richmond
- ^ 25 Up: Punk's Silver Jubilee: So Tough: The Boy Behind the Sid Vicious Myth | PopMatters Music Feature
[edit] External links
- Sid and Nancy at the Internet Movie Database
- Sid and Nancy at Allmovie
- Sid and Nancy at Rotten Tomatoes
- Sid and Nancy at GaryOldman.info
- Sid and Nancy page on Alex Cox website
- Criterion Collection essay by Jon Savage
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