Books, Arts & Manners: The Continuing Famine

Fame, directed by Alan Parker, who gave us those two abominations, Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express, marks a step up. It concerns, first, the way boys and girls audition to get into New York’s High School of Performing Arts; then how the work and lives of some of them interlock; how, in some cases, the teachers affect them; and how, after adventures and misadventures, they all graduate with a bang. The stories of the youngsters make absolutely no sense— one smart, tough girl gets suckered into making porn movies against her will, and one homosexual feels like a lonely pariah, whereas the school must teem with his likes—but the early sequences of more or less desperate, wryly comic auditions carry some conviction (though they are unduly gimmicked up) and a good deal of energy, which is the film’s chief virtue.

The trouble even here is that the audition as an objet trouvé of story-telling has lately been overexploited: we’ve had A Chorus Line on stage and its cinematic derivative, All That Jazz. Yet Fame owes even more to Milos Forman’s treatments of the theme: first in his Czech student film, Competition, then in his American reworking and expansion of it, Taking Off. There exist, it appears, subjects that film cannot use more than sparingly without making them look repetitious, derivative, all but plagiarized. Still, the comic vitality of its initial sequences makes Fame viewable in a season of famine.

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John Simon

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Fame, directed by Alan Parker, who gave us those two abominations, Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express, marks a step up. It concerns, first, the way boys and girls audition to get into New York’s High School of Performing Arts; then how the work and lives of some of them interlock; how, in some cases, the teachers affect them; and how, after adventures and misadventures, they all graduate with a bang. The stories of the youngsters make absolutely no sense— one smart, tough girl gets suckered into making porn movies against her will, and one homosexual feels like a lonely pariah, whereas the school must teem with his likes—but the early sequences of more or less desperate, wryly comic auditions carry some conviction (though they are unduly gimmicked up) and a good deal of energy, which is the film’s chief virtue.

The trouble even here is that the audition as an objet trouvé of story-telling has lately been overexploited: we’ve had A Chorus Line on stage and its cinematic derivative, All That Jazz. Yet Fame owes even more to Milos Forman’s treatments of the theme: first in his Czech student film, Competition, then in his American reworking and expansion of it, Taking Off. There exist, it appears, subjects that film cannot use more than sparingly without making them look repetitious, derivative, all but plagiarized. Still, the comic vitality of its initial sequences makes Fame viewable in a season of famine.