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| Images courtesy of Fun City Editions |
A year before the late producer Dodi Fayed (who would decades
later perish by Princess Diana’s side in a fatal paparazzi car crash) and his
production company Allie Stars funded the Academy Award winner Chariots of
Fire, his family owned Egyptian production company’s first feature film
breakout into the industry came in the form of Poltergeist II: The Other
Side and What’s Love Got to Do with It director Brian Gibson’s 1980
British punk-rock drama Breaking Glass.
A film which would later echo the rise-and-fall trajectory chronicled in
the Irish rock drama The Commitments (also the superior film), its best
remembered for being a star vehicle for Hazel O’Connor as the film’s heroine
who also wrote and performed the songs in the film, two of which would reach
the UK Top Ten charts.
A lower-budgeted, gritty rock drama somewhere between the British
punk vibes of Sid & Nancy and the sometimes-implausible melodrama of
Lady Sings the Blues, the UK import was slightly shortened for the North
American release distributed by Paramount Pictures. For posterity, new boutique label Fun City
Editions have taken it upon themselves to release the original uncut British
release version in the US for the first time with the alterations included in
the bonus features and finally presents Outland cinematographer Stephen
Goldblatt’s scope 2.35:1 widescreen vistas intact on home video.
Music industry street hustler and record pusher Danny (Phil
Daniels) scours the pubs and clubs of London looking for a way into the
industry via any means possible. Turned
away at every door he spots a young blonde-haired punk girl named Kate (Hazel O’Connor)
who proves to be a hidden talent waiting to be discovered and promoted. Taking her under his wing, they eventually
find their first partner in the form of saxophonist Ken (Jonathan Pryce) before
eventually landing a guitarist and bassist with Tony (Mark Wingett) and Dave (Gary
Tibbs) and lastly a troubled drummer named Mick (Peter-Hugo Daly) whom Kate
formerly had romantic relations with.
At first their bookings aren’t very good, playing in a
sleazy pub dominated by Neo-Nazi skinheads and fascist regalia though that
contrast to Kate’s rebellious lyrics somehow helps the singer find her stage persona. Following a fight and the pub’s refusal to
pay the band, for awhile every show they play throughout England is accosted by
police authorities. Garnering a record
contract, eventually Kate and her manager Danny develop feelings for one
another as her band, now entitled Breaking Glass, begins touring across
the country and gaining momentum. During
one particularly riotous concert where Neo-Nazis, Irish and Black residents
clash together, Kate taunts the crowd inciting a fatality before her very eyes,
echoing the infamous Altamont Free Concert from 1969 which claimed the lives of
four people.
Their ascension is further complicated by the arrival of renowned
producer Bob Woods (Jon Finch) who begins initiating a takeover of the band as
well as wooing its lead singer away from her manager/lover Danny and further
threatens to split up the band. As they
reach Platinum Record status, the pressures from all sides including veteran
bandmates dropping like flies with further emphasis on Kate as the center of
attention including but not limited to changing the band’s musical style
completely in a sellout move, Kate soon finds herself on the verge of a nervous
breakdown.
Dubbed the ‘Princess of Punk’ in the poster taglines in a
film which many regarded as the United Kingdom’s answer to Mark Rydell’s career
launching pad for Bette Midler with The Rose from 1979, Breaking
Glass was writer-director Brian Gibson’s debut feature as a director years
before Poltergeist II: The Other Side.
Though usually working in television, Gibson’s gritty panoramic snapshot
of 1980s England and the rising punk rock scene as well as the evolution of the
scene itself reflected in the band’s foray into electronica shows he definitely
had an eye for big screen musical melodrama.
From the producers of Alan Clarke’s Scum, it offers an equally
dark and unflattering portrait of Great Britain rife with violence and urban
decay as that film did.
Performance-wise, Hazel O’Connor is a natural English punk
at heart and much like The Rose the performer belts out her own vocals
and you can see and feel it on her face with her angry eyes and fangs. As she starts drifting away from her roots
towards a neon-futuristic Tron costume replete with robot dance moves
and even more elaborate outlandish makeup, we sense her appearances and sound
are changing and not necessarily true to the fans that helped shape her into
who she became.
Phil Daniels from Quadrophenia is excellent as the
young hustler/manager who helps the band’s rise to prominence who watches his musical
baby forcibly wrestled away from him by more powerful forces in the cutthroat
world of the music industry. Of course
the film’s very best actor is the ever phenomenal and chameleonic Jonathan Pryce
who convincingly conveys the image of a strung-out saxophonist playing until
his next high. Also there’s a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from the great Michael Kitchen and BBC’s The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Zaphod Beeblebrox actor Mark Wing-Davey.
Released theatrically in 1980 through Paramount Pictures and
GTO Films, the newly digitally restored Fun City Editions 2.35:1 scope transfer
on the Blu-ray disc looks beautiful with rich luminosity and gloss. Outdoor sequences and nighttime scenes as
well as dingy clubs have a recurring grittiness to them contrasted with the
more overtly science-fiction disco looking elements of later scenes when our
heroine starts to lose her way. The FCE
disc includes a new video essay by Chris O’Neill, a video interview with
producer Davina Belling, audio commentary with Marc Edward Heuck as well as
reversible sleeve art and an extensive collector’s booklet replete with essays
and original promotional materials.
Though far from groundbreaking, this familiar fable of
losing one’s-self in the industry artists are drawn to like a moth to light
looks and sounds splendid with sharp editing by Ken Russell’s lifelong
collaborator Michael Bradsell whose own experience on works like The
Boyfriend helped shape his own musical vocabulary. Hazel O’Connor is the face of the movie and
functions as a bit of a forewarning about the altering transformative nature of
the music industry and how it can change an original voice into something else
entirely. The FCE disc is great and
should give viewers a faithful representation of how this offbeat little British
punk-rocker drama came across to audiences in 1980.
--Andrew Kotwicki
