Review: Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy on Sony BMG DVD

Rude Boy belongs in every Clash aficionado’s collection.

Rude BoyFilmed in 1978 and released the following year, Rude Boy captures the Clash and its fanbase right before the band shifted gears away from their punk background and released London Calling, their cross-genre masterpiece. Spliced between the 17 (!) full-length performances is the lolling narrative of Ray (Ray Gange), a dole-cashing, sex-shop employed yob who serves as the band’s roadie during a brief jaunt through Scotland. Ray’s story is the stuff of an Afterschool Special, metonymic of Britain’s youth falling prey to alcoholism and dangerous right-wing ideology, and is filmed in a minimalist, yawn-inducing verité style. The “Just Play The Clash” special feature, which cuts out the dramatic scenes and just shows the concert footage, is a welcome one.

While it’s no artistic tour-de-force, Rude Boy makes good some two decades later as an insightful depiction of punk’s collapse. Unlike Derek Jarman’s overly romantic though admittedly inventive Jubilee, which gleefully celebrates punk’s hedonism to the point of tedium, Rude Boy tackles the movement’s innate hypocrisy. Ray sports a Bob Marley T-shirt and cruises London’s streets to the tune of Junior Marvin’s “Police And Thieves,” but spouts crude support for the National Front party, an extreme right-wing group that is depicted early in the film at a hateful rally (“You’re nothing but filth, scum, and not fit to be on this earth…We don’t even want you to walk our streets!”). Ray drunkenly humiliates himself onstage at the Clash’s explosive performance at Rock Against Racism’s Anti-Nazi League Carnival and lamely engages in a political argument with Joe Strummer in a pub that is little more than a plea for employment.

Seen today, the film may seem comical in its representation of an attention-starved naïf, but for a film shot in 1978, it’s a very sharp critique of a self-congratulating subculture that celebrated inarticulateness and clad itself in swastikas. The Clash were one of the first, and certainly the loudest, voices to contradict punk’s nihilistic “No Future”-agenda, and that their version of a cash-in road movie a la The Kids Are Alright addresses these concerns is careful, sharp, and defiant—just like their records.

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The performances are all top-notch, even the often-bemoaned version of “White Riot” sung by Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey (a Strummer-led, more hectic version of the song is included as an extra on the DVD). On the interview tracks, Mingay mentions that he’d shot concert films before, but you could’ve fooled me. During the musical numbers, the cinematography feels like someone figuring out his skills as he goes along: long takes bridged erratically by short takes, few establishing shots, shaky hand-held close-ups, all of which is clearly the result of a struggle to capture the band’s raucousness and unpredictability. Perhaps not the depiction the Clash deserved, Rude Boy’s sense of inexperience—though perhaps affected—is a fitting representation of the band right before their peak.

Image/Sound

Dated, with the occasional scratch or cigarette burn, but the transfer and restoration is an obvious improvement over the VHS and bootleg versions previously available; better-than-decent representation of the Clash during their heyday makes for a pretty captivating viewing. The sound is best during the live performances, thankfully, with the dialogue during the dramatic scenes a little difficult to decipher.

Extras

The interviews are overlong, not unlike the film itself, but illuminating and erudite. It’s no surprise to hear the filmmakers admitting their uncertainty about beginning the project, or Gange noting that he probably wouldn’t have used his real name for a fictional character if asked to do the film again, but like Rude Boy itself, the interviews are worth a peek. The bonus scenes are throwaways from a film that is itself made up largely of throwaway scenes; most of my future viewings of Rude Boy will engage the “Just Play The Clash” feature.

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Overall

For those of us who weren’t there, this is as close as we’ll get. What the film and the DVD’s extras lack in quality they make up for in quantity. Rude Boy belongs in every Clash aficionado’s collection.

Score: 
 Cast: Ray Gange, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Nicky Headon  Director: Jack Hazan, David Mingay  Screenwriter: David Mingay, Ray Gange, Jack Hazan  Distributor: Sony BMG  Running Time: 127 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1980  Release Date: August 1, 2006  Buy: Video

Jimmy Newlin

James Newlin received his PhD in English from the University of Florida. His research is primarily concerned with the reception of Shakespeare in intellectual history, though he has also published articles on film and contemporary literature.

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