| | | | Pink Floyd: The Wall
(1982) |
n 1981, MGM released "Pennies From Heaven", a dark musical drama with violence, sex and rough language. Then, in 1982, another release from the house of Leo The Lion came along to make "Pennies From Heaven" seem like "Singin' In The Rain" by comparison.
Hold on to your swivel chair, because we're about to take a freaked-out ride into the mind of a musician.
We're gliding down a perfect white hallway. A maid is vacuuming. Suddenly, the screen goes black. The titles flash on-screen in a scrawl the color of a spurting artery. A lantern is lit. A man...Nay, a soldier (Laurenson) lights a cigarette.
"It was just before dawn..."
The soldier loads his gun. Many years later, listening to the same songs this soldier did, a scruffy-looking man stares ahead at the TV, his own cigarette tipped with ash. His hotel room is locked, the maid knocking away. The unlocking of the room's door is like that of an arena's doors. All of a sudden, World War II and 1982 meet in the hotel man's addled mind. This man is Pink (Geldof). He's a rock star and every night he performs is a mass for his fans. To them, he's a prophet. To himself, he's like Hitler.
"So you thought you might like to go to the show...
To feel the warmth, the confusion, the space cadet glow."
He'll have none of that. Pink is daring his audience to see his truth. For him, rock isn't religion...It's war, like the soldier before him. The shrapnel of a bunker explosion is juxtaposed with a quiet England day. A mother rests in her yard, her baby in a nearby carraige.
"Mother loves her baby...
Daddy loves you, too".
Pink, in the modern day, imagines his suite's pool colored in blood. We see that the soldier was his father. We see his mother praying. We see the first frazzled nerve exposed. Walking the playground, Little Pink (Bingham) sees kids with their fathers. He realizes he's missing a certain love, lonely as he swings. At home, eating jam and bread while reading the paper, Little Pink ascends the staircase to look at his father's war uniform.
"Kind old King George sent Mother a note."
That note certified his father's death. Little Pink dresses up in his father's uniform. In an animated sequence, a dove becomes a hawk of steel, then transforms back to float above the graves of dead soldiers. Back in Pink's past, Young Pink (McKeon) sets a bullet on a train track. It explodes as Young Pink sees hands sticking out of the train. These trains appear to be headed for a dangerous place...SCHOOL. Belittled by a teacher (Alex McAvoy) who hates his poems, staring down spankings, feeling like going through a mind grinder. Sing it with me now and let them hear you in the rafters...
"We don't need no education...
We don't need no thought control."
FLASHPOINT! School destruction...Who hasn't wanted to do this? Into the modern day again, Pink calls someone...Someone he dreams of...His wife (David).
"Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?"
His wife appears both in his youth and his modernity. Young Pink grows up and marries. It becomes almost Oedipal, as Pink wants his wife to give him the love he never got from his Mom. It doesn't happen, and they drift apart. Pink travels the world with his manager (Hoskins) while his wife goes to peace rallies and eventually seeks the warmth of a Lover (James Hazeldine). In another animated sequence, flowers cross-pollinate, eventually gaining a death-like appearance.
Death...Death becomes destruction becomes sex becomes violence becomes THE WALL. The protective cocoon of a rock star, The Wall insulates a musician from the outside world. The Wall is full of yes-men, dealers and pimps who will serve your every purpose. The Wall will prevent you from seeing who you truly are.
Glass breaks in a robbery attempt seemingly unrelated to the plot, yet it makes sense. The chaos on the outside is like the chaos on Pink's insides...bleak and disturbing as his father's death. Gears switched again, we see Pink enjoying the rocker's life. Women, cars, champagne, rocket fuel...Happy Days, or are they? A groupie (Wright) comes to Pink's room. She looks around as he watches a war movie. She wants to help him, but he's zoning. She tries arousing him, but there's no hope in sight.
All of a sudden, Pink snaps and destruction reigns again. TVs are kicked in. Tables are upturned. Food is thrown. Paintings are wrecked. Shutters are pulled off their rods. Glass breaks. Pink's hand is cut. In the aftermath, Pink floats between reality and fantasy. Floating and bleeding, he sees his wife cheating. The blurring furthers as his wife becomes an animated demon. In sudden cuts, everything we previously saw becomes the same. Sex...Death...Music...School...Riches.
"You were all just bricks in the wall."
Now Pink stands at The Wall, yearning to break free. He's trapped, though, and the end is near. As a final message to the world, he turns the wrecked room into a Pop Art suicide note. Covering his chest in shaving cream, he cuts up, then down. Bloodying his chest, he now goes for a newly installed TV. As he begins his mental death march, he punches at the remote control the same way he punched at the telphone. Neither worked...Nothing works in Pink's life.
Now, he's alternating past and present, wandering a wind-swept landscape. The bunker his father died in becomes a room full of beds. Young Pink then finds a crazed man with a book of poems. Wandering further, he finds dead soldiers. Finally, Young Pink stares at old Pink and walks away, seemingly ashamed of what he's become. Now the soldiers are returning home, yet Young Pink is still bereft of love. He foolishly looks for his father, but doesn't find him. As everybody around him sings for the soldiers, Young Pink finds a TV. We fade to the modern day. Pink's manager and crew find him and try to rescue him, but it's too late.
The occasional flash of lucidity means nothing. The end has come....Or has it? In his mind, Pink returns to the Hitler theme, and he's going full-tilt boogie with it. The swastika becomes two hammers. Black dogs on leashes are patrolling the rows. This black mass starts out as a ceremony from an acid-spewing Hell, and spirals further into the dark from there. To the cheers of the audience, people Pink disapproves of (Gays, blacks, Jews) are dragged out and beaten. The crossing of arms is a Sieg Heil for the go-go 80s, and Pink is Der Fuhrer. The violence spills into the streets. Minorities are beaten. Women are raped. The suburbs are thisclose to becoming concentration camps. Animated hammers are marching, bringing death and destruction to all who cross their path. Pink has flown off into the wild black yonder, and now is looking at his own bad self...His literal bad self.
We're now in a bathroom but we don't know whether this is reality or fantasy. A security guard washes his hands. In a stall, Pink is reading his poems. In his mind, and in animation, a trial awaits him. Simply because he wants to break free, he's put to death, but not before the parade of witnesses come along. His teacher cries against him. His wife beats him. His mother suffocates him. His manager...his groupies...Everybody he's ever touched calls for his death. In a final warp-speed montage, Pink's life replays before his eyes as the jury of his life cries out...
"TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!"
In the end, all that remains are the bricks. They are picked up by young children. May they never become rock stars.
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Oh...My...God.
First off... Yes, this is an 80s movie, although the album was released in the '70s. It came out in 1982, and what a year that was for movies. This was one of the best
This movie is graphic, unflinching, neurotic, psychotic and terrific. The combined forces of director Parker and animator Gerald Scarfe bring Pink Floyd's classic album to brutal life. If this is what rockers are really like, I'm glad that I have a lousy singing voice and I'm happy that I can't even play a kazoo. I couldn't stand the kind of pressure Pink is under in this movie. Much like 1983's "Scarface", this movie tells the tale of a man who had it all and didn't care who he stepped on to get it, and likewise, it told of a downfall that can be caused when you cut yourself off from those who love you and want to help you, even if it's only for a few hours.
I can find no fault with this movie (except for the feelings about war that are expressed, but music is a liberal's game, so I, a conservative, might as well live with it).
In a final note: Alan Parker, if you're reading this, I believe that this is your best movie of the 80s. I know it was tough for you to work on this movie, but you did a bang-up job.
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You can now correct/update any item of trivia by clicking the "Update" button next to it...
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Bob Geldof, of course, would do something in real life that a man like Pink never would. He staged Live Aid in 1985, THE charity concert of the decade... --Probably the most significant concert of all time. 
Jenny Wright, who plays the groupie who tries to help Pink, had roles in the classic 80s movies "St. Elmo's Fire" and "The Wild Life".
Joanne Whalley (the future squeeze of Val Kilmer) plays a groupie in this movie. One of her fellow band chicks is played by Nell Campbell, whom we all know and love from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Shock Treatment". One of the paramedics who tries to save Pink is played by Vincent Wong, a man occasionally referenced by Monty Python's Flying Circus (Ref.: "The Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of Monty Python And The Holy Grail"). Finally, last but most definitely NOT least, Roger Waters, one of Pink Floyd's main men, as well as this movie's screenwriter and narrator in song, plays a guest as Pink's wedding.
The poetry that young Pink was caught with during "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" is the second verse in "Money", from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". Far from being "absolute rubbish", this album stayed longer on the Billboard chart than any other album: more than 700 weeks.
Oddly enough, there's another connection to "Shock Treatment" in this movie. The choreographer of this movie, Gillian Gregory, also choreographed "Treatment".
The lyrics sung by Pink as he huddled in the bathroom stall later resurfaced in "Moment of Clarity" in Waters' solo album: "The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking" He also uses some lines which surfaced in Pink Floyd's next album, "The Final Cut". Waters originally presented the band with the concepts for both "The Wall" and "Pros and Cons" and the band decided to do "The Wall".
Roger Waters staged a live version of the album at the Berlin Wall in 1990. The participants included Bryan Adams, Paul Carrack, Tim Curry, The Band, Thomas Dolby, Cyndi Lauper, Marianne Faithfull, Albert Finney, James Galway, Jerry Hall, Ute Lemper, The Scorpions, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Sinead O'Connor.
The shot of Mother when young Pinky is asking a girl to dance reveals the "mask" on the curtains behind her.
This movie also has a connection to 1984's "Ghostbusters": here, actor Michael Ensign portrays the aggrieved hotel manager, seen in "Comfortably Numb". Ensign later went on to play the manager of the Sedgewick Hotel named 'Morris Grout' in the animated series) after this.
The war movie on the television in Pink's hotel room is the classic WWII film Dam Busters, The (1954).
Aside from his singing at the concert and reciting of lyrics in the bathroom stall after shouting "Stop!", Bob Geldof has only one line in the entire movie: "Next time, f***ers" when he trashes his hotel room.
Roger Waters took the plaque from the church of the men killed in Anzio, Italy as a keep sake, while Art Director Gerald Scarfe took the lamps from Pink's hotel room, because he thought they would look nice in his house.
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Waters originally conceived the Wall film as a starring vehicle for himself; his lackluster screen test led to the casting of, ironically, another musician with no prior acting experience, Bob Geldof.
During "The Thin Ice", Pink (Bob Geldof) can be seen floating in a swimming pool. Geldof (who is infamous for his dislike of baths) couldn't swim and instead was supported by a plastic body mould in similar manner to that used for the flying sequences in Superman (1978) (actually it's the one used in "Supergirl" (1984).
Jenny Wright wasn't told that Geldof would be throwing that bottle at her, so her reaction of ducking was totally spontaneous.
A scene for the song "Hey You" was filmed. It showed British police in riot gear facing off against a mob. Author Roger Waters asked this reel to be cut.
Director, Alan Parker, walked out on this project many times, probably due to an ego clash with Roger Waters. Waters was annoyed at Parker, who didn't like the way that he wanted to make it a cult film. Pink Floyd's next album "The Final Cut" contains the following lyrics (written by Waters): "Not now John, we've gotta get on with the film show: Hollywood waits at the end of the rainbow. Who cares what it's about, as long as the kids go? So not now John I've gotta get on with the show." Parker refers to this film as "the most expensive student film ever made."
Real skinheads were used in the neo-Nazi segment.
The scene in which Pink is calling his home from the United States and is very depressed to hear a man's voice, was made by actually placing a call to England through a random, unsuspecting AT&T operator. The conversation was recorded and played over the filmed sequence.
During the crowd devotion scenes there was going to be a shot of members of the audience's heads exploding as they wildly cheered, loving every minute of it. Waters decided that it could not be accomplished without making it comic.
In his autobiography "Is That It?", Bob Geldof tells the story of how he was first told about the project by his agent while riding in a taxi and how he didn't want to do it because he didn't like the music of Pink Floyd. Roger Waters knows this story, not because he read it in Geldof's book, but because the taxi driver was actually Roger Waters' brother.
The crowd at the fascist concert were unpaid Pink Floyd fans whom the filmmakers called on to take part in the film in an advertisement.
Bob Geldof is terrified of blood and found the razor blade scene extremely difficult to film.
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|  |  |  | | Pink Floyd: The Wall
Locations |
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The movie was filmed in London, England and Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The school segments weer filmed at The Royal Masonic School, Bushey, Hertfordshire, England U.K.
80s movie freaks will recognize this school from it's usage in "Lifeforce" and "Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life".
Royal Horticultural Society halls, Vincent Square, London SW1 - fascist rally sequence. [Thanks to David Sibson]
Can you help? Do you know any of the GREATER LONDON, UK filming locations used for Pink Floyd: The Wall? [Please send them in]
|  | | | | ![[16:9 -Widescreen Enhanced]](16_9.gif) | ![[5.1 CH SURROUND]](dd5.gif) | Trailer, Commentary, Featurette, OutTakes |
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| | | | Trailer, Commentary, Featurette, OutTakes |
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The soundtrack, more or less (see Trivia), is Pink Floyd's album "The Wall", readily available at your local music store. Orchestrations were provided by the late, great Michael Kamen.
"The Final Cut" was originally planned to be a soundtrack of the film. A single with "When the Tygers Broke Free" and "Bring the Boys Back Home" was released in the UK, stating that these songs were taken from the forthcoming album.
Song changes from album:
When the Tigers Broke Free - added
In the Flesh? - extended/re-recorded
The Thin Ice - extended/re-mixed
Another Brick in the Wall 1 - unchanged
The Happiest Days of Our Lives - re-mixed
Another Brick in the Wall 2 - re-mixed
Mother - re-recorded/lyrics changed
Goodbye Blue Sky - re-mixed
Empty Spaces - re-recorded/lyrics changed to match the original album sleeve
What Shall We Do Now? - added
Young Lust - unchanged
One of My Turns - unchanged
Don't Leave Me Now - changed
Another Brick in the Wall 3- re-recorded
Goodbye Cruel World - unchanged
Hey You - not included
Nobody Home - unchanged
Is There Anybody Out There? - unchanged
Vera - unchanged
Bring the Boys Back Home - extended
Comfortably Numb - unchanged
The Show Must Go On - not included
In the Flesh - re-recorded
Run Like Hell - shortened
Waiting for the Worms - shortened
Stop - re-recorded
The Trial - unchanged
Outside the Wall - re-recorded
The music heard playing during the opening credits is "The Little Boy that Santa Forgot" performed by Vera Lynn. Notably, the song is about a fatherless boy. Featured on the album, the song "Vera" is referring to another classic by Vera Lynn called "We'll meet again." Its lyrics include: "We'll meet again, / Don't know where, Don't know when, / But I know / We'll meet again / Some sunny day."
People who helped on the soundtrack included jazz artist Lee Ritenour and, oddly enough, Toni Tenille of The Captain and Tenille.
The film was originally to have included live footage of five performances of Pink Floyd in concert at London's Earl's Court, however none of the resulting footage was deemed suitable.
The Pink Floyd song performed by Pink in the movie ("In The Flesh?") was actually sung by Bob Geldof. This was done to the dismay of Roger Waters, who felt Geldof's voice was too distinctly Irish.
The famous teenage anthem "We don't need no education" chorus from the title song was performed by pupils from the 1979 fourth form (13 to 14 year-olds) music class at Islington Green School in London. They apparently secretly recorded the vocals after their teacher was approached by the band's management. Recently, the 23 ex-pupils have sued for "overdue session musician royalties", taking advantage of a new Copyright law from 1997 to claim a percentage of the money earned by the music over the years!
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| |  | | Bob Geldof stars |
 | | Is this what it's all about? |
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Year:
| 1982 | Studio:
| Metro Goldwyn Mayer | Director:
| Alan Parker | Starring:
| Bob Geldof,
Christine Hargreaves, James Laurenson, Eleanor David, Kevin McKeon,
Bob Hoskins, David Bingham, Jenny Wright | | - | - | Genre:
| Dance / Musical | | | | + | Stem to stern, in every respect, the movie is strong as an ox. | - | Unless you count the fact that we never find the answer to the question, "How can you have your pudding if you don't eat your meat?", this movie is flawless |
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