a review of 龙蛇小霸王

I was born a few years after this movie came out, and I remember having a strong aversion to it as a kid whenever it would appear on TV, usually as a Sunday afternoon matinee on one of the local channels. For some reason I can't really explain, the sight of kids around my age pretending to be old-timey grownups in suits always made me extremely irritated, maybe because I was (and I guess I still am) extremely distrustful of anything that involved wearing a tie. So this was never really a part of my childhood. But I finally watched it a few weeks ago when it popped up on Criterion because why not, and I was mostly charmed by it. Mostly because the Paul Williams music hit me right in the part of my brain that appreciates the whole late-60s-to-mid-70s trend for reinterpreting the 1920/30s through a vaguely countercultural lens. And some of the kid performances (especially the kid playing Fat Sam and of course Jodie Foster) are legitimately decent! (OTOH, I'll admit to being fairly creeped out by the costuming and choreography for some of the girls in the movie, because it made me wonder exactly who was looking after these kids and keeping them safe during the production. Knowing what we know now about the 1970s film industry, I'm amazed/relieved/apprehensive we haven't heard any real horror stories from the kid actors who worked on this one.)