Alan Parker, director of Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning, dies at 76
Alan Parker, a British director whose wildly eclectic films included a gangster musical with child actors (“Bugsy Malone”), a grim account of prison life (“Midnight Express”), a civil rights drama set in the 1960s (“Mississippi Burning”) and an upbeat tale of Dublin teenagers starting a soul band (“The Commitments”), died July 31 in London. He was 76.
The British Film Institute announced his death, citing an unspecified illness.
Mr. Parker began his career in advertising, producing print ads and television commercials that formed his apprenticeship as a director. He made 14 feature films in his career, seldom venturing down the same cinematic path twice.
He received two Oscar nominations for best director, first for 1978’s “Midnight Express” about an American serving a prison sentence in Turkey, then 10 years later for “Mississippi Burning,” about an FBI investigation of the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. (He lost to Michael Cimino, director of “The Deer Hunter” at the 1979 Oscars and to Barry Levinson in 1989 for “Rain Man” — a job Mr. Parker had turned down.)
Advertisement
Along with dark dramas about social issues, Mr. Parker made a wide range of other films, including “Bugsy Malone” (1976), a lighthearted romp with an all-child cast portraying 1920s mobsters, featuring a 12-year-old Jodie Foster as a satin-gowned nightclub chanteuse; “Fame,” a 1980 movie musical about students at a New York performing arts high school; “Shoot the Moon,” a 1982 domestic drama about a disintegrating marriage, with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton; “Pink Floyd: The Wall,” a 1982 dramatization of a concept album by the rock group Pink Floyd; and “Evita,” a large-scale 1996 production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, starring Madonna as Eva “Evita” Perón, the wife of dictatorial Argentine leader Juan Perón.
“I just think,” Mr. Parker told the New York Times in 1982, “that it would be incredibly boring to do the same kind of subject 20 times, or even to make films in the same place, when you’ve got the whole world to explore. Right from the beginning, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed.”
His films were often described, in one way or another, as “powerful but flawed.” They often received mixed reviews, but they often rose in critical esteem over time.
Advertisement
Reviewers were baffled by Mr. Parker’s feature debut, “Bugsy Malone,” which included costumed children in sophisticated dance numbers and in scenes where they were drinking, driving pedal-powered cars and having gangland shootouts — with marshmallows and cream pies as ammunition.
Critic John Simon seethed in New York magazine that the film was “an indecency, an outrage. ... Wholesome youngsters have been duped into acting like adults — stupid, brutal, criminal adults, at that.”
(Mr. Parker said he got the idea for the film from his 9-year-old son.)
With “Midnight Express,” Mr. Parker moved to an entirely different world, a brutal Turkish prison where a young American, played by Brad Davis, was serving a long sentence for attempting to smuggle hashish. The film, with a screenplay by Oliver Stone, depicted the prisoner’s harsh ordeal in unsparing terms but created a backlash for showing Turkey in an unflattering light.
Advertisement
“One couldn’t help feeling that there was something profoundly, gratuitously nasty about its sensationalism,” Times critic Vincent Canby wrote.
Yet in 1984, when Mr. Parker released “Birdy,” about two psychically wounded Vietnam War veterans, Canby found the film “so good and intelligent and moving” that it might require an “upward reevaluation of all the work” by the “consistently idiosyncratic, not conventionally likable” Mr. Parker.
In 1987, Mr. Parker continued with his unconventional and controversial approach to filmmaking with “Angel Heart,” a dark private-eye film starring Mickey Rourke and Robert DeNiro. The film originally carried an adults-only X rating for a graphic sex scene between Rourke and the actress Lisa Bonet, which Mr. Parker reluctantly edited to receive a more commercially viable R rating.
Advertisement
“Mississippi Burning” was one of the most popular films of 1988, but it was denounced by some for taking liberties with history and for focusing on two White FBI agents, played by Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman, rather than on Black civil rights activists.
Mr. Parker defended his vision — “It’s fiction in the same way that ‘Platoon’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ are fictions of the Vietnam War” — while maintaining that the film’s deeper truth was its depiction of the United States’ enduring struggle with racial injustice.
“I think all films in a way are manipulative,” he told The Washington Post in 1988. “You have a point of view, you know what you want to say. It’s my responsibility — or my duty — to make that as powerful as possible. ...
“It’s about the racism that’s within all of us. And it’s around now.”
Advertisement
Alan William Parker was born Feb. 14, 1944, in London. His mother was a dressmaker, his father a painter for London’s electricity company.
Share this articleShareAt 18, Mr. Parker began working in the mail room of a London advertising agency and soon became a copy writer.
“The great thing about advertising in Britain at that time, and now,” he told The Post, “is that it’s very egalitarian. Advertising didn’t care where you came from.”
His first experience with filmmaking came by directing commercials.
“English television commercials were awful, so we used to do a lot of experimenting in the basement of the agency,” he told the Times in 1982. “The art director did the lighting, somebody else ran the tape machine, somebody else ran the camera. I was the only one who couldn’t do anything. So I had to say, ‘Action!’ which any idiot can do. Then I realized I could also say, ‘Cut!’ And one day I shouted at an actor, ‘No, no, that’s not what’s wanted!’ and everybody looked at me, and suddenly I was a director.”
Advertisement
Mr. Parker’s commercials were hugely successful, and he began to experiment with short films. He was the first of several prominent directors, including Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne, to emerge from the British advertising world.
On a film set, Mr. Parker could be a not-so-benevolent dictator, rewriting scripts and asking his cast to work through the night.
“I’m not difficult for ego reasons or for desire of awards — but for the work,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I’m not making movies for 14 intellectuals at the Cinematheque in Paris. I’m making films that have to find a wide audience.”
Mr. Parker often said his favorite film was “The Commitments,” an adaptation of a Roddy Doyle novel about young Dubliners in love with 1960s soul music. He shot the film on location, auditioning more than 1,500 people for the 10 leading roles; most of the prominent parts went to amateurs.
Advertisement
“The Commitments” has become a cult favorite for its portrayal of music as one of the few creative outlets for poor people, whether African Americans in the South or teens from the Dublin slums.
The most difficult film Mr. Parker worked on was “Evita,” which required a number of meetings with Argentina’s president at the time, Carlos Menem. When Menem refused to allow the crew to film at the country’s presidential palace, Mr. Parker invited Madonna to meetings with Menem to seal the deal. When Madonna sang “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from the palace balcony, 4,000 Argentine extras watched from below.
Making “Evita,” Mr. Parker later said, was “like riding bareback on a crazed elephant strapped to a jet engine, whilst Madonna combs your hair with a razor blade.”
His first marriage, to Annie Inglis, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife since 2001, the producer Lisa Moran-Parker; four children from his first marriage; a son from his second marriage; and seven grandchildren.
Advertisement
Among Mr. Parker’s other films were “Come See the Paradise” (1990), set in part in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II; “Angela’s Ashes” (1999), based on Frank McCourt’s autobiography about his impoverished childhood in Ireland; and his final film, “The Life of David Gale” (2003), starring Kevin Spacey as an opponent of capital punishment who finds himself in prison, sentenced to death.
Mr. Parker served as chairman of the British Film Institute and was the first chairman of the U.K. Film Council, which provided funding to the British film industry. He was knighted in 2002. He also published several works of fiction and volumes of cartoons.
He said he rejected several opportunities to direct blockbuster films that would have earned him a fortune.
“I seem to always go against the grain,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1991, citing a scene in “Midnight Express,” in which the American held captive in the Turkish prison walks in the opposite direction of other inmates in the exercise yard.
“That’s a lot like me,” Mr. Parker said. “I’ve spent my whole life walking in the opposite direction of everybody else.”
Read more Washington Post obituaries
John Saxon, rugged screen veteran who starred in ‘Enter the Dragon,’ dies at 83
Peter Green, 1960s guitar hero and co-founder of Fleetwood Mac, dies at 73
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmwr8ClZqiamanCor7InqpomZyWu268wKuinqpdmbazscKtpqtln5t6rrXDp6CgoKRisrm80Z6qrGWRo7FuucisqqKro569sbWMm6yrppmjtG6wyJ6qZpmkYoR3e5FpaWlnYG18cX2OnmtumWKaf6R5w21naWVhZrKieZecbG5lZmayeLLAbpxxapGXrLTAzquwZ6Ckork%3D