Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982)

Rock Opera based on the titular album by the titular group. Pink Floyd - The Wall is a slightly abstract, metaphorical film, which is best remembered, as is the album, for the song Another Brick in the Wall and its imagery of a stiflingly conforming English boys school come meat processing plant. There is a lot going on in The Wall but what I want to focus on is what I take to be its primary through line and theme, which I will call 'rage at the loss of the father'. Early in the film we see the father of the character "Pink" (played as grown man by Bob Geldorf) in a surprisingly well budgeted sequence fighting in the Battle of Anzio in Italy in 1944. Pink's father would die there and his resulting absence would be a continuing source of pain for Pink, a loss he would feel deeply, occurring as it did when he just a little past being a toddler.

There is a post war scene, in England, where a young Pink is in a park watching children play, he spies one young child playing with his fathers and watches, follows them. In a moment when the father is distracted Pink grabs hold of the mans hand, in desperate child logic trying to lay claim to 'a father'. The man is confused and shoes him away, going back to concentrating on his own son. Latter in life Pink spends a lot of time brooding and watching old World War II films on TV, later his musical persona embraces a fascist esthetic (ironic given that fascists killed his father), as he increasingly rages and melts down. It was a very moving, very powerful motif that I was not expecting to find in this film. The rest of the movie did not work as well for me, its not really my thing, but it was usually interesting. No real stars to speak of in this, but a youngish Bob Hoskins plays Pink's sleazy manager. ***