Gimme Shelter – Blood and Porridge

© Taplin-Perry-Scorsese Productions / Warner Bros

I ended my previous post by promising I’d give a list of my favourite movie scenes wherein songs by the Rolling Stones are employed to memorable effect. Here it is.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1968) in Mean Streets (1973)

Wow. Martin Scorsese really likes the Rolling Stones. Not only has he made a concert movie about them, 2008’s Shine a Light, but he’s used their music in umpteen films: Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), The Departed (2006) and the one that first put him on the map, 1973’s Mean Streets. Even today, more than 50 years later, the scene in Mean Streets where a young Robert De Niro comes swaggering through a bar, in slow motion, towards a pensive Harvey Keitel, while Mick Jagger hollers in the background about being “born in a cross-fire hurricane”, is a great synthesis of rock ‘n’ roll music and rock ‘n’ roll cinema. Indeed, Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a fitting accompaniment for the arrival in popular consciousness of De Niro, who’d spend the rest of the 20^th century showing Hollywood how to do proper acting. The 21^st century, featuring such efforts as The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), Little Fockers (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011) and Dirty Grandpa (2016)… Okay, not so much.

Satisfaction (1965) in Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Stones’ early, primordial and still potent stomper Satisfaction gets a brief but memorable airing in Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque Vietnam War masterpiece, playing on the radio while Captain Martin Sheen and his not-exactly-fighting-fit crew go cruising up the Nùng River in search of Marlon Brando. Cue some funky on-deck dance moves by a frighteningly young-looking Laurence Fishburne and some funny / cringeworthy water-skiing moves by Sam Bottoms that knock various Vietnamese people out of their fishing boats.

© Omni Zoetrope / United Artists

Sympathy for the Devil (1968) in Alien Nation (1988) and in Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Graham Baker’s sci-fi / cop movie Alien Nation isn’t very good. Its premise of an alien community getting stranded on earth and having to integrate as best as they can with the curmudgeonly human natives was handled much better in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009). But I do like a woozy, hypnotic scene in it where alien-loathing cop James Caan enters a sleazy alien bar while a lady-alien performs an erotic dance to the strains of Sympathy for the Devil. Not the original Stones song, but a correspondingly woozy, hypnotic cover-version of it by the great Jane’s Addiction. I can’t find a film-clip of the scene, but here’s the Jane’s Addiction cover.

Meanwhile, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire ends with Sympathy for the Devil on the soundtrack. Again, this isn’t the Rolling Stones version but a cover, this time by Guns n’ Roses. It’s every bit as ramshackle, shonky and (for me) enjoyable as the other covers Guns n’ Roses have done, for example, of Wings’ Live and Let Die (1973) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973). Sympathy for the Devil kicks in when the vampire Lestat – Tom Cruise in one of his rare interesting roles – pops up to claim Christian Slater as his new vampirical companion for eternity.

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? (1971) in Casino (1995)

While Martin Scorsese serenades Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel with Jumpin’ Jack Flash in Mean Streets, he employs the Stones song Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? for another of his regulars, Joe Pesci, in Casino. Remarkably, Scorsese plays all seven minutes of the Santana-esque Can’t You… as an accompaniment to a lengthy sequence showing how Pesci’s Casino character Nicky Santoro gets established in Las Vegas. Predictably, the sequence has Pesci doing what Pesci usually does in Scorsese movies: being a psychotic shit, barking orders at hoodlum sidekicks twice his size, eating in restaurants, ingratiating himself with fellow Mafiosi, being a psychotic shit, cursing and swearing, getting a blow-job, being a psychotic shit, talking about food, knocking off jewellery stores, acting the loving family man with his non-criminal relatives… and being a psychotic shit.

© Légende Entreprises / Universal Pictures

Ruby Tuesday (1967) in Children of Men (2006)

Wistful Stones ballad Ruby Tuesday features briefly on the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuarón’s gruellingly pessimistic science-fiction thriller Children of Men. It’s another cover, sung by Franco Battiato. We hear it during one of the movie’s calmer moments when Theo (Clive Owen) is visiting his old mate Jasper (Michael Caine), whose home provides a small pocket of sanity amid the unfolding dystopian grimness. Amusingly, Caine, well known in real life for being a right-wing old grump with an aversion to paying tax, here plays an elderly anarcho-hippy with a fondness for smoking exceptionally strong pot.

Gimme Shelter (1969) in The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese loves the Rolling Stones and he loves their apocalyptic number Gimme Shelter in particular. By my count he’s used it in three movies: Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed. It’s best deployed at the beginning of The Departed, rumbling in the background while gangland thug Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) expounds his philosophy. “I don’t want to be a part of my environment,” he intones, imbuing his words with that leery, languid menace that only Nicholson is capable of. “I want my environment to be a part of me.” Strangely, in Scorsese’s Shine a Light two years later, Gimme Shelter was one of the songs the Stones didn’t perform on stage. Marty missed a trick there.

© Plan B Entertainment / Warner Bros

Street Fighting Man (1968) in Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

Director Wes Anderson also sticks Rolling Stones into his movies, but so far I haven’t mentioned him because I think most of his work is smug, pretentious and annoying. For example, Play with Fire (1965) figures prominently in 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, an Anderson movie so twee I find it the cinematic equivalent of being force-fed with chocolate-cake mix. However, I like the scene in his stop-motion-animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox where, to the sound of the rabblerousing Stones anthem Street Fighting Man, Farmers Bean, Boggis and Bunce use three diggers to tear up the den of the titular Mr Fox; forcing the den’s inhabitants to frantically dig an escape-route. Yes, they really ‘dig’ that song. Sorry.

And finally… Out of Time (1968) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

I’m not the biggest fan of the Stones song Out of Time – Jagger’s vocals get a bit too caterwauling for my liking – but it sees good satirical use in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s paean to the American movie-making capital in the late 1960s, a fascinating period when traditional notions about what made a good film were rapidly being undermined by an uppity younger generation. Played when Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), his new Italian spouse Francesca Capucci (Lorenza Izzo) and sidekick Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) return from Italy, where Rick has been making spaghetti westerns and action thrillers with the likes of Sergio Corbucci and Antonio Margheriti, Out of Time gives an one-the-nose summation of DiCaprio’s sad-sack character – an actor a bit too old, un-hip and uncomprehending of the changing world around him to get the leading roles he once did, now doomed to playing villains in second-rate TV shows.

© Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Releasing

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Bros.

Oh God. I’ve just discovered that the soundtrack of Melania (2026), the vanity-documentary about Melania Trump, financed by Jeff Bezos and directed by Brett Ratner – a man accused of sexual assault by six women (allegations Ratner has always denied) – contains a song I just might identify as my favourite one of all time. That is Gimme Shelter, the opening track on the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed. Yes, a tune that means so much to me features in a movie pithily described by Mikey Smith, deputy political editor at the Daily Mirror, as ‘a bad film made by bad people about bad people’, and about which Variety suggested if they showed it on an airplane ‘people would still walk out’. I feel besmirched.

It’s quite possible, though, that the Trumps and Brett Ratner bunged Gimme Shelter onto the soundtrack without actually listening to the words. Supposedly played as an accompaniment to Melania’s preparations for her husband’s inauguration as 47^th President of the USA, which one year later would lead to masked, paramilitary-style thugs abducting young children from their homes and schools and executing peaceful protesters on the street, the song has such lyrics as “Rape, murder / It’s just a shot away” and “War, children / It’s just a shot away.” Very apt, when you think about it.

Anyway, this has at least got me thinking about a different, and nicer, Rolling Stones-related topic – the band and movies. After all, over the years, there have been plenty of Beatles films: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), Yellow Submarine (1968), Let It Be (1970), I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), The Birth of the Beatles (1979), Give my Regards to Broad Street (1984), The Hours and Times (1991), Backbeat (1994), Two of Us (2000), The Beatles: Get Back (2021) (which is actually a miniseries, but Peter Jackson made it, so it feels like a movie to me) and Sam Mendes’s forthcoming project, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event (2027). But what about the Rolling Stones? What contribution to cinema has been made by the Liverpudlian mop-tops’ less wholesome London rivals?

On the face of it, there isn’t a lot. That is, if you don’t count the various documentaries made about them like Charlie is my Darling (1966), Jean Luc Godard’s oddball Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Gimme Shelter (1970), a chronicle of their 1969 American tour that ended bloodily with Hells Angels-perpetrated carnage at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival. And if you don’t count their many concert movies like The Stones in the Park (1969), Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), Julien Temple’s The Stones at the Max (1991) (the first feature-length movie to be filmed in IMAX – because what you really want to see is a 100-feet-tall close-up of Keith Richards’ face, right?), The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1996) (plug your ears for the bit with Yoko Ono) and the Martin Scorsese-directed Shine a Light (2008), which provided the gruesome spectacle of a leathery 60-something Jagger duetting with 20-something pop-moppet Christina Aguilera and prowling around her like a randy velociraptor.

There’s been little effort to film key events in the history of the Rolling Stones. Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is the little-known Stoned (2005), about the possible circumstances of Brian Jones’s death. And as for movies featuring Stones-members as actors, well, there’s just a couple of items with Mick Jagger – epics such as Ned Kelly (1970) and Freejack (1992). Ouch.

Actually, you could make a case for the Pirates of the Caribbean series being Rolling Stones films as their star Johnny Depp famously based the voice, mannerisms and swagger of his Captain Jack Sparrow character on Keith Richards. I thought Depp-playing-Keith-playing-a-pirate was a rib-tickling gimmick that elevated the first Pirates of the Caribbean instalment, back in 2003, from being a middling film to being an entertaining one. Alas, the sequels to it became ever-more convoluted, repetitious and tedious and, by the time of the third in the franchise, At World’s End (2007), when the filmmakers had the bright idea of bringing in the real Keith Richards to cameo as Captain Jack’s pirate dad, the idea had lost its novelty value.

Arguably, the most Rolling Stones-esque film of all is Performance (1968), the psychedelically weird crime-rock movie co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg. Its cast includes Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, then lover of Keith Richards. The story of an on-the-run gangster (James Fox) who holes up in a mansion belonging to a burnt-out rock star (Jagger) and gets involved in some mind-bendingly druggy goings-on, the film neatly captures the dark, dangerous aura that was popularly associated with the Stones at the time. Neither did it do the film’s scary reputation any harm that afterwards Fox underwent a ‘crisis’, dropped out of acting for the next decade-and-a-half and became an evangelical Christian. As if the poor man hadn’t suffered enough, during the late 2010s, his son Laurence came out of the closet as a whinging, entitled, far-right-wing rentagob.

Keith Richards had and still has a deep-rooted aversion to Performance, thanks to the sexual shenanigans that Pallenberg supposedly got up to with Jagger during filming. He believed these shenanigans were orchestrated by Donald Cammell, presumably as a way of getting Pallenberg and Jagger further ‘in character’. In his autobiography Life (2020) – which was written with the help of a journalist also, confusingly, called James Fox – Richards describes Cammell as “the most destructive little turd I have ever met.”

Because of Richards’ loathing of Performance, one Jagger-Richards song that’s never been played at Rolling Stones gigs and is unlikely to ever be played at future ones is Memo from Turner (1968), which soundtracks a particularly strange sequence at the movie’s climax when everyone is out of their faces, the gangsters start stripping off and Jagger dances amid veering lights. On the Performance recording of the song, Jagger is the only Stone involved, doing vocal duties, while Ry Cooder plays slide-guitar (wonderfully) and Randy Newman plays piano. It’s a shame that we’ll never hear a live Stones version of it because it’s a belter. I’m also partial to this cover of it by forgotten 1980s retro-rockers Diesel Park West.

Anyway, there’s one thing you can say about the Rolling Stones and celluloid. In the right film, blasting over the soundtrack at the right moment, a Stones song can help create a splendid musical, visual and dramatic alchemy, turning a good cinematic scene into one that’s truly awesome. In Part 2 of this post, I’ll list my favourite uses of Rolling Stones songs in the movies. Stay tuned…

Tag: Gimme Shelter

Cinematically stoned (Part 2)

Cinematically stoned (Part 1)