Malcolm Scrawdyke, a fascist political figure, plots revenge against the college that expelled him by forming the Party of Dynamic Erection, a right-wing political movement, with three acolytes.
Like many of Apple's film and recording projects, production on Little Malcolm was then jeopardised by lawsuits pertaining to Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr's severing of ties with manager Allen Klein. Speaking in 2011, Cooper said that Harrison "fought for a very long time to extract Little Malcolm from the official receivers", adding that its entry in the Berlin festival was only possible because the festival was an artistic forum and not finance-related.
The film was shot primarily in Lancashire, in the north of England, during February and March 1973.
Soundtrack
Harrison supplied incidental music for the soundtrack and, after being introduced to the duo Splinter by their manager Mal Evans, produced their song "Lonely Man" for inclusion in a pivotal scene. The soundtrack also featured the band Harpoon singing "Not With You".
Release
Once the Beatles' partnership had been formally dissolved, in January 1975, the film received a brief run in London's West End. In February 1983, Harrison donated his personal copy of Little Malcolm to a New York-based company for screening at a local film festival.
The performances... are a real pleasure: John Hurt as the diminutive Führer, all hair and bluster masking a shy gazelle; John McEnery, angular and simmering with suppressed violence as the only real potential terrorist in the group; Raymond Platt as the round-eyed, chubby-faced archetype of the hoi polloi; and above all, David Warner as the disaster area Nipple.
Hurt, producers Harrison and Gavrik Losey, screenwriter Derek Woodward and director Stuart Cooper were compelled to put together this film version, shot in chilly Oldham in a disused gasworks... with few concessions to realism. Speeches run on like demented party pieces, with Hurt fulminating non-stop and Warner spinning out a bizarre fantasy of an encounter in which Nipple – trousers tucked into socks that serve as bicycle clips, hood always up in a manner once seen as silly rather than threatening – presents himself as an erotic dynamo.
Variety wrote called it "a frequently hilarious, generally thought-provoking and sobering, beautifully acted, but a trifle overlong and repetitious film of uncertain destination, being a bit too special for general audiences and – in some passages – too rough for primetime vidspectators."
↑Pop Music in British Cinema: A Chronicle - Page 77 Kevin Donnelly - 2002 Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1974 Stuart Cooper) Subafilms/Apple Films. P - Gavrik Losey. Exec P - George Harrison. M - Stanley Myers. Song - Harpoon - Not With You. Students set up a terrorist group, semi-comedy.
