Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg (2023)

Fascinating Documentary with some great home-movie footage & interviews with Anita's kids with Keith - Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg review by PV

This is a watchable documentary though it could have done with dates or years put on the screen, to give it more structure.

Home movie footage is wonderful. I especially liked the interviews with Anita's children Marlon Richards and also Angela Richards, who lived with Keith's mother in a small flat in Dartford and went to state schools - her dad gave her a stables worth millions to run. Lucky her! A shame there is no interview available with Keith's very down-to-earth working class mu, Dot, though.

it really does help to be a rich pop star when you have a bad drugs or alcohol habit - ordinary people lose their homes and end up on the streets, not in expensive rehab facilities as Anita Pallenberg did.

The Stones were in a way lucky, not only as they could seemingly avoid the law and live lives of ease in beautiful places - France,. Switzerland etc. However, at the end of the 60s they were in effect broke. Only after that did they rake in millions, and still do.

I have to say I find posh totty Anita Pallenberg - who could swan off to New York on a parental allowance no doubt after flunking her expensive private education and leaving school - a bit tiresome. A hanger-on like so many other women associated with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles too.

I do not buy the 'muse' theory. It was the band members who had talent, not their latest girlfriends who were almost all rich upper class types attracted by the famous rich pop stars they would not have looked at twice back on their home streets of Dartford and Liverpool.

Watch with one of the several documentaries on Brian Jones who was seemingly brought down by binge drinking of spirits which hospitalised him several times before his untimely death.

4 stars