Rock 'n' Roll Movies

David Sterritt

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813583235
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Rock ‘n’ Roll Movies presents an eclectic look at the many manifestations of rock in motion pictures, from teen-oriented B-movies to Hollywood blockbusters to avant-garde meditations to reverent biopics to animated shorts to performance documentaries. Acclaimed film critic David Sterritt considers the diverse ways that filmmakers have regarded rock ‘n’ roll, some cynically cashing in on its popularity and others responding to the music as sincere fans, some depicting rock as harmless fun and others representing it as an open challenge to mainstream norms. 

1

The Fabulous 1950s

Origins tend to be murky, and identifying the first-ever rock ’n’ roll movie is a tricky business. The first film to make tentative contact with the music was Richard Brooks’s message movie Blackboard Jungle, a juvenile-delinquency drama that premiered in March 1955. This isn’t a true rock ’n’ roll picture, since its nod to the genre is limited to one song: “Rock Around the Clock,” performed by Bill Haley and His Comets, whose Decca Records single had been around since 1954. Officially titled “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” it was the B-side of the disc—the A-side was “Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town),” a song with an atom-bomb theme—and sales were disappointing until Blackboard Jungle propelled it to international fame. Heard behind the opening titles, reprised without vocals later on, and repeated at the end, it made a major impression on audiences, and four months after the movie opened, it became the first rock ’n’ roll disc to reach the top of the Billboard pop chart.

BILL BEATS BIX

The overall impact and influence of Brooks’s film were similarly strong, enhanced by attacks from educational groups and especially from Claire Booth Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, whose successful effort to keep it out of the Venice Film Festival helped make it “the most highly publicized film on the worldwide market” (Hollinger 5; quoted in Doherty 58). Together with Nicholas Ray’s teen melodrama Rebel Without a Cause, released seven months later, Blackboard Jungle alerted Hollywood to the idea that rebellious youths on the screen held a powerful appeal for money-bearing youths at the ticket window.

“Although purportedly adult films,” the cinema historian Thomas Doherty points out, these timely, controversial pictures “offered convincing evidence that teenagers were becoming the most populous segment of the moviegoing audience.” And that segment loved the “foreshadowing of the shape of things to come” that occurs in Blackboard Jungle when “the kids erupt in an orgy of destruction and play Frisbee with their music instructor’s priceless collection of Bix Beiderbecke 78s” (57–58), demanding “some bop” or at least some Frank Sinatra or Joni James, as they trash and smash the teacher’s platters. Rock ’n’ roll is never named, but the adolescent vibe is unmistakable: Jazz is dead! Long live Bill Haley’s rocking rhythms!

JUNGLE SAM

Among the producers taking note of these developments—including the additional million dollars that Blackboard Jungle earned when moralists like Luce raised its profile—was Sam Katzman, known in the trade as Jungle Sam, so named for the sixteen Jungle Jim pictures he profitably produced between 1948 and 1955. Katzman had been catering to young spectators since the middle 1940s, aiming romances and comedies like Junior Prom (1946) and Betty Co-Ed (1946) at “Teen Agers” and action serials like Captain Video, Master of the Stratosphere (1951) and Son of Geronimo: Apache Avenger (1952) at the “cap pistol” crowd. By the time Blackboard Jungle brought rock ’n’ roll to the screen, the cap-gun kids of the 1940s were Teen Agers, and their demographic was growing fast. As a savvy producer with an exploitational turn of mind, Katzman saw an opportunity for a possible killing in the youth market that hadn’t even existed a few years earlier.

The result was Rock Around the Clock, which premiered in March 1956, exactly a year after Blackboard Jungle tested the waters. Produced by Katzman, it was directed by Fred F. Sears, a B-western specialist who had collaborated with Katzman on the early youthsploitation venture Teen-Age Crime Wave, a 1955 release whose promotional tagline, “Out of the Sidewalk Jungle . . . ,” revealed the imitative impulse that inspired it. Rock Around the Clock is a prime candidate for first-ever rock ’n’ roll movie, so it calls for more attention than its actual content might seem to warrant.

Three ideas appear to have animated Rock Around the Clock, each reflecting Katzman’s eagerness to cash in on what promised to be (and turned out to be) a very new, very hot trend. Idea 1: make the title song of Blackboard Jungle into the title of the new picture. Idea 2: double the ante by showcasing the song not once but twice. Idea 3: have the group that made the song a hit on disc and screen, Bill Haley and His Comets, perform it in the picture. There was an Idea 4 as well: present the movie debut of Alan Freed, the hugely popular disc jockey who had given the new musical genre its moniker.

And a word about that moniker: the so-called race records distributed mainly to African American communities between the 1920s and 1940s became known as rhythm-and-blues records when the entertainment trade magazine Billboard changed the name of its black-music popularity chart out of deference to readers. Freed was a white radio personality who boldly programmed R&B on his Cleveland show, and in 1952 he borrowed the term “rock ’n’ roll” from the lyrics of various blues and jazz songs—where it was a recurring euphemism for sex—and repurposed it as a race-neutral label for the music he spun for a growing army of (mostly white) listeners. He moved to the New York station WINS in 1954 and began presenting rock ’n’ roll revues featuring the likes of Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre and elsewhere. For fans, he was a well-known voice but not a familiar face, and Katzman scored a minor coup by recruiting him for rock ’n’ roll’s first major film.

DISTILLING DISGUST?

Rock Around the Clock chronicles the effort of big-band manager Steve Hollis (Johnny Johnston) to reinvigorate his career by finding an exciting new musical idiom now that jazz’s great swing era is winding down. Leaving the small town he calls home, he heads for New York with sidekick Corny LaSalle (Henry Slate), and while traveling, they find Bill Haley and His Comets (playing themselves) in another small town. The rockers and their manager, Lisa Johns (Lisa Gaye), have been languishing in obscurity, notwithstanding the group’s fresh sound and its manager’s dancing talents. But everyone now heads for New York, where Freed (playing himself) is speedily persuaded to sign the unknowns as the headliners of his next live revue. There is a happy ending for everyone, including the two managers, who unsurprisingly fall in love.

Haley and company perform six numbers in Rock Around the Clock, including the million-selling “See You Later, Alligator” and “Razzle Dazzle” as well as the title tune. Among the stellar ancillary acts are the Platters, performing “Only You” and “The Great Pretender,” and among the nonstellar ones are Tony Martinez and His Band, doing four numbers, and Freddie Bell and His Bellboys, doing two. Some latter-day commentators have been less than kind to Haley, the top-lined star of rock ’n’ roll’s first expedition to the big screen; the critic Marshall Crenshaw finds him “pudgy and decidedly stiff” (186), for example, and the film historian Jeff Stafford observes that he is not a “typical rock star” by today’s standards. “Hefty, stiff in manner and well past the age of his screaming fans,” Stafford writes, “he certainly doesn’t look hip but his music proves the opposite,” sparking a “gyrating frenzy” among the on-screen teens, even though canny moviegoers may notice that all the songs except “Rudy’s Rock” are lip-synched to their hit recordings (Stafford).

Some commentators in the 1950s were unkinder still about rock ’n’ roll itself. One of them was the legendary Spanish cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, who found it “the distillation of all disgust of our time,” and another was Francis Braceland, a Connecticut psychiatrist. According to a New York Times article published in 1956 with the headline “Rock & Roll Called ‘Communicable Disease,’” he diagnosed the music as a “cannibalistic and tribalistic” genre that “impels teenagers to wear ducktail haircuts, wear zoot suits, and carry on boisterously at rock & roll affairs” (Fuchs 18). Haley himself spoke up for the positive effects of rock ’n’ roll, especially with respect to racial discrimination at a time when radio stations and concert venues were just beginning to program both white and African American performers. While playing for mixed audiences all over the United States, he said, he saw young people sitting “side by side just enjoying, . . . being entertained by white and negro performers sharing the same stage” (Schonberg 10; quoted in Romanowski 211).

Whether on purpose or by default, Rock Around the Clock shared the racial-tolerance agenda, placing the all-white Comets and the all-black Platters onto the same screen. This contributed to the atmosphere of social change that led some civic and religious leaders to call for boycotts of the film; their fears were reinforced when trouble broke out in some places where Haley played and some theaters where the movie was shown. A brouhaha at the Palomar Ballroom in San Jose, California, was dubbed a “Rock ’n’ Roll Riot” in numerous headlines, for instance, and fights occurred at a Haley concert in the National Guard Armory in Washington, D.C., where the armory’s manager opined, “It’s that jungle strain that gets ’em all worked up” (Denisoff and Romanowski 32). On the other side of the Atlantic, some towns in England banned the picture after hearing of “agitated” spectators at London showings.

These responses are hard to fathom in the twenty-first century. Everything from Haley’s trademark (a “magic curl” dangling over his forehead) to the look of the group—plaid jackets, upright bass, zany stunts like playing while lying on the floor—screams “square” rather than “subversive” today. But to 1950s teens with youth-culture moxie flowing through their veins, Rock Around the Clock was as hip as hip could be. It also made lots of money, pulling in $2.4 million within a year, an eightfold return on the meager $300,000 it cost to produce. Thoughts naturally turned to a sequel.

THE PAGEANT OF ART AND CULTURE

Katzman and Sears were busy filmmakers in 1956; the former produced thirteen pictures, and the latter directed nine. Seven of these were joint projects, and after their Latin-flavored fall release Cha-Cha-Cha Boom! the duo returned to rock ’n’ roll with Don’t Knock the Rock, a play-it-safe project again featuring Haley, the Comets, and Freed, joined this time by Little Richard, who was soaring to fame on the wings of “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally,” both million-selling hits. Lesser lights—the Treniers, Dave Appell and the Applejacks—also perform. Haley and company do their usual stunts (they lip-synch with glee, the bassist straddles his bass), and Sears’s directing is bare bones at best. At one point, a pipe-smoking father manages to miss his mouth when he goes to take a puff; at another point, the camera dollies in for an extended close-up of a teenage girl’s backside as Freed and friends watch her dance with her boyfriend through a window.

The plot of Don’t Knock the Rock, such as it is, centers on the return of the rock musician Arnie Haynes (Alan Dale) to his hometown. The teens greet him with enthusiasm, but wary adults, including Mayor George Bagley (Pierre Watkin) and newspaper columnist Arline MacLaine (Fay Baker), attack him and his music as menaces to youthful wholesomeness. The climax occurs when Freed helps high-school theater buffs put on a “Pageant of Art and Culture” cleverly designed to show that rock ’n’ roll is just another benign link in an aesthetic continuum stretching from Renaissance painting and the minuet to once-scandalous dances like the black bottom and the Charleston, in which the elders once indulged with no signs of lasting harm. “We’d like to show . . . the country that rock ’n’ roll is a safe and sane dance for all young people,” Arnie explains. His mission bears the expected fruit, as did Don’t Knock the Rock, earning exactly half as much as Rock Around the Clock, a smaller sum but still a tidy return on a tiny investment. Freed parlayed anticipation of the film into excitement over a holiday Rock ’n’ Roll Show he presented in February 1956 at the Paramount Theatre in Manhattan, where the picture’s New York premiere was accompanied by a dozen doo-wop and rhythm-and-blues acts plus a big band conducted (after a fashion) by Freed himself.

These things notwithstanding, Freed’s career was soon to wane. He took a painful hit in 1958 when WINS fired him for badly handling a restive Boston audience, and he took a fatal hit in 1959 when WABC fired him for accepting “payola” from record companies to play and plug particular discs on his show. Katzman dabbled further in the pop field by producing Sears’s Calypso Heat Wave in 1957, Arthur Dreifuss’s Juke Box Rhythm in 1959, and Oscar Rudolph’s Twist Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Twist—titles that are either shrewd or desperate, depending on your point of view—in 1961 and 1962, respectively, and he made pictures with folk-music, country-and-western, and Elvis Presley hooks in later years; but horror, science fiction, and comedies took up most of energies after the middle 1950s.

Haley kept on playing, with diminishing returns. Some observers see his lackluster presence in Don’t Knock the Rock and specifically the contrast between his haplessness and Little Richard’s paradigm-busting power as harbingers of his decline. “Haley was the ignition for rock ’n’ roll,” R. Serge Denisoff and William Romanowski accurately write (59). “He didn’t invent the sound. He merely popularized it [during] a brief, but magical, moment in the evolution of the genre.” Rock ’n’ roll kept thriving, but the ignition was no longer needed.

Sundry rock ’n’ roll musicals followed the formulas of the Katzman pictures in time to come, and other films naturally went in different directions. Summarizing the contributions of such movies to midcentury culture, the film scholar David E. James notes that they “developed the visual depiction of musical performance along with the singers, the fans, the components of the industry, and some of the ethnic and other social forces that rock ’n’ roll culture contained, including the consternation it often caused,” and they also spotlighted and legitimized new dancing styles by using them as a “visual counterpart to the music” (42). Among the more significant were the following:

• Edward L. Cahn’s Shake, Rattle & Rock! (1956). Black acts and white acts (but no integrated acts) appear in this picture about a “society” of three or four fogeys—one of them is an undertaker who envisions the people he meets as future corpses ripe for his practice!—who try to have a rock ’n’ roll club banned from their community but fail because the club is a terrific place where doing “arts and crafts” keeps teens out of trouble.

• Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). Like Tashlin’s best films with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, this over-the-top comedy is cartoonish in its style, sociological in its interests, and satirical in its attitude. The plot centers on a sub–Marilyn Monroe bombshell (Jayne Mansfield) whose mobster boyfriend (Edmond O’Brien) hires an alcoholic publicist (Tom Ewell) to make her a pop-singing star despite her apparent lack of talent or training. A number of rock ’n’ roll careers—those of Fabian in the 1950s and the Monkees in the 1960s, for instance—have been engineered by behind-the-scenes figures more interested in good looks and potential drawing power than in actual ability to sing or play. The movie plays this syndrome for sarcastic laughs, but Tashlin still taps into the industry’s generous resources, juicing up the narrative with performances by currently hot talents. Eating his satirical cake and having it, Tashlin simultaneously sends up, puts down, and capitalizes on the pop-culture industry in which he was himself a canny player.

• Roger Corman’s Rock All Night (1957). This offbeat item could almost be a one-act kammerspiel by Eugene O’Neill. Nearly all of it takes place in a second-rate saloon, where the evening’s congregants include a bartender, an extortionist milking him for payments, an unpromising prizefighter and his two-bit manager, a rock ’n’ roll group and its jive-talking manager, two gun-toting thugs, a singer unsure of her talents, and a customer who becomes a hero by overwhelming the thugs with the sheer unpleasantness of his personality. The music, heard primarily in the first half, comes from the Platters and also Abby Dalton; the second half is bargain-basement melodrama, but Corman serv...