Part 1: Elvis, The Beatles, and Grease, et al.
Since Bill Haley and the Comets electrified Hollywood during the opening credits of Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle with their Rock Around the Clock in the early 1950s, the film industry in the US has tried to use rock n’ roll to sell tickets. The 1950s saw poverty row studios, and some bigger ones, creating films produced by rock entrepreneurs like Cleveland, then New York, disc jockey Alan Freed, highlighting acts with which he had special arrangements, and whose stories had no oxygen. The performances were filmed to put faces to performances, not to capture or evoke rock n’ roll.
There were attempts in the 50s and 60s to build films around an individual star or group. When The Twist was dominant in the club world and high school hops, New York’s Peppermint Lounge generated its house band Joey Dee and the Starlighters, whose Top Ten success generated a film about them and The Twist, called Hey, Let’s Twist. Box office success did not follow. In Britain other Mersey groups followed The Beatles, whom we will look at later. The Dave Clark Five and Gerry and the Pacemakers, like Joey Dee and the Starlighters, topped the Top Ten and got movies, Havin’ a Wild Weekend (directed by a young John Boorman [Deliverance and Excalibur]) and Ferry Across the Mersey (directed by Jeremy Summers), respectively.
Clearly, I am bypassing two names: Elvis Pressley and The Beatles. The third major name from this period, The Rolling Stones, is also missing. While they were involved with successful and significant concert/performance films (including Jean-Luc Godard’s One + One [aka Sympathy for the Devil]), they were connected with no strictly narrative films, especially fictional. Jagger did some impressive acting in films (Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelley and Cammell and Roeg’s Performance to name two), but that is a different issue.
So, I should stop ignoring Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
Pressley’s first handful of films enabled him to stay within his performance/recording comfort zone, i.e., the kind of music and performance that had endeared him to his audience and had given agita to TV execs but without advancing said agita to movie execs. He was able to croon like his idol Dean Martin, rock like Big Mamma Thornton, and perform regional sounds as he does in the films Love Me Tender and Lovin’ You. Still, in those films there is a Hollywood pacification of his real energy, especially his body language as he sings. He is neither Cab Calloway nor Bing Crosby, nor is he the Elvis we can see in his clips from regional TV appearances. This Elvis could have played Grease’s Danny Zuko twenty years later.
This absence of the original Elvis disappears partly in Jailhouse Rock and entirely in King Creole, the only times we see the real Elvis on fictional film, the Elvis who could be seen in the performance documentaries, but who was neutered by his management and Hollywood producers. He could still be charming; he was a genuine star. But they would not let him be edgy, let alone dangerous. As he became Las Vegas Elvis, he stopped being anyone substantial except in the dollars he fed into the performance life of Las Vegas.
As a performer, he was no longer substantial; he was at best a condiment. Even later on, in Don Siegel’s Flaming Star, he (in his only non-singing role) had to be more cute than dangerous as an angry “half-breed.” (Edges do slip through in places, suggesting how fine an actor he could have matured into, had his talent and, it seems, his instincts been allowed to take their course.)
Clearly though, the energy that had been threatening to people on his arrival in the early days was being stripped away until he finally became on-screen and in person a Las Vegas headliner. From Tupelo to Vegas. What would Dante suggest as the end point of such a journey.
The Beatles, not that many years later, have a different story. They were neither neutered nor recorded documentarily (until Let It Be, late in their existence), although Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night seems to do both. The essence of the band was to honor, but not replicate, the US blues and rock and of the previous decades. No one in Lester’s film played a raucous piano like Little Richard on Lawdy, Miss Claudy; no one, not even John, duckwalked when covering Chuck Berry.
But they could be, to use the British term, cheeky. And they made this as much of their off-stage personae, as respect for the roots of their music was their on-stage demeanor.
Lester had been connected with Spike Milligan’s The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film, as had A Hard Day’s Night’s writer, Alan Bennett. Lester brings the energy of Milligan’s comedy into much of the film, especially in the larger musical numbers. Milligan’s comedy free-wheeled through logic and narrative, as later did Monty Python’s, as does this film. Other than the “documentary” nature of the performance numbers, rehearsals for the TV broadcast, etc., the realism of the documentary is abused. We are supposed to be watching a documentary of the Beatles “day,” yet the editing and general structure of the film works counter to any suggestion of documentary. There is then the sub-plot about Paul’s grandfather. Lester brings Milligan[1] to the fore-front here
As inventive as the Beatles’ music may have been, it was safe because The Beatles were safe. This was especially true with the Stones doing their bad boys’ schtick in opposition. The two groups created a marvelous yin/yang.
This is a simplified view of how rock n’ roll moved through the 60s into the 70s. The Who had little presence in narrative film; the films of Tommy and Quadrophenia are best left to the mists of memory.
In February of 1972, a musical erupted on Broadway. Named Grease, it was vulgar and offended Broadway behavioral and linguistic criteria. It’s language was not that of Shakespeare, Shaw, Coward, Berlin, or Porter. Grease was a boys’ locker room show. Barry Bostwick, who created Danny Zuko, the male lead, had all the necessary sleaze and grease intact.
Grease was Broadway’s first rock n’ roll hit.[2] It lasted eight years. And still lives on, although in versions more respectful of the film version than the original production.
Toward the end of the play’s run, Grease (1978) the film appeared. Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy could have played the film’s Danny while the casting should have gone to someone like James Spader. John Travolta’s Danny, though, was family friendly. Except maybe for the greased-back hair, he’d have been welcome at a suburban girl’s family’s Sunday dinner. He had been domesticated[3] in the transition from stage to screen.
By this time Hair had already had two lives: one at the Public Theater and one on Broadway. Hair, for its controversial first act curtain nudity and its anti-establishment dramatic themes, was a PG show in its heart. The subsequent film was also scrubbed clean with an excessively bucolic Central Park replacing New York’s Greenwich Village and Alphabet City as the principal location, thereby changing the context of all that happens.
But then there was American Hot Wax (1978). A simple film about Alan Freed and the trials of playing early rock on the radio and putting on a live show, it was released a month before Grease, which lived in a world where rock n’ roll, as the film defined it, was an accepted part of the culture; high schools even invited it into their gymnasiums. American Hot Wax embraced a world where music was made on street corners, where municipalities were hostile to this music and culture; where white and Black kids found common ground on the outskirts of the dominant culture; where Chuck Berry duckwalked; where Screamin’ Jay Hawkins put a curse on us; and where we actually lived.
While American Hot Wax was designed and marketed as a low budget film, it captured a very specific and important part of this history. Shows like the one the film’s Freed tries to mount were at the New York and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and later the Fabian Fox, the latter two theaters within a few hundred yards of each other in downtown Brooklyn. The film captures the grit of the early rock n’ roll. Watching the film today, I am back to my single digit-age-self sitting at the back of the auditorium of the Brooklyn Paramount, watching Jerry Lee Lewis rise off his piano bench while he continues striking the piano and then explodes, kicking that bench back across the stage while upping his keying on the piano. And it was a wide stage.
Things were never again the same for me. I didn’t become a JD, a criminal, or see my grades at school drop.
But Jerry Lee showed me there was a world out there beyond that of the good Sisters.
And the rock n’ roll was not suburban track housing; it was urban, country, and blues. It was America as it pretended to be, all-inclusive. And when America finds itself confronted with the possibilities of such inclusiveness, it has a simple reaction. It rejects them, often violently.
I had the privilege of, maybe ten years after the release of these films, going to a small neighborhood theater in New York’s East Village to see them on a double bill. As it happened, I saw Grease first; the audience clearly enjoyed the film, laughing at the right moments, etc. Then came American Hot Wax. From early in the film, the energy in the auditorium changed. It was electric. By the climactic sequence, the show at the Paramount Theater, couples were dancing in the aisles of the theater in which I sat. Wisely, the management did not interfere. (As this was a few days into the booking, maybe they were used to it.)
These were two manifestations of the spirits of rock n’ roll. Clearly only one of them came out on top.
This brings us to Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire.[4]
Next Time!
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Rest in Peace: Ed Bullins; Senator Max Cleland; Todd Gitlin; Dean Stockwell.
In Memoriam: Raymond Durgnat; George W. Hunt, S.J.; Samson Raphaelson; Andrew Sarris; Stefan Sharff.
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Willow Entertainment Media Staff: Mel Bilecky; Selma Jasarevic.
Editorial Consultants: Steve Carosso; Chris McAteer.
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[1] Milligan has a presence on YouTube, but sadly not with The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film. He and Bennett were enormous presences in the British comedy world in the post war years.
[2] There had been, several years earlier, a hit musical about rock n’ roll, Bye, Bye, Birdie, which used conventional Broadway music and choreography.
[3] Still, John Travolta paired his Danny Zuko with another career making performance in Saturday Night Fever, this time as a club rock n’ roll dancer. There was no looking back for him.
[4] Now streaming on Netflix.
Gonna Say it Now 