In July, TCM is gonna rock around the month. Each Monday, “The History of Rock in Film” will serve up time capsule glimpses of how America grooved in the latter years of the 20th century. From A (ABBA: The Movie) to V (Viva Las Vegas), the films featured in this 40-year retrospective chart Hollywood’s attempts to harness (some might say exploit) contemporary music’s immense power while turning solid gold into solid green at the box office.
1950s
When Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” kicked off The Blackboard Jungle (1955) rock and roll entered the mainstream. Something new had been added, something cultural watchdogs warned was “the Devil’s music;” dangerous and subversive (to which generations of rockers might respond, “You say that like it’s a bad thing”).
Initially, Hollywood turned the volume up on sensationalism. Dig this tagline from the poster for Howard Koch’s Untamed Youth (1957): “Youth turned ‘Rock-N-Roll’ Wild and the punishment farm that makes them wilder.” But the flip side of that was that popular rockers had a presold audience and would put teen asses in the seats.
No one at the time was bigger than Elvis Presley. His third film, Richard Thorpe’s Jailhouse Rock (1957) is arguably his best; it’s Elvis at his snarliest as an ex-convict looking out only for No. 1 on his way to the top of the charts. The incredible production number of the classic title tune probably went a long way toward getting this film inducted into the National Film Registry as an “historically, culturally and aesthetically significant” film. Stay tuned for Mystery Train (1989). The spirit of Elvis literally haunts Jim Jarmusch’s off-center Memphis-based it-happened-one-night triptych.
Other hitmakers of the day did not get their own star vehicles, but instead had featured spots in jukebox musicals that endeavored to assure parents that the kids were alright and they should stop worrying and love rock and roll. The Alan Freed-produced Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) features rare screen turns by Eddie Cochran and Ritchie Valens. Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), starring Tuesday Weld, boasts Chuck Berry, The Moonglows, The Flamingos and Frankie Lymon. (And that’s Connie Francis dubbing Weld’s singing voice). Jamboree! (1957) cranks it up to 11 with appearances by Fats Domino, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Lewis gets the bio-pic treatment with Jim McBride’s Great Balls of Fire (1989), starring Dennis Quaid as the “The Killer.” TCM’s Fifties night also includes The Buddy Holly Story (1978), which features Gary Busey in his Oscar-nominated performance in a film that Roger Ebert called “one rock and roll movie with a chance of being remembered.”
The 1960s
TCM’s salute to 60s rock films kicks off with George Harrison’s indelible Fadd9 chord and a burst of Beatlemania. Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) hits the ground running and never lets up as the Fab Four prepare for a television special. The hits just keep on comin’ (“I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”) while Lester unleashes a Marxist (as in Brothers) anarchy to the proceedings. This is the next best thing to being there. In its initial release, theaters designated special showings for adults only so they could hear the film, whose songs and dialogue tended to be drowned out by the screams of young Beatlemaniacs in the audience.
Back in America, “Juvenile Deliquent” movies were nowhere, so enterprising producers gave rock a sunnier spin in a spate of rom-coms. Bikini Beach (1964) pokes fun at the Beatles with Frankie Avalon’s performance as British rocker, Potato Bug.
Elvis was still shaking things up. Viva Las Vegas (1964) is one of his most popular films, pairing him with Ann-Margret, whose breakthrough film, Bye-Bye Birdie (1963), was coincidentally about the tumult caused when a Presley-esque rocker is drafted into the Army.
But the times they were a’changin. Mark Rosenthal’s The In-Crowd (1988), about a high school senior who becomes the unlikely star dancer on a local “American Bandstand”-type show, points to a new direction when his girlfriend introduces him to the music of Bob Dylan. D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), another National Film Registry inductee, is an anti-A Hard Day’s Night, an era-defining warts-and-all documentary that chronicles Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England.
The classic opening, a proto-music video presentation of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” ushers in the counterculture era, which reached perhaps its fullest expression on screen in Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969). Today, they make movies based on theme park rides, but there was a time when they made movies based on iconic songs. This is one of the best, a pure blast of ‘60s idealism based on Arlo Guthrie’s epic anti-war (and anti-littering) anthem.
The 1970s
In the ‘70s, artists with grand designs to elevate rock beyond the 2:30 AM-radio hit single put popular music through massive changes and permutations. Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975) brought to the screen The Who’s seminal 1969 rock opera about the rise and fall of a “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who becomes a champion pinball-playing messiah. Nothing succeeds like excess, and Tommy boasts several set pieces, including Elton John’s full title version of “Pinball Wizard” and Tina Turner’s soul-tearing “Acid Queen.”
Equally psychedelic and hallucinatory (but way more decadent and depraved) is Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), which couples rock’s “sex, drugs and rock and roll” ethos with the hard-boiled gangster movie. Mick Jagger stars as Turner, a former rock star who has “lost his demons” and lives as a recluse. Enter Chas (James Fox), an “out of date” enforcer for a crime kingpin and who is on the lam after killing someone he was not supposed to. The only performance that “makes it all the way,” Turner tells him, is the one that achieves madness. Performance makes it all the way. Jagger’s astonishing “Memo from Turner” is a mind blower.
Another seminal 70s rock film is Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972). Jimmy Cliff stars as country boy Ivan, who comes to the city to become famous. He becomes infamous, not as a recording star, but as a gun-toting outlaw. The soundtrack, with classic tracks by Cliff, Toots and the Maytals and Desmond Dekker, is an essential reggae primer, while The Harder They Come is in the pantheon of cult films as one of the first generation of movies that found their audience at midnight screenings.
Ivan’s attitude is pure punk, which brings us to Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy (1986), an unflinching biopic about star-crossed lovers Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman), of Sex Pistols infamy, and Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb), an American groupie and kindred addictive spirit. Not your typical Hollywood happy ending, but Vicious, who is described at one point as an “emblem of a nihilistic generation,” succeeded in making rock dangerous again.
The 1980s
TCM’s night of ‘80s music films steps off with Joel Silberg’s Breakin’ (1984), a throwback to the first rock movies rushed to market to capitalize on the phenomenon, and in which the stories took a back seat to the musical performances. First out of the gate when breakdancing became a thing, Breakin’ is a showcase for L.A. streetdancers Adolfo “Shabba-Doo” Quinones and Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers.
Adrian Lyne’s Foxes (1980) focuses on four Valley girls (led by Jodie Foster), but the soundtrack’s the thing, an early ‘80s playlist of pop and disco that includes Donna Summer (“On the Radio”), Cher (“Bad Love”) and Janis Ian (“Fly Too High”).
Punk, on the wane in Britain, still had a pulse in the States, as witness a pre-Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), an indelible portrait of New York’s pre-gentrification underground scene. For another shot of pure ‘80s, Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), is a surreal madscape that combines live-action and Gerard Scarfe animation in adapting the group’s 1979 rock opera about an increasingly isolated and alienated rock star (Bob Geldof).
Rock and roll has come a long way since Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” released in 1951. To quote Paul Simon, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.” While TCM’s “The History of Rock in Film” hits the high notes, we do admit not all the films in this series can claim classic status (we’re looking at you, Get Yourself a College Girl, 1964). But as a wise man once sang, it’s only rock and roll, and we like it!
