Music-cinema an old marriaoe
By BILL LINGLE
As soon as movies could talk,
they sang. When Al Jolson
opened his blackened chops and
crooned “Mammy,” he began a
trend in films that has continued
right down to Saturday Night
Fever.
Every kind of popular music has
found its way to Hollywood. In the
early days it was the music of vau
deville, Broadway and operetta. In
the Thirties and Forties, when
folks were more genteel than we
are nowadays, even opera had its
film counterpart and constituency.
When Big Band music became
the teen rage in the late Thirties,
movies followed suit, and Glenn
Miller, the Dorseys and Harry
James began film careers, how
ever uncomfortably.
The late Forties and early Fifties
belonged to a series of gloriously
cinematic MGM musicals — On
the Town, Meet Me in St. Louis,
An American in Paris, The Band
Wagon and, above all Singin' in
the Rain. They were the peak, in
deed the last flowering, of the film
musical.
The only other interesting Fif
ties trend was the musical bio
graphy, in which those same awk
ward dance band leaders who
were pop culture heroes a decade
ago were lionized by glossy,
romanticized film homages. The
best of the lot was Anthony
Mann's fine Glenn Miller Story
(1954), which took a few liberties
with the facts but faithfully and lov
ingly recreated the Big Band
sound of the Forties.
But the days of both the Big
Bands and the big budget film
musical were numbered.
Rock'n’roll came along, and the
rock revolution was as keenly felt
at the movies as it was anywhere
else in American society.
Fittingly, the first rock’n’roll films
were cheap little exploitation
numbers that had little value either
as music or as film. The only thrills
they offered were set pieces
featuring such controversial stars
as Chuck Berry and Little Richard
performing their iconoclastic hits.
The plots and production values
were kept so minimal as to be al
most non-existent.
Head and shoulders above the
rest was Frank Tashlin’s vulgar
but witty The Girl Can’t Help It,
starring Tom Ewell, Edmund
O'Brien and Jayne Mansfield’s
humongous cleavage. Typically, it
tells a thin story about an out-of
work PR man hired to promote the
singing career of a gangster’s
moll. Somewhere enmeshed in
this are some remarkable perfor
mances by a few of rock’n’roll’s
greatest stars.
They, and Tashlin’s visual ap
proach to comedy, make The Girl
Can't Help It worth watching when
it turns up on the late show.
The real class act of the time
was Elvis Presley, but though he
nearly always projected a sincere,
likable screen persona, his musi
cal films can be charitably de
scribed as undistinguished. In
fact, his best performance comes
in a film in which he doesn’t sing to
speak of, Don Siegel’s Flaming
Star (1960), though Jailhouse
Rock (1957) and King Creole
(1958) have a certain vulgar
panache.
The next step in the develop
ment of the popular musical film
was on most accounts an unfor
tunate one. Someone had the
idea of taking former Mouseketeer
Annette Funicello and has-been
rock’n’roller Frankie Avalon, plop
ping them down on a studio
created beach and telling them to
sing — something they found
rather difficult to do.
The result was a series of
“beach party” films, the major
function of which today is to re
mind us how calculatingly naive
the pre-Love-ln Sixties were.
Beach Blanket Bingo was the
best of a bad lot, primarily be
cause of the comedic talents of
Buster Keaton and Paul Lynde.
But the rock’n’roll was as vapor
ously sterile as the Southern
California sun.
What a surprise, then, that in
the midst of this aesthetic vacuum
should appear the remarkable
Beatles and their equally remark
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able first film, A Hard Day's Night
(1964).
For once director Richard
Lester’s slapdash, zany visual
technique found the perfect sub
jects, and a new kind of musical
film was born. It combined a back
stage plotline with a total musical
abstraction that freed the songs
from the confines of the plot en
gine. The result was an impres
sionistic, visually exciting film
that told us more about the Bea
tles than anything before or since,
excepting of course their songs
themselves.
Little-noticed in the discovery
that the Beatles were for real was
a film superior to either of the Bea
tles’ efforts (Help! was released in
1965), Having a Wild Weekend,
starring the Dave Clark Five
and directed by John Boorman.
An interesting essay in the failure
of success, this little film never got
the bookings it deserved and now
is one of the few rock'n’roll films to
reach cult status and to gamer
showings at obscure film festivals.
D.A. Pennebaker’s documen
tary about Bob Dylan, Don’t Look
Back, established a new cinema
tic approach to rock movies. Fol
lowing Dylan on his 1965 English
tour, Pennebaker forgot the fic
tional requirements of most musi
cals up to that time and concen
trated solely on the artist as pop
god.
The documentary style reached
its apotheosis with Seventies
Woodstock, an Academy-Award
winner that drew millions of
The leader of The Band, Bobbie Robertson, plays one of his many
guitars in “The Last Waltz," opening at the Mayflower June 7.
would-be heads who were unfor
tunately doing something else on
The Big Weekend. Woodstock
remains a fine musical record and
a penetrating social document, al
though it must be admitted that in
retrospect we looked more than a
little silly.
The same year also brought two
films that spelled the end for a cer
tain kind of documentary. Gimme
Shelter, the Maysles brothers’
tacky ripoff of the Altamont Rolling
Stones concert, convinced many
(Continued on Page 9B)
~_&JTUi.
Cultural Forum
INTRODUCING
1978-1979 CULTURAL FORUM
1. Jon Schamber, Contemporary Issues
2. Todd Blickenstaff, Popular Concerts
3. Sarah Mickelson, Film and Literature
4. Susan Rome, Visual and Performing Arts
5. Leon Taylor, Heritage Music
We would enjoy receiving input for our 1978-1979
program. We will be located in EMU Suite 2.