(1956) 3 Bruce Eder Rock, Rock, Rock! was the first of three juke-box movies starring Alan Freed, the legendary dee-jay who, as much as anyone else, played an essential role in putting rock 'n' roll on the map. It also happens to be a dreadful movie in most of the areas by which we usually judge a movie's worth -- among other shortcomings, the "plot" is thinner than tissue paper and the acting is barely on a level that would engender the description "amateurish"; what's more, and, seemingly fatally for a movie with those attributes, it never lets us forget that it is a movie. And, yet, for all of those flaws (and one has to see Tuesday Weld's performance to truly appreciate the awfulness that we're talking about), this is still a movie worth watching, as a popular culture and musical artifact of its time. If one concentrates on the musical acts, whose performances take up most of the movie's running time, one gets a sense of a telling moment in American cultural history, when rock 'n' roll captured the imagination of virtually the entire population below the age of 20, and even some of their parents to a certain degree -- and as this was the first full year of the rock 'n' roll boom, a lot of Black acts that would be swept aside later in the 1950's are featured as well. You sort of wish that someone would shove Alan Freed aside in the final performance segment so that we could see Big Al Sears, the jazz saxophone legend, in the center of the screen, but it's pretty cool just hearing him and seeing his band, and it was Freed who brought them aboard on his package tour. Later on, programmers would become more sensitive to racial and sexual sensibilities but here we get sexy, robust La Vern Baker, the elegant Moonglows, the spirited Flamingos, the beguiling Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, and the totally provocative and lusty Chuck Berry, duckwalking through "You Can't Catch Me", his guitar about as phallic looking a stage prop as anything seen on the screen this side of the bananas in a Carmen Miranda production number -- had a Black man ever before been permitted such a degree of sexual expression (and you can see the delightful, proud smugness on Berry's face, knowing what audience the movie was aimed at) in a movie intended for white audiences? Not to this reviewer's knowledge. The white acts -- even most of the dance bands -- are also pretty good, though there's only one here that matches the Black performers for sheer charisma, and that's Johnny Burnette doing "Lonesome Train".

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Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956)

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Suitable for Children

genres

Musical

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category

Feature

directed by

Will Price

countries

USA

released

1956

run time

78 min.

produced by

Vanguard, Distributors Corporation of America

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