For a lot of decades, mainstream movie critics have derided Fred Sears' Rock Around the Clock (1956) as a cheap exploitation movie with little to recommend it except its music. Oh, the music is its raison d'etre, there's no doubt about that, but the movie offers a lot more than performance clips of Bill Haley & His Comets, The Platters, et al.
In 1956, no one knew how long rock & roll would hold onto its audience, but the assumption was that it was a fad that would pass at some point, so Sears and his two screenwriters, working for low-budget producer Sam Katzman, were obviously working very quickly to get Rock Around the Clock shot, edited, assembled, and into theaters while Haley and rock & roll were still hot properties. Amazingly, what they had to get right to sell the picture, they got right -- mostly that was the sheer joy that rock & roll elicited in receptive audiences, which included not just, teenagers but some adults, too; just check out the scene with then 67-year-old Harry Tyler as the motel operator who digs "the most." Even more to the point, check out the dance that's going on in the small Pennsylvania town in the opening section of the movie -- those kids are having fun; and surprisingly daring, even risque fun, as when an onlooker asks the young woman dancer, being thrust over the head of her male partner, legs in the air, "What's that exercise you're getting" and she replies, with total abandon, "It's rock & roll, and we're rockin' tonight!" The makers got that side of the music and its appeal -- which is often overlooked in histories of the bands or the chart hits -- totally right, spot-on perfect. And from there, with some better-than-competent performances from the veteran players, the presence of some appealing young players (most notably actress/dancer Lisa Gaye as the love interest), and some great clips of the bands, Sears and company could do no wrong. With the addition of some excellent choreography by Earl Barton (and his bracing dance performance with Lisa Gaye), the movie was a deserved hit, a breezy entertaining Hollywood version of Haley's rise to fame, and a lot of fun. The acting is actually a half-step or so above the norm for Sears' movies and Katzman's productions, and the director, photographer, soundman, and editor -- even if they were 20 to 40 years too old to appreciate the music on its own merits personally, arrived at an approach that was sympathetic to its needs and worked for the movie. Columbia TriStar struck new prints from restored negatives on this and a handful of its other early rock & roll film titles, and a summer 2004 screening at Lincoln Center in New York had audiences from 20 to 70 stomping their feet and all but dancing in the aisles, a testimony to Rock Around the Clock's lingering appeal.