1h 25min | Drama, Music | 7 December 1956 | b/w, fs
Director: Will Price
Stars: Alan Freed and his Rock 'n Roll Band, Fran Manfred, Tuesday Weld, Connie Francis (v), Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049684/
Watched on AmazonPrime, good print; also on a megapack.
More teen dreck. Most of the screen time (thankfully) is taken by performances supposedly on AF's TV show. Strange that he's both a VJ and a band leader; he intrusively sing/speaks the name of the song Rock n Roll Boogie while it's being played.
I didn't recognize any of the 20 songs performed (per the Soundtracks.)
CF (b. '38) is shown in the credits (a captioned portrait photo slide show) as the singing voice of TW (b. '43). CF, although only 18, looks too old to be in high school; TW looks older than 13. 1st of 30 films for TW. 1st of 6 films for CF.
The music here is more melodic than the past 2 R'n'R films, with several singers crooning in echo chambers to make them sound different than big band and post-war solo singers. But the melodies, lyrics and ideas are much cheaper, more dashed-off sounding than the prior generation. Then again, the equivalently inexperienced songsters of that time weren't making money hand over fist so that feature length films were being made from their songs. The word "Rock" was probably in each uptempo number, multiple times, much like the title of the film.
The plot, where TW opens her own "bank" to loan out the money of her sole depositor, is a pretty good lesson about the importance of practical math education. TW thinks 1% is really 100%. Why is the dress, purchased with the borrowed money, still at the dress shop, so that TW can foreclose on it as the collateral when the borrower defaults? It had been at least a couple of weeks since it was purchased; alterations wouldn't take that long. The teen angst about who asking you to the prom and what to wear is pretty shallow stuff. But this is aimed at the teen market, so martinis and board rooms are not their topics.
I hope to never watch this again.
Vanguard Prod., distr. DCA, dir. Price; 5
