It’s often credited as the first rock ‘n’ roll musical and I can’t prove that, but I believe it. No film treats rock ‘n’ roll as more exotic. It’s the story of a talent manager whose old big band clients are floundering so he takes a major risk by putting all of his energy into promoting Bill Haley and the Comets. He discovers Haley one Saturday night in a small town where the kids regularly dance into the wee hours to the band’s stomping swing/blues/hillbilly hybrid. It’s an uphill battle from there, as all of the bigtime booking agents and nightclubs find the very sound of Haley’s band too scandalous to touch, but persistence eventually pays off and everyone ends up happy.
It’s not a great film, but it survives the decades as some entertaining kitsch. It’s directed by Fred F. Sears, a cinematic short-order cook who pounded out multiple low-budget flicks a year. The dialogue is snappy in a pulp novel sort of way, but the characters are wooden, the conflicts are shallow, and there’s a love story that couldn’t be more clumsily pasted on to the whole affair. On the plus side though, it’s only a slim seventy-seven minutes long and an intriguing document of a time when music still surprised people and freaked them out a little. Let’s also mention the terrific musical sequences from Haley and the Comets, Freddie Bell and The Bellboys, and the immortal Platters.