In 1957, B-movie producers saw a few bucks to be made from this rock ‘n’ roll garbage that young people were into. So they made movies about it and they ALL had the same idea.
Just keep the music coming. Rock around the clock. Set the film in or near a nightclub where something’s always happening on stage. Any excuse to cut to a band is a good one. Do it ten, fifteen times–who cares? The plot doesn’t matter. The plot is mere formality. It can be some junk swiped from an old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland flick. Nobody’s gonna mind. Rock movies like this have a license to be flimsy because the people who made them didn’t think that anyone would watch them FIVE years later, let alone sixty-two years later, in a strange new cyber-world in which a guy like me just digitally summons movies out of thin air and does it without even putting on pants.
That’s the mark of true trash and exploitation, by the way. They’re films made with zero thought about how they’ll play in the future. They’re out to make those profits NOW. They expect to fade away. They don’t CARE if they fade away. To the makers, an exploitation movie is a hand grenade. Set it off, toss it, let it explode and then it’s gone.
The moment that you start thinking about the future, you’re making art.
And I like art.
But I also also like the cinematic death missions that you get in exploitation flicks.
Films like this don’t need good actors. They don’t even need much money if they do it like the makers of Rock Baby – Rock It did it. They shot this gutter-level independent film in my hometown of Dallas, Texas and used lots of local talent. None of these groups ever got near a chart, as best I can tell. They might have jumped at the chance to be in a movie. Might have even done it for free.
Hey, I’m a guy who writes movie reviews on the internet for free. I relate.
The “plot”: Some young pompadours and poodle skirts are about to be evicted from their club/hang out spot by their crooked landlord who’s in bed with the mob and only a rock ‘n’ roll show can save the day.
Meanwhile, the cast are almost all amateurs and it shows. Some have their dialogue completely overdubbed while others don’t. Then there’s one-time director Murray Douglas Sporup who just points and shoots and gets this thing over with. All of this film’s energy goes into the music perfomances.
Among the highlights there include the spastic rockabilly stylings of Johnny Carroll. This movie is really into him. He gets more songs here than anybody else because of the way that he shakes like a live wire, yelps like Gene Vincent, and wields his guitar like it’s a weapon for terrific songs like “Wild Wild Women” and “Rockin’ Maybelle”.
Roscoe Gordon and The Red Tops shout and lay on the bawdy horns for “Chicken in the Rough” and “Bop It”. Then, the almost unnervingly wholesome Belew Twins get in some fine hillbilly harmonies and hiccups for “Lonesome” and “Love Me, Baby”. For the R&B side, The Five Stars hit us with the top-notch doo-wop of “Juanita”, a song that belongs in any malt shop jukebox.
It all culminates with 50s rock ‘n’ roll figurehead Kay Wheeler (famous for being the founder and president of The Elvis Presley Fan Club when she was 16) and her solo dance number, in which she does her twitchy “rock & bop” moves to the Johnny Carroll-sung “Sugar Baby”