Though a very successful director and producer in his own right, Allan Arkush's name doesn't tend to rate very highly among the great alumni of the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking. But if the journeyman trajectory of his own career hasn't put him in the same auteur rankings as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, or even his classmate Joe Dante, he can at least lay claim to a comparable triumph, which is that he was one of the few beleaguered movie brats to pass under the awnings of the Filmgroup or New World Pictures having directed at least one true "B" movie masterpiece.
Originally rolled out in the spring and summer of 1979, Rock 'n' Roll High School stars P. J. Soles as Riff Randle, a self-professed teenage "rock'n'roller" whose devotion to the Queens cult quartet Ramones puts her in the crosshairs of her school's new administrator, Principal Evelyn Togar (Mary Woronov). When Riff gets caught skipping school to buy all her classmates tickets to an upcoming Ramones concert, Togar punishes her and her nerdy friend Kate Rambeau (Dey Young) by taking their tickets, but it's gonna take more than that to stop the shake, rattle and roll of Vince Lombardi High School from snowballing into a hard-rocking bacchanal of youth in revolt. Supplementing the ensemble cast are the clinically virginal football captain Tom Roberts (Vincent Van Patten), who wants to make it with Riff even though it's Kate who wants to make it with him, the entrepreneurial Eaglebauer (Clint Howard), who Tom hires to help make his dream a reality, and the sympathetic music teacher Mr. McGhee (Paul Bartel), who comes to find in his students' passion for the pop of their own time an inspiring, revitalizing echo of the Beat from his younger days.
Though I had seen Rock 'n' Roll High School before, I was delighted to discover that the Ambler Theater would be playing it on the big screen this past Thursday, having acquired a 35 mm Eastman Color print of the film through the venerable American Genre Film Archive. The print was in pretty bad shape, much of the colorful vibrancy of Dean Cundey's cinematography lost in a muted, red-shifted wash. And, yes, I do mean that Dean Cundey, who would himself graduate from the Corman School to work on Big Trouble in Little China, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Jurassic Park, to name just a few "real movies." Those who want to fully appreciate Cundey's nascent command of a pop movie aesthetic would do well to patronize Shout! Factory's 40th Anniversary blu-ray release of Rock 'n' Roll High School, which was scanned from the original camera negative. But for the purposes of a before-weekend specialty screening at one of rural P.A.'s best indie theaters, it's hard to argue that the respectably-sized crowd of mostly aged punks and "B" movie lovers didn't get their grindhouse money's worth. Just as importantly, too, the fidelity of the print's soundtrack was remarkably well-preserved, so whether it was performances by the Ramones themselves, including a climactic live set featuring such classics as "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Pinhead," and "She's the One," or needle drops ranging from Nick Lowe to Devo to Alice Cooper, the key musical experience of the film easily exceeded anything that you're gonna get on a home theater system, much less off your laptop.
I'll admit to being tempted several times to get up and rock out with the Ramones myself, especially when they finally arrive onscreen some thirty minutes into the picture, shambling down the sidewalk outside the Roxy Theatre on Sunset, rather crudely miming "I Just Want to Have Something to Do" for an ecstatic line of moshing fans. It really wasn't that kind of screening, though, as a couple of older patrons unhappily discovered when they tried to lead the theater in a "Hey! Ho! Let's Go!" chant when the clock chimed 7:30 and the picture hadn't started rolling yet. In case any of us were feeling just a little too old for our outfits, the Ambler staff did alert us that there was gonna be an unofficial karaoke afterparty for the screening at the cozy Forest & Main Brewing Company, where the gaggle of us who actually showed up mostly kept to our unsightly selves in the bar lounge, and slurred our way through a few more Ramones hits to more or less empty the place out by 10:00 p.m. I was heartbroken, however, when my host informed me that my favorite of the band's songs, "Questioningly" from Road to Ruin, was not on tap.
I'll fully cop to being prejudiced in favor of declaring Rock 'n' Roll High School a masterpiece, if only for the fact that I love the Ramones. Really, calling Rock 'n' Roll High School a "masterpiece" is only accurate to the extent that I'm fully immersed in a kind of contrarian thinking where there's just a certain type of "B" movie where the balance between technical accomplishment and slapdash cynicism is such that even a film's flaws can be seen as features rather than bugs. Arkush conceived of the story for the film with Joe Dante, but the screenplay was cobbled together by Richard Whitley, Russ Dvonch, and Joseph McBride, and the film is written and presented in a style of cornball affectation that will be familiar to (and just as much dreaded by) those who are even cursorily familiar with the kind of cinema that Corman thrived upon throughout his career. It's hard enough to write a good comedy, but virtually impossible when screenwriters who aren't established comic writers are expected to write a comedy within the timetable that America's emperor of schlock demands. There are plenty of inspired bits, or, rather, inspired lines in Rock 'n' Roll High School. I would even hazard to say that, as a comedy, it is at least mostly charming, if not necessarily funny. But the movie is also stuffed with that kind of "funny-esque" Potemkin humor that, at best, rises to the level of an endearing dad joke, but mostly just falls flat on its face. As directed by Arkush - and an uncredited Dante, who briefly took over from his comrade after the former literally collapsed from exhaustion during what turned out to be a particularly strenuous shoot - the film is presented with a kind of cartoon logic. Except that, despite the production benefiting from being one of the most expensive Corman ever mounted, Rock 'n' Roll High School is still way too cheap to actually afford its creators the technical liberties to do much more than make corny gestures at that kind of Looney Tunes-styled potential. You can guarantee that most of that money disappeared down the drain of music licensing alone, anyway. So what you're left with is something more akin to a somehow overly broad knockoff of a contemporary Zucker Bros. or National Lampoon joint.
But I would still argue that Rock 'n' Roll High School amounts to a fairly stunning, ephemeral success. For whatever Arkush and Dante's shortcomings may have been, this sophomore film for the duo - who graduated from cutting trailers for New World Pictures to directing the send-up and compilation film Hollywood Boulevard three years before - proves exceptionally well-executed from a technical perspective. It's no wonder that Arkush's personal health was jeopardized during the production. With only the standard three months and change to wring a movie out of Corman's paper-thin resources, his film reflects a determination to shoot more scenes, more individual camera set-ups, and with a greater level of technical sophistication than the vast majority of his journeyman contemporaries. Rock 'n' Roll High School may not quite crack the nut as a comedy, even at the best of times, but it works superbly as a musical showcase, and it's immensely supported in this regard both by the total commitment of its cast to the flimsy bit (the reliable Woronov and Howard putting in the best work overall), but also by Arkush's more authentic attention to emotional detail, which shines through the film's myriad shortcomings.
Rock 'n' Roll High School was originally cooked up by Corman as a kind of nostalgic throwback and update of the kinds of jukebox teensploitation movies he had already made for A.I.P. in the late-'50s and '60s. But besides clear differences in both budget and a director's commitment to making good, rather than merely serviceable programmer work, what needs to be emphasized is that those old rock 'n' roll movies rarely ever rocked and/or rolled. Just as the actual content of those films tended to be a lot cheaper and more conservative than their ballyhoo publicity suggested, the musical personages and songs that popped up along the way tended to be more of the vocal pop and traditional R&B type, the stuff only the out-of-touch old fogies making these movies to exploit the teen set could get hip to. It really wasn't until the psychedelia came in that Corman seemed to develop more of an appreciation for what the delinquent rock 'n' roll culture that he read about in the papers and saw on the Billboard charts actually had been, and where it was going. By the time he was formulating the arena rock era version of the same teensploitation template, he was apparently hip enough to initially want either Cheap Trick or Todd Rundgren to be the stars of the show! But scheduling conflicts forced him to defer to marginal punk rock pioneers, who had released four studio albums in just three years, and only to subsistent commercial success.
The result is a film where an immense part of it's schizoid charm is that it seems to exist in a parallel universe where the Ramones are actually famous - where, even within the cartoon logic of the story, Riff finds that everyone in her high school wants to rock out to "Teenage Lobotomy" and "California Sun." One doesn't need to necessarily be too familiar with the Ramones cult status as a rock band to appreciate this. When Riff gets high in her bedroom after school one day and fantasizes that Joey, Johnny, Marky, and Dee Dee are all personally serenading her with one of their rare slow songs, "I Want You Around," the sheer gulf between Soles' swooning, enraptured, twitterpated performance, and lead singer Joey Ramone's pale, lanky, lurching, yellow snaggletoothed form, is simply mind-boggling. Plenty of otherwise conventionally unattractive people have been made feminine heartthrobs by the virtue of fame and some talent alone, but Joey Ramone is one of the ugliest human beings who has ever existed. The very certificate of his punk authenticity is that he looks like he was sired by Beaky the Buzzard. And yet for no other reason other than a total declamation against anything conspiring to enforce even a modicum of physical, emotional, or commercial rationality into the universe of Rock 'n' Roll High School, here he is presented as seducing P. J. Soles, clad in lacy red bra and panties. And yet, despite the viscerally disturbing and repulsive undertones of this sequence, the remarkable thing is that it absolutely works in its own awkward, deranged, Frankenstinian way. It becomes justified within the elseworld of the movie by the sheer amount of passion and heart that Arkush puts into the pageant that is potential in every frame, and every soundbite. As opposed to the program directors of the past, he himself clearly loves the contemporary rock 'n' roll music of his day, and his film sweeps you up in that enthusiasm. This isn't just commercial cynicism. This is a real rock 'n' roll movie.
That sense of heart and enthusiasm is felt in more subtle ways as well when it comes to the admittedly narrow arc of the film's respective characters. While watching Rock 'n' Roll High School this time around - and at the risk of walking into a minefield given the recent passing of Olivia Newton-John - I couldn't help but recall Grease, which had been a hit in 1978 and, in a spiritual sense at least, seems to have inspired Corman's decision to return to the well of the teensploitation rock movie. Grease is a great musical, but it's a musical that, consistent with the 1971 stage production upon which it is based, bound up in nostalgia. It captures a distinctly American style of retrenchment into cornball fantasy. For all its own corniness, Rock 'n' Roll High School is at least a parallel success as a film overall if only for its embracing of the contemporary and, when it comes to its particular affinity for marginal and cult rock music, the artistically progressive. There are nostalgic elements to the film, just as the Ramones were, in their own way, a band that was also informed by a nostalgia for the old fashioned rock 'n' roll and pop of the period in which Grease is set. But the film itself, like the music of the Ramones, is not a nostalgic production. In its technical limitations, it pushes and chaffs against its own marginalia, hungering for a kind of ecstatic liberation into the new. And the surprising depth of Arkush and Dante's film, in contrast to the shallowness of Grease, is nowhere more obvious than in how these respective productions choose to tell their own stories about youth in revolt and coming-of-age in the thrall of rock 'n' roll. Riff and her friends don't sit around waiting for boys to pick them up. They take command of their own adventure. The female cast of the film don't snipe at each other over their perceived pretensions, and while the nerdy Kate may require a little help from her bestie to punk-up for the show at the Roxy, there is no baptismal transformation of her into the sort of "fast girl" who can get the guy she's crushing on. Kate's motivations in going after Tom are not subject to any kind of coquettish, stuffy put-on. Her desires are presented as explicitly, reductively sexual. I'm not about to argue that any of the characters in Rock 'n' Roll High School are necessarily three-dimensional, but they are nonetheless strong and well-rounded, and offer a vision of youthful rebellion and sexuality that is fairly liberatory, devoid of the predatory gender binaries and maudlin threats against indiscretion that the quirky nostalgia of Grease can hardly veil.
There is certainly a sexism to Rock 'n' Roll High School, which is embedded in its programatic presentation of the "student body" when it is female. Those gym uniforms that the girls wear during the first titular musical number are of the variety expressly designed to titillate, and there is one recurrent gag about Tolgar's hall monitor henchmen performing off-screen strip-searches of young women that has aged particularly poorly. But even still, the PG-rated Rock 'n' Roll High School also proves particularly remarkable - especially in the canon of New World Pictures and contemporary exploitation movies - in terms of how restrained it is even when it aims for a modicum of sexual exploitation. Come to think of it, the only actress in the picture who is subject to a particularly lascivious shot of her "student body" is one Marla Rosenfield, who plays one of Riff and Kate's mutual friends, and that comes only at the end of the movie. But Rosenfield herself is not, for how her character chooses to dress, presented as a ditz or a slut or an object. Even when Arkush has the Corman-mandated opportunity to exploit and objectify, he overtly chooses not to do so, as in a scene following the "Rock 'n' Roll High School" number when the girls are all in the locker room. In any other New World Pictures film, even a PG one, this would be an apt opportunity to really explore those "student bodies," but Arkush conducts the entire scene rather tastefully, with only one shot set-up as the girls crowd around the mirror, viewed from the shoulders-up, wrapped in their towels, and with the focus consistently upon their facial performances reflected back at us. Arkush may not have been above enjoying Rosenfield's body for the purpose of its own narrow titillation of the spectator, just as Rosenfield herself doesn't seem to be having a bad time being a titillating character, but it must be said that he directs much of Rock 'n' Roll High School with a height of respect for his female performers, and with the objective of making a film that is mostly just fun and cute, rather than sexy. It's that sort of earnestness, whether in terms of visual production, musicality, or just the character focus, that keeps Rock 'n' Roll High School alive and jumping, to an extent that even its rutty bits, not unlike the looming visage of Joey Ramone himself, are endemic to why it works as well as it does.
Comments
Post a Comment