There’s a really great film to be made about the influential rise and payola-plagued downfall of seminal rock ’n’ roll disc jockey Alan Freed. This well-intentioned yet utterly incoherent mess isn’t that flick any more than the ’99 TV movie that miscast Judd Nelson as the ingenious impresario.
Here he’s played by the very fine and gone-too-soon character actor Tim McIntire, who now strikes me as resembling a young Adam Schiff. It’s a quality performance: his expressions alone convey the range of reactions Freed must have experienced amid the relentless mania he stoked during his heyday. He’s noteworthy, deserving of a better biopic; it’s everything else with this picture that’s a waste, including an eye-rolling love/hate romance between his assistant and driver (Fran Drescher and Jay Leno in early roles, the latter insufferably smarmy and sexist). Capturing the chaos that cyclonically propelled Freed to higher heights is the goal, yet the constantly overlapping dialogue — something that typically magnetizes an Altman acolyte like me — is ultimately exhausting. Altman was the expert because he knew how to lead viewers through such clutter and commotion, steering us toward subtler nuances, whereas this just throws everything higgledy-piggledy into an indecipherable cacophony. And yet it has Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, reliably compelling even if they couldn’t possibly pull off looking like their younger selves two decades later. There are also snippets of Sceamin’ Jay Hawkins (such a shame they didn’t show all of ‘I Put a Spell on You’) … and, of course, there’s this 2LP soundtrack. The first platter can be skipped apart from 10 minutes involving the names I just mentioned, and even that isn’t essential. The second disc, however, is chock-full of classics and novelties, not one of which appears on ‘American Graffiti.’ Advice: buy a cheap copy and stick the mono-originals half inside the other set. Instantly becomes a deeper trove of oldies.
#SoundtrackSunday 017
‘American Hot Wax’
A&M, 1978
d: Floyd Mutrux