Their Satanic Majesties' Celluloid Regret

Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance with Popular Music, the long-gestating, virtuosic new work by David E. James, primarily known for his work on the American avant-garde in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (1989) and The Most Typical Avant-Garde (2005), tackles the intersection of cinema and the shambolic, transformative, and appropriative cultural amalgamation that came to be known as rock 'n' roll. It is perhaps surprising that this topic remains unexplored, given the ongoing cross-medial nature of pop and audiovisual media evidenced by the recent ecstatic reception of Beyoncé's Lemonade and the ubiquity of televisual "backstage" industry musicals (Empire, Star, Nashville, Sun Records, The Get Down, Vinyl, etc.). Pop music continues to be dismissed as a doggerel and delinquent cultural form that persists in evading even the widening aegis of media studies. James's examination, closely argued with texts obvious and recondite, reveals a heretofore obscured history of pop's transformative influence on Western film forms ranging from classical Hollywood to independent, avant-garde, and documentary traditions.

Composed of eighteen chapters, James's history of rock 'n' roll's interactions with cinema reads as comprehensive yet surprisingly succinct. The author proceeds along a set of familiar dichotomies: low versus high, spectacle versus narrative, communal folk art versus commerce, black versus white, and pop music versus film. James enriches and augments these commonplace axes by suggesting that cinema's intermedial employment of rock 'n' roll served as much as a cross-promotional tool as it did to preserve the established hierarchies of the culture industry. For example, the use of Bill Haley and His Comet's "Rock Around the Clock" in Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) was greeted with "frenzied jubilation from below augmenting apoplectic fear from above that linked it to threats of communism . . . and the escalation of juvenile delinquency" (25). Producers strove not only to normalize the music's rebellious potential but also to ensure that it "did not threaten cinema's position at the apex of the culture industry" (30). Columbia Studios, the distributor of the independently produced Blackboard Jungle, profited from the controversy surrounding the film, cashing in on a "800% return" on its shoestring budget (42).

Rock 'N' Film restores historical significance to the resultant genre, jukebox musicals, feature films that built on the generic traditions established by the revue film, 1930s and 1940s backstage musicals, and the musician biopic genre formed around jazz bandleaders such as Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman (44). Initiated with the Alan Freed–starring Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956), jukebox musicals were "low-budget films made by small independent production companies, the cinematic equivalent of the small companies that recorded early rock 'n' roll" (43). These particular films worked to normalize the transgressive possibilities of rock 'n' roll by placing an emphasis not on the biracial social interaction beyond the stage but instead on the industry-associated promoter or disc jockey (such as Freed). James reveals cinema's role in the whitening of the music, carefully noting that while these films proved "radically progressive" in "emphasizing the primacy of black musicians and integrating them with whites in concert," black musicians rarely migrated from spectacle to narrative, narratives that primarily concerned white teenagers and industry insiders (45). Often culminating in a televisual special performance, jukebox musicals contributed to the project of distancing rock 'n' roll from associations of delinquency by reimaging the genre as a positive social force while confining its ascendant economic possibilities within an established cultural hierarchy that placed it below cinema and television in mid-1950s America.

In addition to exploring a number of lesser-known musical film styles and stars, Rock 'N' Film also attends to the filmic transformations made in relation to the three most enduring artists of the period: Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. In the tightly composed fourth chapter, James contrasts the star image of Jayne Mansfield (primarily in the...