Gamming 1956 gasser Shake, Rattle and Rock!
Not all 1950s Rock'n'Roll flicks featured Bill Haley. Those that had, and had fared admirably, encouraged make-a-greenback movie-hustlers of the matinee/drive-in variety to hitch rides on the trend motored by the burgeoning teen market.
Garry Nelson (a pre-Mannix Mike Connors, billed as Touch Connors) hosts a local TV show that brings Rock'n'Roll to teenage viewers. Capable of conversing in establishment language -- but all the while of hep soul -- Garry bridges the camps.
Threaded throughout is a romantic subplot involving Lisa Gaye, to whom nature was most generous. (Dancer and sister of Debra Paget Lisa was also in 1956's Rock Around the Clock.) She plays the daughter of no-fun agitators and is also Garry's undercover paramour. Hence, a Romeo and Juliet element.
Connors/Garry and eternal-teen Sterling Holloway/Axe McAllister have channeled borderline-wayward kids into lawful pursuits.
Sports-jacketed Garry acquits himself as effective, in both decisive sense-of-mission and direct speech. He brooks no foolishness and proves a stalwart presence.
For his part, Axe deploys mile-a-minute motor-mouthisms. Often coupled with mugging and flamboyant gesticulations, they usher waves of hepcat slang. (He flings stunt phrases at every turn, pretty much a Johnny Appleseed of scat-speak.)
They and the cavorting kids envision a Boys Club-type Teen Town. "A spot of our own," one junior enthuses. "Run for and by the kids themselves!" ("You can act real wild / They don't treat you like a child!")
Fats Domino and crack band rehearse "Honey Chile" before the TV dance show's ecstatic kids, a mix of rolling musicality and teenage hijinx being the bouyant product. Also appearing in a subsequent scene is inimitable man mountain Big Joe Turner, who foghorns "Do You Wanna Jump Children." His and Fats' turns are isles of Big Beat class in shenanigans-tossed waters.
Enter the pompous vigilantes of SPRACAY -- Society for the Prevention of Rock'n'Roll Corruption of American Youth. Fussbudget kvetchers include erstwhile Marx Brothers foil Margaret Dumont and ambulatory sight gag Percy Kelton.
Following a studio dance-party invasion by the stuffy elders, Axe makes an impassioned support-letters appeal into the camera:
"Hello, you out there in videoland! Now dig this: There's a brigade of bluenoses here out to smash this whole bust-up! I need a shoulder! So, make with the quill on the parchment, please! And keep 'em comin' in! Else the whole works'll blow up -- the club, the permanent building fund, everything!
"And another thing: Get to Mama and Papa Square. Try to sell them the pitch! Huh? Radar shows trouble ahead. But are we kittens or are we cats?!"
But troubles aren't only on the stuffed-shirts front. Newly on the avenue after a stint in the Graybar Hotel, a penny-ante hood (basically a Damon Runyon knock off: "When I wish you to venture an opinion, I will ask you thereof!") deplores to a torpedo what his former Artful Dodgers had become.
"They toined square!" he laments of the teens in scenery-chewing, bent-nose fashion. His desire is to steer them back onto the pot-holed JD boulevard.
When anti-fun league SPRACAY gets the youth/Rock'n'Roll 'problem' before a judge, and seeks action against Garry and the TV station, Axe lets fly from the witness stand.
"I teed off moniker Albert, but folks now call me Axe, 'cause I chop a mean tin!," he grinned to the court.
"What language is that?" demands the befuddled jurist. Garry volunteers to translate for the judge. After headphones are rigged so that the microphoned TV host's rephrasings are judicially audible, Axe aims the jive hose.
Axe: "They dig me Axe. I chop a chop."
Garry: "They call me Axe, because of my ability to get the best in an exchange of repartee."
(Throughout the following, Axe's word-riffing is decoded by Garry.)
Axe: "Well, I cut from my pad, one early bright...I float into my set of threads...Then, I glance into the reflector on the wall. What do I gam? A nowhere! A great big nothin' from Hungerville!...So, I figure I'll salt-mine it off...So, I grab my tin. I chop off a few riffs...Zero, minus nothin'!...No bread, no ox pullin' rocks. So, I flounder over and check my chick. Well, she was macin' in it with her Jack and a joke...They're red-eyin' the silverscreen. And all of a sudden, I gammed this gasser [indicates Connors]. And judge, I dig him the most. He's makin' jazz for some diaper dots and dashes!..I figured I like this guy, so I go over and wag a tongue at 'im. We shout at each other. And you know what, judge? He took me off the ragged edge and put me on the every Saturday. So, any creep who peeps this cat is zero is nuts! He's the most!"
Moving forward, the flinty prosecutor likens gyrating teens of the Rock'n'Roll generation to filmed Aboriginal tribes. Dumont herself, though, is subsequently also seen on grainy film, kicking with flaming youth abandon to Roaring Twenties flapper Jazz.
The lesson is identical to that articulated in Bill Haley song "Teenager's Mother:" "'Cause the same thing that's worrying you / is the same thing you used to do yourself!"
As an on-film Fats Domino sings "Yes It's Me," Garry and Gaye embrace, old fogies follow the beat's siren lure, and the courtroom becomes a ballroom.
In Axe phraseology: That was the livin' end!
Shake, Rattle and Rock!: "Jump Children" (Big Joe Turner) "Rock On a Saturday Night" (Annitta Ray)
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