Rock Follies

By Frank Rich

AMERICAN HOT WAX Directed by Floyd Mutrux Screenplay by John Kaye

This sentimental film biography of pioneer Rock Disc Jockey Alan Freed is the work of slobs, but there's no use pretending that it isn't fun. In its own bumbling way, American Hot Wax rekindles the cataclysmic spirit of the rock-'n'-roll revolution of the 1950s. Audiences who care little for rock should stay away, and so should anyone who expects movies to offer a credible plot. American Hot Wax is largely meant for a hard-core crowd--the moviegoers who have seen Saturday Night Fever three times and are desperate for a new rock-film fix.

American Hot Wax, sad to say, is not in the class of John Travolta's disco musical. It has more in common with such cheapie rock pictures as Rock, Rock, Rock and Rock Around the Clock, which Freed himself appeared in a generation ago. Like those films, American Hot Wax seems to have been thrown together in a few weeks; it relies on rude energy to overcome its essential slightness. Luckily, the energy is there--in the direction, some of the acting, and especially in the music. Any movie that features Chuck Berry stomping out Roll Over Beethoven and Jerry Lee Lewis igniting Great Balls of Fire cannot be a complete waste of time.

The film's vague story starts at the peak of Freed's career, when he was spreading the rock gospel on New York radio and staging riotous live shows at Brooklyn's Paramount Theater. Much of the screenplay appears to be Hollywood fantasy. In his desire to pander to adolescents, Writer John Kaye has transformed his hero into a Christlike figure: kids grovel at the deejay's feet while rockhating adults hound him literally to his death. The real Freed, a self-destructive man who died at age 43 in 1965, is far more fascinating than Kaye lets on.

Some of the flavor missing in the script is captured by Tim McIntire's crafty performance in the starring role. Chainsmoking Luckies and always looking in four directions at once, McIntire's Freed is a classic show-biz hustler. The film's best scenes show him at his office dickering with the fast-talking agents who assaulted him day and night. McIntire listens to auditioning singers for only a few bars before turning thumbs up or down, and he exercises his power with sleazy theatrical relish. Unfortunately, even McIntire cannot fill in the movie's most gaping holes: we never do learn about Freed's personal life or even how the man discovered his then radical professional calling.

There are many other rich stories that American Hot Wax shortchanges. Though the movie indicates that rock brought kids of all races and classes together, it never makes dramatic capital out of this crucial aspect of the music's social impact. Freed's susceptibility to payola, which ultimately proved his undoing, is mentioned only in passing and is then blithely excused. Kaye chooses to dwell instead on a tired subplot about a starry-eyed teen-age songwriter (Laraine Newman, of NBC's Saturday Night Live) who feuds with her disapproving folks.

If someone ever does write a script that does justice to the birth of the rock culture, Floyd Mutrux may be the man to direct it. This erratic film maker at times creates exhilarating order out of American Hot Wax's chaos. There is one infectious sequence in a sound studio where a record producer (played by real-life Record Producer Richard Perry) flamboyantly reshapes a lame rock song into a hit; there's also a surprisingly touch ing scene in which the president of the Buddy Holly Fan Club (well acted by Moosie Drier, 13) tells Freed of his sorrow over Holly's death. Such isolated moments do not bring American Hot Wax to a crescendo, but no one can accuse Mutrux of ever losing the film's rocking beat.

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