Old Yorker

  • The Buddy Holly Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve Rash (1978)

    I saw this on its original release but couldn’t remember anything about it, except that I enjoyed it and thought Gary Busey was good as Buddy Holly.   Seeing it thirty years later, on BBC4 – along with an Arena programme about Holly (made in 1985), to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death – I still feel the same about Busey, though the film isn’t otherwise up to much.   It picks up Holly’s life in his home town of Lubbock, Texas in 1956 and ends with a freeze frame of him onstage at Clear Lake, Iowa – on the night of his death in a plane crash on 3 February 1959.  (In the film that date is wrongly shown on the publicity outside the Surf Ballroom, the venue for Holly’s final performance.  The show – with Dion and the Belmonts, Ritchie Valens and J P ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson also on the bill – took place on the evening of 2 February.  Valens and Richardson died too, with the pilot of the plane that Holly had chartered, in the crash at 1am the following morning.)

    For all the imagination it shows, Robert Gittler’s screenplay – supposedly adapted from a book by John Goldrosen – might as well be based on a primer on how to write a 50s rock star biopic.  Gittler isn’t an apt pupil, however.  One of the standard scenes shows an indifferent or hostile audience realising that the star-to-be has talent.  In the British sub-division of the genre, bored teenagers may be sitting in an espresso bar when the hero starts strumming his guitar.  Their faces brighten up, they click their fingers, they exclaim, ‘Hey, that’s not bad!’ (usually in middle-class accents).  There’s more than one equivalent to this in The Buddy Holly Story.  Buddy and the Crickets (whose sound has got them mistaken for a black band) play the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, where no white act has ever appeared before.  Winning this house over must have been a very big deal indeed but you’d never get that from the perfunctory way it’s shown here.  The large black audience, all smiling and grooving within seconds, don’t amount to much more of a conquest than those sullen adolescents in sparsely populated English coffee bars.  The scene certainly has no more weight than the opening sequence at the Lubbock skating rink, when the home town youngsters start jiggling about to Holly’s music.

    Scrambling facts and chronology for dramatic effect is a pretty well accepted convention with this sort of material.  In this case, the standout fiction seems pointless.   The two Crickets, from whom Buddy has recently split, arrive at his Greenwich Village apartment on the night of the Clear Lake performance and tell his wife Maria Elena that they’ve decided to travel to Buddy’s next gig, in Minnesota, to surprise him and say they want to get back together. We never see their (or Maria Elena’s) reaction to the news of his death.   I didn’t regret that omission (the film ends at the right moment) – but why invent this scene if there’s no payoff?    The script sets up the Holly band’s ‘jungle music’ in contrast to established types of music:  the innocuous harmonies that are acceptable fare to the older generations in Lubbock; country and western (there’s an abortive visit to cut a record in Nashville); classical (represented by two cartoon character musicians brought in for the recording of “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”).  But it does so mechanically, superficially.  The film doesn’t explore what rock ‘n’ roll meant to Buddy Holly.

    There are some sequences where the director, Steve Rash, shows more sensitivity than the script deserves.   Panning across the locals at the Lubbock rink, he gets some flavour of Holly’s small town background.  When Jesse Charles and Ray Bob Simmons, the other Crickets, decide to split from Buddy, the break-up occurs in their dressing room.  The rupture is poorly prepared for; until a couple of minutes before, we’ve had no sense that the other two don’t share Buddy’s desire to be at the centre of things in New York and are homesick for Texas, but the scene itself is nicely done.  The three boys are quiet, almost shocked by what’s happening.  The dominant sound is the insistent plink-plonk music accompanying a performing animals act on the stage the Crickets have recently left.    There’s a good, rough rhythm to the immediately preceding onstage sequence, when Buddy – for whom the audience is still calling after his act has ended – does an impromptu double act with Eddie Cochran (Jerry Zaremba), who’s followed him on the bill.  Buddy’s final routine at Clear Lake is well done too.   Sometimes – in the candy-coloured, softly lit images of people arriving at the Lubbock skating rink or the Surf Ballroom – Steve Rash seems to be trying to evoke the texture of a vanished, more innocent time but this doesn’t develop into a coherent approach.  When a legend comes up on the screen over the final image of Buddy, explaining what happened later that night and that ‘The rest is rock ‘n’ roll’, you wonder if the filmmakers had any aspiration beyond bland tribute.  The implication is that the 1950s must have been a better time simply because they contained Buddy Holly.

    Insinuating itself into this jerry-built construction is an interpretation of Buddy Holly which, given the shallowness of what surrounds it, seems almost subversively earnest.  Gary Busey is not always appealing or fully convincing – the film might be more simply enjoyable with an easily amiable performer as Buddy.  Yet Busey is incredibly consistent and ultimately very likeable; he gives the proceedings a redeeming friction.   Right from the start, he has an aggressive quality onstage which doesn’t correspond either with one’s idea of Buddy Holly (that may not be the right idea, of course) or with anything in the script.  You never get much sense that Busey’s Holly connects with or enjoys performing before an audience.   What you do get when he’s on stage is an eccentric energy and a strong sense of commitment to the music he’s playing.   Busey does his own singing; his voice isn’t particularly distinctive but it seems to be coming out of the character that he creates – questing, harshly determined, emotionally always just out of reach of those he’s with – and this is much more satisfying than vocal impersonation.

    Busey is terrific in the Cochran sequence and there’s a raw plangency in his performance of “True Love Ways” and the final medley at the Surf Ballroom.  There’s not much chemistry between him and the Crickets (Don Stroud and Charles Martin Smith).  There’s a lot more, though – and softer shadings to his portrait of Holly – in his scenes with women and children:  in his courtship of Maria Elena (the gentle Maria Richwine) and especially in the touching scene when two young boys in the New York apartment block ask him to fix their guitar.  This is true even of the sequence in which Buddy visits Maria Elena’s sternly protective aunt to request her permission to date her niece (Buddy and Maria Elena met two weeks before they married and he died less than six months after the wedding).  This interview is stupidly conceived:  the aunt, like Maria (Buddy’s producer’s secretary), works in the music business and Buddy is a star, known through national television as well as radio.  There’s no reason why he would think she wouldn’t know who he was (their meeting ends with the punchline, ‘And, Buddy, I think you’re great on American Bandstand’).  But Busey plays the scene charmingly (as does Gloria Irizarry, as the aunt).

    The film won an Academy Award for Best Score Adaptation.  Gary Busey, who never enjoyed anything like this kind of success again (even before a serious road accident in 1988), was nominated for Best Actor.

    6 February 2009

  • Peggy Sue Got Married

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Coppola (1986)

    When Peggy Sue Bodell (née Kelcher) is named as ‘queen’ at her high school reunion (class of 1960), she’s so overcome that she faints and wakes to find herself transported back to her teenage years.  Peggy Sue is aware that she’s travelled in time but her friends and family see the girl they know and are puzzled when Peggy Sue reacts with amazement to meeting them and tells them, from experience, what will happen in their future.  Revisiting the past – returning to a time when you were young, your parents weren’t old and your grandparents were alive – should have considerable emotional heft but the film, although often effortfully hectic, has a heavy, unhappy spirit.   It’s hard to see from the end result what Coppola (who made this in the period when he was Ford-less) saw in the screenplay by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner.

    It may be unfair to blame Kathleen Turner, who plays Peggy, too harshly but the success of this fragile enterprise depends so much on the lead actress that it’s hard to resist doing so.  Peggy Sue is uncomfortable in the 1960 teenager’s dress her daughter Beth has persuaded her mother to wear for the reunion.  But, once she’s back in the time of her youth, it’s the actress rather than the character who seems uneasy in adolescent outfits and there’s no humour in the unease.  The larger problem is that Turner is emotionally slow-moving.  Someone taller but more fluid, Geena Davis say, would have worked better in the role, been more able to bring out the comedy of Peggy’s situation – as well as her youthfulness.   The mid-life Peggy Sue is divorcing Charlie, who was her teenage sweetheart.  Much of the action during her regression to 1960 focuses on their courtship (it seems that, because Peggy knows the marriage went wrong, we’re supposed to find this suspenseful – as if she could decide not to marry him – although the writers don’t seem to have fully worked out the what-might-have-been scheme of things).  There’s a moment when the couple are out together by a moonlit lake.  Peggy says, ‘I want to be a dancer!’, and Turner does a leaden twirl. She doesn’t suggest either a young, free spirit or the pathos of encroaching middle age.

    It was never clear to me whether we were supposed to find Kathleen Turner believable as a teenager.  Suspending disbelief about that (accepting that the people in 1960 see her as seventeen but we see her as older because we know her as someone older) turns out to be less problematic than the high-school contemporaries in Peggy Sue’s past.  They also seem to be acting unconvincingly younger than their years – so there’s no real contrast with the time-travelling Peggy.  Jim Carrey, twenty-four at the time, is strikingly accomplished but largely because you know what he’s going to go on to after this movie.  Nicolas Cage, who was only twenty-two when the film was made, is baffling.   As the young Charlie, he does a crude cartoon of adolescence – and when Charlie speaks lines like, ‘What’s the point of being a teenager if you can’t dress weird?’, Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner make him sound like an older person with a stupid, clumsy idea of the-things-kids-say (like the writers themselves, in other words).   There’s nothing touching in the central romance because Cage’s Charlie is charmless – you get no sense of his being irresistible to Peggy at the time but a heartbreaking disappointment later on.  What’s remarkable is that Cage is much better – more natural and engaged with the character – in his scenes as the louche Charlie (who makes a living acting in commercials etc) in his late thirties.  (It’s even more remarkable that Cage gave so much more mature a performance in Raising Arizona in the same year as Peggy Sue Got Married and made Moonstruck only a year later.)

    The falsity of the most of the adolescent portraits made me wonder if Coppola is aiming at something more complex than he manages to convey – whether we’re seeing the teenagers in 1960 as Peggy Sue sees them, as a mixture of who they were at the time and the people she knows they’ve turned into.  Jordan Cronenweth’s lighting gives the landscape of Peggy Sue’s youth an unnatural, idealised look:  is Coppola (who was twenty-one in 1960) suggesting that his generation inevitably sees this time as a golden age – or that the viewpoint of a mid-1980s film audience is filtered through intervening nostalgic American movies preoccupied with the music and cars and clothes of the period – American Graffiti, The Buddy Holly Story, even Grease?    There are odd facets of the age confusion of Peggy Sue that are affecting:   Helen Hunt (twenty-three at the time) seems more grown up than Kathleen Turner in the high-school reunion sequence, not just because of the latter’s too-young outfit; Barbara Harris, as Peggy’s mother, is mysteriously both younger and older than her daughter.  Joan Allen as Peggy’s friend Maddy is clearly meant to have a middle-aged soul even as a teenager.  But the fact that Barry Miller is credible as both the junior and senior versions of Richard, dismissed as a nerd in high school but a successful businessman years later (and the reunion ‘king’), makes you suspect that Coppola wanted the film to be convincing in a more straightforward way than it is.  Except for Sofia Coppola, who has a likeable gaucheness in the small role of Peggy Sue’s younger sister, Miller is the only younger performer with charm:  Richard is geeky but charm is a commodity in such short supply in this film that you’re grateful for it in any form.   (There’s not that much of it in the older generations:  Barbara Harris and Don Murray, as Peggy’s father, both have it; Maureen O’Sullivan, as her grandmother, signally lacks it.)   The movie takes its title from a Buddy Holly song, less well-known than ‘Peggy Sue’, which is played over the opening credits.  John Barry has written a score with a pleasing, plangent melody at its centre:  because there’s so little emotional texture for it to support, however, Barry’s theme becomes too insistent.  Peggy Sue Got Married now offers an interesting opportunity to see a range of young actors who went on to better things but the film itself is almost entirely unsuccessful.

    7 October 2010

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