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