Word: wax
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American Hot Wax purports to be the saga of this modern cultural genesis, and in some ways it adequately serves this function. However, the movie re-creates the '50s and the upheaval that begat rock and roll with a disturbingly developed sense of ficto-history, portraying as true and factual that which is romanticized and basically false...
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...
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...
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...
...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...