Word: wax
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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...
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...
...snow depths regularly reach to the third-story window. Each flake, she explains, is in fact clusters of crystals that become stuck together as they fall. She tells how the crystals themselves form, and how snow changes once it falls. It is useful information, especially for skiers, who should wax their boards differently for different types of snow. Small wonder, she notes, that the Eskimos have more than two dozen words in their language to describe various kinds of snow. Yet the substance, which slowed