Rock You Sinners

The only thing worse than the feeble storyline here is the so-called "rock 'n' roll" music performed by a bunch of ultra-square British fugitives from the Music Hall. Since the 1956 American film "Rock Around the Clock" was already a hit in the U.K., it's no wonder that the two best groups here, Art Baxter & His Rockin' Sinners and Tony Crombie & His Rockets, are carbon copies of Bill Haley & His Comets, but they pale in comparison. The rest of the singing acts are so lousy, you're advised to keep your thumb near the fast-forward button. When it came to creating rock 'n' roll, the Brits didn't have a clue in 1957.

For a start this movie was at least an attempt to follow the American lead and to call Tony Crombie a feeble attempt to copy Haley is just not on-he was an already well established jazz musician who was never afflicted with the same snobbery as many of his ilk. These kind of films were no more than something to hang the songs to same as most of the Elvis movies. True the stories were absurd but when it comes to silly musicals it began with the Busby Berkeley ones in the 20s. Crombie and Baxter made credible versions of mainly U S songs and if you go further you find the former in the 60s with organist Alan Haven recording Lennon & McCartney The first real rock'n'roll movie was A Hard Days Night,preceded by Its Trad Dad from the same director and which saw jazz and pop intermingled. I've seen worse than this-try Gonks Go Beat

Jazz music played too quickly with the words "rock and roll" popping up at random intervals does not result in a rock and roll song.

Most of the cast were at least ten years too old, some were 20 years too old, for the parts they played which was ridiculous.

A very poor attempt to cash in on the new music that was rock and roll at the time, those who bought a ticket to see it at the time must have been most disappointed. Not one act survived beyond appearing in this film, appearing in it probably killed their music careers stone dead.

This is among the top five musical films that have a dreadful storyline, that are poorly directed, produced and acted.

A lot of the dialogue is spoken as if being read straight from the script, a script that was derived in about 5 minutes.

Lyrics to the songs are dreadful and embarrassing.

The cast are among the most amateur you'll ever see and a slight redeeming feature is the dancing.

Think of 6th formers doing their end of term play and you have an idea what the films like.

So cheap the dialogue was obviously post-synced and so obscure it didn't even make it into Jenkinson & Warner's 'Celluloid Rock' (1974) or the 'NME Guide to Rock Cinema' (1981). Yet historically noteworthy as Britain's first attempt at the sort of rock'n'roll quickie that had been cleaning up on the other side of the Atlantic.

Demure young ladies with permanent waves respond ecstatically to calypso rock with a feverish gleam in their eyes which makes them look as though they're on drugs; while one of them flounces off in a huff to create a plot. Not so demure is a pre-nose job Jackie Collins before she learned to write.

Also of interest to film buffs is an appearance by Tony Crombie, who later scored a handful of films for Danzigers.