by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the dreariness of the first rock movie Charles and I
watched last night, Rock, Rock, Rock!,
our second one, Hey, Let’s Twist!,
was a revelation (and it helped that we were watching it in a quite good DVD
transfer from The Video Beat instead of a crummy download from archive.org — at
times the picture quality on Rock, Rock, Rock! was so ghostly Charles got the impression that the
Moonglows and the Teenagers were racially mixed groups because the guys in the
back had so much color drained from their faces that in this cheap
black-and-white film, ill treated through years of abuse and generations of
copying, they looked white). Not
that it was any great shakes as a film, but its director, Greg Garrison, was
miles ahead of the director of Rock, Rock, Rock!, Will Price, in doing creative camera angles and
rapid-fire cutting. Instead of presenting the performances from one static
camera shooting from one unchanging angle, as Price and most of the directors
of the Freed movies did, Garrison propels us into the action and makes the
music of his star attraction, Joey Dee and the Starliters, as exciting as the
script by Hal Hackady (a name that seems to invite bad puns!) tells us it is.
(He also fills the screen with lots of close-up of women’s butts encased in
tight knit pants — obviously he didn’t want to fall into the trap of previous
rock movies that had appealed mainly to girls; he wanted to give straight guys a reason to watch it as well!) Return with us to
those thrilling days of 1961, when there was a new dance craze called the Twist
and it had two ruling gods, a Black one named Chubby Checker and a white one
named Joey Dee. Actually “The Twist,” the song, had been written by 1950’s
R&B vet Hank Ballard and recorded by his group, The Midnighters, in 1960 —
only, in one of the most boneheaded decisions of all time, Ballard and his record
company, King, decided to put “The Twist” as the B-side of Ballard’s haunting R&B ballad “Teardrops on
Your Letter.” Enter Chubby Checker and the guys at Cameo-Parkway Records, who
heard a hit song buried on Ballard’s B-side and had Checker record it in
virtually the same arrangement.
The result was a record whose sales soared into
the stratosphere, and also attracted a white imitator named Joey Dee, who
recorded something called “The Peppermint Twist” (itself largely ripped off
from Ray Charles, specifically his original “What’d I Say” and his arrangement
of Hank Snow’s country hit “I’m Movin’ On”) and held forth at the Peppermint
Lounge in New York City, where his
record label, Roulette, recorded him live … well, at least they said they did; in fact his album was studio-recorded with
a lot of applause and crowd noise dubbed in later to make it sound live. (A lot of faux “live” albums were made that way in the early
1960’s.) Needless to say, both Chubby Checker and Joey Dee got movie deals out
of their Twist successes (while Hank Ballard grabbed at least a bit of the
revenue when King reissued his version of “The Twist” as an A-side; at one
point America was so Twist-crazy that Checker’s “The Twist” was number one on
the charts and Ballard’s was right behind it at number two!). Checker signed
with Columbia and got put into excruciatingly exact remakes of the Alan Freed
movies Rock Around the Clock and Don’t
Knock the Rock — inevitably retitled Twist
Around the Clock and Don’t Knock
the Twist — while Dee signed with Harry
Romm Productions, who commissioned a script from Hal Hackady that purported to
tell the story of how Joey Dee had invented the Twist (which, as noted above,
he hadn’t) but really recycled The Jazz Singer along with every 1930’s and 1940’s movie about a
star who lets sudden success go to his head and abandons his true values to
attract lots of money and a spoiled rich girl. In this one the Al Jolson role
is split between two brothers, Enrico (Joey Dee) and Rosario (Teddy Randazzo —
so last night Charles and I were unwittingly having a Teddy Randazzo film
festival!) DiDonato, whose father (Dino Di Luca) has somehow been scraping
$1,000 to send his two boys to college, Rosario to be a lawyer and Enrico a
teacher, even though his only visible, above-board source of income is a
decrepit Italian restaurant called the Neapolitan Gardens whose sole customer
base is the younger DiDonatos and its hostess, Angie (Kay Armen), who’s been in
unrequited love with Daddy DiDonato ever since his wife died a few years
before. What Dad doesn’t realize is that it’s really costing his sons $3,000
each to go to college, and they’re making up the difference by fronting a rock
band that plays Twist songs.
They come home for Christmas break and break it to
Dad that they don’t want to go to
college anymore; they want to quit school and play music full-time — and the
shock propels Dad into a nervous breakdown that lasts for several reels.
Eventually, charged with running the Neapolitan Gardens while their father is
convalescing, the kids put in a bandstand, put the tables together and make it
into the Peppermint Lounge nightclub — which is an instant hit with the
neighborhood kids and makes The Twist the irresistible dance craze it was for
real when this film was released. Of course, things can’t stay that way;
Hackady has to introduce some complications, and they duly show up in the
person of Sharon (Zohra Lampert in a nice bad-girl performance), a gossip
columnist who arranges for the Starliters to play at the Toy Ball, her big
fundraiser of the year. They’re introduced to the smart set, and Rosario —
who’s been rechristened “Ricky Dee” in the publicity for the event, as Enrico
has become “Joey Dee” — is immediately smitten with Sharon and the world of
people like Walter Winchell, Elsa Maxwell and Ed Sullivan to whom she
introduces the young, naïve brothers. Hackady seems to have been channeling the
script for the 1956 film of James M. Cain’s Serenade for this character — especially the role played by
Joan Fontaine (who was a Gay man in Cain’s novel), who’s described as burning
through protégés in three weeks, then getting bored, dumping them and leaving
them behind with a cheery unconcern about what they’re going to do with the
rest of their lives. In Sharon’s entourage is a good girl, Piper (Jo Ann
Campbell), who also falls for Ricky — and Joey falls in unrequited love with her — and the film’s climax is when the Peppermint
Lounge forsakes its no-cover, no-minimum, no-reservations policy and drives
away the kids in Sharon’s demented effort to make it a spot for the 1 percent.
Instead of making more money with Sharon’s policy, the newly redecorated
Peppermint Lounge bombs, and Ricky disappears after Sharon rejects his marriage
proposal (but keeps the ring he was going to give her for an engagement ring —
she’s that kind of woman).
Meanwhile, back at the Peppermint Lounge, proximity works its magic and, with
Ricky gone, Piper decides that Joey is the DiDonato brother she really loves. They reopen the lounge with its old policy,
it’s a hit again, and six months later Ricky finally returns — he had (surprise!) gone back to college and got his law degree after
all, deciding to let Joey be the musician in the family.
Hey, Let’s
Twist! isn’t a great movie, but it’s the
kind of innocent fun a rock ’n’ roll movie ought to be and it benefits from a
cast of people who can actually act. Joey Dee isn’t called upon to do much more
than play himself (or at least Hal Hackady’s movie-clichéd version of himself)
but he does so with an easy power and authority that commands the screen, and
Randazzo — who shone in Rock, Rock, Rock! simply because the rest of its cast (particularly Tuesday Weld and
Fran Manfred) were so incredibly incompetent, mouthing their wretched lines
like porn stars who couldn’t wait to get to the sex — seemed to have improved
as an actor in the intervening four years. The actors who play Dad and Angie
are also surprisingly good, managing to flesh out the clichéd bones of their
characters — and Kay Armen actually gets to sing two songs, an Italian song at
the beginning and a Twist number at the end, and does them quite beautifully.
Jo Ann Campbell is the weak link of the cast as far as acting is concerned, but
when she gets up in the final scene to belt out her Twist number, that ceases to matter; as a singer and
especially as a dancer, she grips the screen. One thing I noticed while
watching Hey, Let’s Twist! was
how derivative many of the songs were — not only did Dee’s big hit “The
Peppermint Twist” rip off Ray Charles, he also does a song called “Roly Poly”
which is actually a clever rewrite of the melody of “Will the Circle Be
Unbroken?” and another one called “Shakin’ and Twistin’” which is a blatant
ripoff of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.” Another thing I noticed was that
Joey Dee and the Starliters were actually a racially mixed band — their
keyboard player and drummer were both Black, and the film doesn’t make a
dramatic issue of this at all,
though even in 1961, 24 years after the Benny Goodman Quartet became the first
racially mixed band on film in the Warners’ musical Hollywood Hotel, it still seemed surprising to see white and Black
musicians playing together on screen. Charles noted that when Dee covered the
Isley Brothers’ “Shout” — he was, as far as I know, the first white person to
do this song — you could hear one of his Black band members shout the famous
line from the Isleys’ original, “Now wa-a-a-ait a min-ute!
I feel a-a-a-a-l ri-i-i-ight!,”
and all of a sudden the song seems to erupt into a new and more soulful world
far removed from the Twisting pretensions of Joey Dee and all the white kids in
the movie (though before she made this film, Jo Ann Campbell had covered LaVern
Baker’s hit “Jim Dandy” and done surprisingly well by it — as she did by Johnny
Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive”), a harbinger of the rest of the 1960’s in
which white musicians would not only take over the Black forms of
rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll but legitimately extend them into the
shimmering vistas of psychedelica.
