Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963)

Goldilocks and the Three Bares is a 1963 nudie-cutie directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and produced by Thomas J. Dowd and the legendary David F. Friedman.

Now I’m not saying that Herschell Gordon Lewis was the worst film director in history. Well actually, now that I think about it, he really was the worst film director in history. In his work there’s a dullness, a lack of inspiration, a lack of imagination, a lack of understanding of pacing and of how to structure a feature film that is in its own way quite awe-inspiring.

There was a secret to making a good nudie-cutie. Russ Meyer discovered it in The Immoral Mr Teas back in 1959. A Supreme Court ruling had decreed that nudity per se was not obscene. But you had to make the nudity non-sexual. That led to a deluge of nudist camp movies. But there is only so much nude volleyball that any human being can endure.

The secret was to find a silly, goofy, amusing and clever excuse for presenting lots of naked women. In Meyer’s film a man has his optic never damaged during a dental procedure and as a side-effect he can now see straight through women’s clothing. In Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon the first manned mission to the Moon discovers that the Moon is inhabited - by naked women. Both these gimmicks make the nudity seem fun and playful and you don’t need to resort to nude volleyball.

The other secret was to add gags. Russ Meyer’s sense of humour might not have been sophisticated but he did have a sense of humour. The Immoral Mr Teas is genuinely amusing.

Which brings us to Goldilocks and the Three Bares which is just a standard nudist camp movie. Producer Tom Dowd did however have one gimmick up his sleeve - he was going to make this a nudie musical. An interesting idea but unfortunately the five or so songs that were written for the film are atrocious. And they’re sung by Rex Marlow who had been working as a pool cleaner. As a singer he’s a great pool cleaner.

And Dowd found the world’s worst comic, Tommy Sweetwood, to provide the comic elements.

The plot, such as it is, is that nightclub singer Eddie Livingston (Rex Marlow) is sweet on publicist Alison Edwards (Louise Downe). She keeps disappearing on weekends, which puzzles him. Tommy Sweetwood follows her and discovers the shocking truth - she is a nudist! She goes to a nudist camp on weekends. Eddie is devastated. He thought she was a nice girl.

Eventually Alison and her friend Cynthia persuade Eddie and Tommy to accompany them to the nudist camp. Eddie discovers that nudists are just like ordinary people, so it’s OK for him to be in love with Alison. After lots of nude boating and horse riding everything is fine between Alison and Eddie.

The problem is that it takes the movie takes so long to get to the nudie parts and in the meantime we have to endure interminable nightclub scenes with Tommy telling terrible jokes and Eddie singing awful songs.

On the plus side when we do get to the camp there is an immense quantity of nudity with lots of very pretty unclad girls. Lewis obviously waned to push the nudity as far as he could. Frontal nudity was not allowed in 1963 but there are lots of shots that go very very close indeed to revealing all of these girls’ charms and there are glimpses of frontal nudity which were probably accidental.

The Something Weird DVD also includes another nudie musical, Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964) plus loads of extras.

The real highlight on the disc is the audio commentary for Goldilocks and the Three Bares. It features the great man, himself, David F. Friedman. As always he manages to be hugely informative and incredibly entertaining. It provides wonderful insights into the way these movies were made and marketed. The commentary is way more fun than the movie.

Goldilocks and the Three Bares isn’t really worth seeing on its own but with the commentary it becomes an absolute must.

Interestingly enough there have been a couple of truly excellent nudie musicals. The First Nudie Musical (1976) and Cinderella (AKA The Other Cinderella, 1977) are delightful movies which I highly recommend.

Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964)

Sinderella and the Golden Bra is a 1964 nudie-cutie and it also belongs to a rather small sub-genre, the nudie musical.

It has what seems like a perfect setup for a nudie-cutie. It’s the Cinderella story, but when our heroine flees the masked ball she doesn’t leave behind her glass slipper but her bra. A golden bra. So in order to find the mysterious girl whom the price hopes to marry the kingdom has to be searched for a maiden possessing the physical attributes that will perfectly fill out that golden bra. It’s exactly the sort of naughty but goofy concept you want for a movie such as this. Honestly, with that setup you can’t go wrong. But surprisingly this movie does go wrong, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

The prince is a dreamy lad and his father feels that his son needs to be married off as soon as possible. A masked ball to which every young lady in the kingdom will be invited seems like the answer. Somewhere in this land there has to be a girl capable of arousing the prince’s interest.

The problem is that he already knows which girl he wants to marry - the one he keeps dreaming about.

The king is really much more interested in his knitting than in his son’s romantic problems. The idea of a king devoting himself to knitting is mildly amusing at first but it wears thin real fast.

Derella (Suzanne Sybele) is of course the step-sister of two awful girls, Flossy and Fanny. Both they and their mother treat Derella with contempt. Derella is beautiful but no-one has noticed.

Instead of a fairy godmother she has a fairy godfather who does the magic stuff with pumpkins to get Derella to the ball. He’s well-meaning but he’s a drunk and he’s been a failure as a fairy godfather.

Derella flees from the ball at the stroke of midnight, minus her bra. The rest of the movie follows the basic fairy tale story.

Now, as to what went wrong. Firstly, the songs are rather lacklustre. Secondly, the jokes are rather feeble. The biggest problem however is that by 1964 nudie-cutie standards it’s ridiculously tame. We get a few very brief glimpses of bare breasts. Given that the musical and comedy elements are not up to scratch the movie could still have been saved had it been made genuinely titillating. But it isn’t. And we spend the whole movie expecting that we will see Derella’s presumably impressive bust but all we get is a brief flash. Given that Suzanne Sybele isn’t much of a singer or actress you have to wonder why she was cast if she wasn’t willing to show a bit more skin.

Of course it’s probable that the print that Something Weird found is the only surviving print and it is possible that it was cut at some stage. But it gives the impression that it really was simply a very tame film.

The print is certainly in very poor condition. There’s a lot of print damage.

Sinderella and the Golden Bra is good-natured and inoffensive but doesn’t quite make it. It is mildly interesting if you’re into nudie fairy tales.

Something Weird paired this film on DVD with H.G. Lewis’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares which I am yet to watch. There are of course also the assorted short subjects you expect from Something Weird.

Some online reviews will tell you that this is one of only two known nudie musicals. That is utter nonsense. There have been quite a few, several of which are in fact extremely good.

The First Nudie Musical (1976) is inspired sexy craziness and I highly recommend it. And the 1977 Cinderella (AKA The Other Cinderella) is an example of how to do a nudie musical fairy tale properly. It’s very sexy and very crazy and the songs are a riot.

The First Nudie Musical (1976)

The First Nudie Musical is exactly what it says it is. It’s a nudie musical. And it was the first nudie musical. It defined the nudie musical genre. OK, so it’s the only softcore porn musical ever made. But I guess it qualifies as ground-breaking.

Harry Schechter’s movie studio is in trouble. His father founded the studio back in the golden years of Hollywood but now Harry has to make porno movies in order to keep the studio afloat. He’s produced such classics as Stewardesses in Cages and Cheerleaders in Chains. Now he desperately needs a new idea. And he has one. A nudie musical. He’s sure it will save the studio.

It will have to save the studio. If it doesn’t his backers will move in, take over the studio and turn it into a shopping mall. That would break Harry’s heart. He fells he has a duty to his father to keep the studio going. It would also break the heart of his faithful assistant Rosie. They have two weeks to make this movie, and hardly any money.

Their troubles have only just begun. One of the backers has insisted that his nephew John should direct the film. John is not exactly well qualified to direct a sex movie, having zero experience with either film-making or sex.

Everything that could go wrong does go wrong but Harry doesn’t give up. Show business is in his blood. It’s all he knows.

This is essentially a backstage musical in the grand old “the show must go on” tradition of 42nd Street, but with naked women. And it really is a genuine backstage musical, obeying pretty much all the conventions of the genre - the setbacks, the heartbreaks, the dramas with the leading lady, the desperate need to come up with a hit, the last-minute search for a replacement for the leading lady. But of course it’s played for laughs. So it’s a sex comedy as well as a backstage musical.

It helps that the principals are actually pretty good. Stephen Nathan as Harry and Bruce Kimmel as the hapless director John handle the comedy adeptly. Cindy Williams, who plays Rosie, would go to TV comedy stardom in Laverne and Shirley and she’s excellent. While the three principals don’t take their clothes off just about everybody else does. While Cindy Williams keeps her clothes on she is the star feature of a musical production number celebrating the joys of cunnilingus.

Look out for Ron Howard in a small uncredited part (and no, he doesn’t take his clothes off either).

Bruce Kimmel wrote the script (and produced and gets a co-directing credit) and the script really is quite amusing.

The songs aren’t great but what’s interesting is that even though this was 1976 the songs are attempts at old-fashioned show tunes.

There’s a lot of nudity (and a lot of frontal nudity) and there are some sex scenes but this is a movie that really isn’t the slightest bit erotic. That’s not what it’s trying to do. It’s trying to be a musical comedy. The nudity is part of the joke. The sexual aspects are played for laughs, with reasonable success.

This is a movie that is serious about being a proper old-fashioned musical comedy. It respects the conventions of the genre. If you ignore the copious nudity it is in its own way a sincere tribute to that genre.

In fact at various times during the movie characters spontaneously burst into song, just as they would have done in a 1940s musical. Other songs form a part of the movie-within-a-movie. There are some pretty outrageous musical production numbers, such as Perversion, Lesbian Butch Dyke and the show-stopping (and jaw-dropping) Dancing Dildoes.

It’s also I guess a kind of satire on the skin-flick business and it’s significant that it was made in 1976, a time when the market for softcore skin flicks was starting to collapse under the onslaught of hardcore. If you wanted to do a softcore skin-flick in 1976 it helped to have a gimmick. It was a time when you could actually imagine someone thinking that a porno musical would a great idea. But this is not a porno musical - it’s a backstage musical that just happens to be set in the world of porno movies.

It’s also a fundamentally good-natured movie. Harry is a nice guy. Rosie is devoted to him. John is utterly useless as a director but he means well. The cast and crew are misfits but they’re harmless misfits. Despite the ludicrous nature of the concept we really do want Harry and Rosie to win out at the end. They’re likeable and we always want to see the little guy win in a struggle with the money-men.

And it really is quite funny. A lot of the humour is sexual, but not all. The scene with John doing the crane shots is one of the movie’s more inspired moments.

Now I know what you’re thinking. A musical should have some romance. Well there is romance and it’s actually a very wholesome romance.

I first became aware of this oddity through one of Danny Peary’s Cult Movies books, published back in the 80s. I managed to pick up all three volumes about twenty years ago and they really ignited my enthusiasm for cult movies. The First Nudie Musical was covered in the second volume so I just had to buy it on DVD. It then sat on the shelf for years until somebody recently mentioned this movie on the Classic Movie Fans group and I dug out the DVD and decided it was finally time to watch it.

This movie is an oddity but it’s a strangely engaging oddity. It shouldn’t work but mostly it does work. If you like all-singing all-dancing all-nude movies with plenty of laughs it’s the movie for you. What’s so appealing about it is that despite the nudity and the very very risqué sexual jokes this movie really is remarkably innocent. It captures the wholesome tone of 1940s musicals exactly. It’s a nice movie about nice people. It’s a feelgood movie. Even the nudity is wholesome. And unlike most modern comedies, it’s funny.

Image Entertainment’s DVD release, which is now hard to find, offers an acceptable transfer. The original negative no longer exists so it was necessary to work from some less than pristine prints and while there is some print damage the restoration is as good as this movie is ever going to look. And there are lots of extras. Including two audio commentaries and a documentary!

The First Nudie Musical had an interesting reception. Paramount had taken over the movie during the post-production stage but before it was released Cindy Williams had suddenly become a major TV star, also for Paramount. And she had become a star of family television. Paramount then decided they didn’t want her name associated with a porno musical so they deliberately sank the movie, despite the fact that it was getting rave reviews. Eventually a new distributor was found and the movie did solid business and gained a major cult following.

The First Nudie Musical is highly recommended for its quirky innocent charm.

Showgirls (1995), Blu-Ray review

Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 film Showgirls may not be the most critically reviled movie of all time but it has to be right up there in the top five. That in itself makes it interesting. I’d already seen the movie twice but recently I gave in to temptation and bought it on Blu-Ray (I already own it on DVD). I guess that has to make me a serious Showgirls fan. And I’m not ashamed.

For those who believed the critics and avoided this film the plot is straightforward. Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) arrives in Las Vegas with a dream. She wants to be a showgirl. She wants to be a superstar showgirl, like the famous Cristal Connors. She is aiming for the top, but she has to start at the bottom, working in a sleazy strip joint called Cheetah’s. She gradually works her way up. All she needs is one big break. If only by some amazing stroke of fortune she could take over Cristal Connors’ spot for one night then the world would recognise Nomi as a star. But will stardom be worth it? It’s pretty much 42nd Street but with lots and lots of nudity.

There are several ways to approach Showgirls. The easiest way is to just accept the almost universal opinion of critics at the time (and since) that it’s a spectacularly bad movie, one of the biggest turkeys of all time. The second approach is to see it as triumph of unintentional camp. Most fans of the movie (and it does have a genuine cult following) approach it this way. The third approach is to consider the possibility that the movie turned out exactly how Verhoeven wanted it to turn out, which means having to try to understand what he was actually trying to do.

I personally reject the first approach out of hand. If mainstream critics are united in reviling a particular film I immediately want to see that film. Sometimes it turns out that the critics were right but often such a film turns out to be something wondrously strange and delightful. Mainstream critics are generally incapable of understanding cult movies. Usually they ignore such movies, but Showgirls was a big-budget major-studio production so they couldn’t do that. So they savaged it.

The second approach has a lot to be said for it. Showgirls is about as camp as a movie can possibly be. Gloriously so. There are lots of moments when you ask yourself what on earth was Verhoeven thinking, or perhaps what was he smoking? Showgirls takes trashiness to places other movies never thought of going.

The third approach can be interesting. The first thing you have to do is to accept that some of the criticism levelled at Showgirls really do miss the point. For example it might be quite true that the world of superstar Las Vegas showgirls who are household names existed only in Verhoeven’s imagination. But while most people think of this movie as a Vegas movie it isn’t really. Verhoeven was not making a movie about Vegas. His target was the entire American media-entertainment world and in fact American consumerism, which (in his view) makes us all whores. I think it’s fair to say that he was also taking a swipe at celebrity worship. You might not agree with him, but those was his intentions. He could just as easily have set the movie in Hollywood but that had already been done many times and it might have been misunderstood as a movie purely about Hollywood. Las Vegas seemed better suited to his purpose. The actual Las Vegas would not have served the purpose so he invented an imaginary Vegas, in which showgirls are like movie stars.

Verhoeven was certainly aiming at satire. It’s not very subtle satire, but then Verhoeven isn’t a particularly subtle director. Verhoeven movies like RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Basic Instinct have many virtues but subtlety isn’t one of them. And even though his movies aren’t subtle they still manage to get misunderstood (Starship Troopers being an obvious example).

If you’re going to take the third approach you also need to look at Elizabeth Berkley’s performance in a new light. She gave exactly the performance Verhoeven wanted. It’s actually a very good performance but Nomi is very very unlikeable (and she is not supposed to be a sweet innocent corrupted by Vegas). It’s an extreme performance but Nomi is an extreme person. Every time she has a chance of having something good in her life she smashes it and then grinds it underfoot. That’s the sort of person she is. She’s like a feral cat that nobody is ever going to be able to tame. Berkley gave a great performance and it was the right performance but it was a performance that repelled and angered critics and her reward was to have her career destroyed.

You have to view all the performances in the light of Verhoeven’s intentions. Judged in conventional acting terms Kyle MacLachlan is stupendously awful as Cristal’s boyfriend (sort of boyfriend in a decidedly unhealthy way) Zack, but within the context of the movie he’s just right. Zack is, like everyone else in the film, a whore. He is whatever people want him to be. Gina Gershon is immense fun as Cristal, going wildly over-the-top at every opportunity. At least Cristal knows she’s a whore and she accepts it.

Molly (Gina Ravera) is Nomi’s only real friend and she’s the only character with any real integrity. Which makes her the least interesting character (it’s that sort of movie). Robert Davi provides amusement as Al, the sleazy manager of Cheetah’s, who exploits his girls but in his own weird depraved way actually cares about them.

If Verhoeven’s objective was to strip away every thread of glamour from the glitzy greedy grasping world of Las Vegas and to expose the utter corruption and emptiness of the dreams it offers (and the dreams that Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry offer) then you’d have to say he succeeds. Showgirls has been much criticised for its lack of genuine eroticism but really that’s the point. This is sex as business. If you want it you can get it but don’t expect it to make you feel good. Vegas will chew up all your dreams and spit them out and that’s what this movie does with breathtaking ruthlessness.

The film also wants to play around with the links between money, power and sex (which again made Vegas an obvious setting). Everybody is playing power games with everybody else and all the power games involve sex. Most obviously there’s the bizarre three-way dynamic between Nomi, Cristal and Zack. Everything that happens between these three is about power, made most explicit in the infamous lap dancing scene with Cristal pulling the strings but with Nomi making a bid to take control. The power struggles between Nomi and Cristal never stop. Nomi wants money and fame but mostly she wants control.

Verhoeven did however have other intentions as well. Like so many European intellectuals he seems to have had a love-hate relationship with America. While he’s mercilessly demolishing the American dream he’s clearly besotted with American pop culture and he sincerely wanted to make Showgirls as a big-budget musical. Not quite a traditional Hollywood musical, but a Hollywood musical nonetheless.

Verhoeven was (or rather is) also a director obsessed with religious symbolism and it’s no coincidence that the show which Cristal headlines is called Goddess. The bizarre routines in the show are clearly meant to be a kind of pagan celebration of sexuality, and there’s Catholic symbolism as well.

There are times when Showgirls really does hit the target. James, the black dancer with whom Nomi becomes almost emotionally involved, wants her to give up stripping and join him in doing real dancing with serious artistic intentions but when we see his arty dance routine it’s absolutely no different from what Nomi does at Cheetah’s. James is just a whore as well but he can’t see it. And Cristal sneers that what Nomi does at Cheetah’s is not dancing but her own show at the Stardust is also no different from what Nomi does at the strip club, it’s just more expensively staged. They’re all doing the same thing. Cristal just gets paid more and James deludes himself that he’s doing art.

Joe Eszterhas’s script has been accused of misogyny, which is nonsense. This is a script which is equally brutal to all its characters, male and female. This is misanthropy, not misogyny.

Verhoeven was in fact very happy with the movie, and is still very fond of it. The reality is that nothing quite works as he intended it to, but in a way it still does work. Nothing is believable, the characters are not real people with real human emotions, but that just makes it more fascinatingly weird and hyper-real (or perhaps surreal would be more accurate). This is not reality but it’s a strange alternative kind of reality or unreality. Which perhaps is the point - Vegas is not the real world. Visually Showgirls is also of course wonderfully excessive, again to the point of hyper-reality.

At the end of the day I think the best way to enjoy Showgirls is a combination of the second and third approaches I outlined at the beginning. Verhoeven did succeed in his objective, it just happened to be an objective with which mainstream critics and audiences were violently out of sympathy and it happened to succeed in a very strange sort of way.

It can certainly be enjoyed as a weirdly mesmerising exercise in extreme camp or even out-and-out kitsch, but it’s more enjoyable if you also view it as a movie with serious intentions that often fails but in failing it succeeds on a whole different level of weirdness. Most bad movies are either just bad or they’re just bad movies that are so crazy that they’re entertaining. Showgirls is something else again. It’s bad in conventional terms but it achieves a kind of greatness all its own. They don’t make movies like this any more. In fact nobody ever made movies like this. Except Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas.

It’s essential to realise that the film’s trashiness and emotional emptiness and it’s unerotic eroticism are deliberate. These were not mistakes on the part of the director and the writer. They were conscious choices.

Showgirls flopped badly on its original release but has since made a ton of money.

Showgirls has had quite a few DVD and Blu-Ray releases (testifying to its enduring cult appeal). The UK Blu-Ray from Pathé offers a good transfer with a few extras. I reviewed the DVD release of Showgirls quite a few years back.

There is no other movie quite like Showgirls. It’s totally off-the-wall but it’s hypnotic and insanely entertaining once you allow yourself to become immersed in its bizarre alternate universe. It creates its own genre. Personally I just love this movie, almost to the point of obsession. Highly recommended.

Jailhouse Rock (1957)

It’s many years since I’ve seen an Elvis Presley movie but since I like his music and since his movies certainly qualify as cult movies I thought it was about time I checked out a few of them. Jailhouse Rock, released by MGM in 1957, was his third movie. His first two movies had been hits but Jailhouse Rock is definitely a bit more ambitious. It features great songs and it makes an attempt to be at least somewhat gritty.

The character he plays, Vince Everett, is a nice guy but he’s impulsive and he has a temper. He gets into a bar fight. He’s trying to defend the honour of a lady (who probably isn’t much of a lady) but he gets carried away and the guys dies and he finds himself serving a prison sentence for manslaughter.

His cell mate is a broken-down country singer named Hunk Houghton (Mickey Shaughnessy) who is the prison entrepreneur. If there’s a way of making money in prison Hunk knows it. Hunk teaches Vince that if you don’t have money in this world you’re nothing but he also gets Vince interested in the idea that you can actually earn a living as a singer.

After being released Vince meets music industry insider Peggy Van Alden (Judy Tyler). His first attempt at stardom fails but Vince is not a guy who gives up easily. They start their own record company and pretty soon Vince is the biggest sensation in the music business. He’s on the way to fame and fortune but he’s also in danger of losing his basic decency. Too much fame and fortune too soon can be a dangerous drug. And the inevitable romance between Vince and Peggy seems destined to crash and burn.

This is of course a musical and it pretty much follows the long-established template for movie musicals. It borrows elements from the classic backstage musicals and it’s your basic rags-to-riches story wherein the star makes it to the top but then they’re going to have to learn that there’s more to life than money and fame. Musicals don’t require complicated plots and the plot in this movie is more than adequate for the purpose.

As an actor Presley is actually not that bad. In Hollywood he quickly gained a reputation for professionalism and for being, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably polite and easy-going guy. He refused to take acting lessons but he took acting quite seriously. What’s interesting is that he really is acting here, he’s not playing himself. Vince is not at all like Elvis. He’s surly and rude and bad-tempered and he tramples over other people’s feelings. It’s not that Vince is a bad guy. He would never actually cheat anybody. He won't even cheat Hunk even though Hunk tries to cheat him. There’s a lot of good in Vince. He just needs to grow up and he needs to think before he acts.

This was the era of the brooding self-pitying new style of star like Marlon Brando and James Dean who were seen by Hollywood as the key to attracting a younger audience. The performances of Brando in movies like The Wild One and Dean in Rebel Without a Cause now seem embarrassing but Presley’s performance stands up quite well. He didn’t know anything about Method Acting techniques. He just followed his instincts and as a result his performance comes across as more natural and less contrived. He wasn’t a great actor by any means but in a rôle like this he’s fine.

Judy Tyler is the perfect leading lady for Elvis. As Peggy she’s strong-willed but feminine and while she’s not going to let Vince walk all over her she’s not going to give up on him either. Tragically Tyler was killed in a car accident at the age of 24 shortly after shooting of the film was completed.

It helps if a musical has good songs and that’s where Jailhouse Rock really scores.

The tricky part for Elvis was that Vince, when he’s first trying to get a break in the music industry, is really not very good so in the early songs he has to come across as a mediocre singer and it’s not easy for a great singer to sound mediocre. He does this pretty well. He manages to make those early songs sound slightly lifeless. Of course Vince soon learns what he’s doing wrong as a singer and then Elvis gets to give us some truly great local performances.

The Jailhouse Rock number was Hollywood’s first ever attempt at a rock’n’roll big production number in the classic movie musical style and it’s great. Elvis rejected the initial choreography explaining that he just couldn’t do that type of dancing so the choreographer then built the whole routine around the type of dancing that Elvis could do. The results are superb. The (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care production number is in a different style but it’s just as good.

The Blu-Ray release is excellent. The black-and-white cinematography looks terrific and there are a couple of worthwhile extras including an audio commentary.

This is not a big-budget blockbuster but neither is it a low-budget affair. Production values are quite high. Having Elvis as the star in 1957 was pretty much a guarantee of box-office success (and it did extremely well) so it was obviously considered worthwhile to spend some real money on the production. It’s well made and the acting performances (Including Elvis’s) are a cut above B-movie standards.

Jailhouse Rock combines all the virtues of the traditional Hollywood musical with the energy of rock’n’roll and the charisma of Elvis. Highly recommended.