A Star is Born

By J.C.

THAT'LL BE THE DAY

Directed by CLAUDE WHATHAM Screenplay by RAY CONNOLLY

There have already been quite a few movies about rock 'n' roll: concert films like Woodstock, lightweight dramatic vehicles tailored-to-measure for pop stars, documentaries offering cinema-verite glimpses of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. There have even been a couple of films that used the world of rock as a metaphor for power and ruin: for in stance, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (TIME, Dec. 2).

That'll Be the Day has mostly the music in common with any of these. It is an intelligent, rueful attempt to get at the roots of pop culture by dramatizing the shaky beginnings of one musician's career. Director Claude Whatham and Writer Ray Connolly also succeed nicely at something that has hardly ever been tried: to say and to show just how rock gave a voice to a generation.

The music is what keeps Jim MacLaine (David Essex) together, in part be cause its ragged, incessant tempo catches the cadences of his own anger and confusion. Jim is the son of shopkeepers.

His father ran off when he was small, and his mother barely managed to make their small grocery store pay enough to send him to a decent school. Hours be fore his crucial final examinations, Jim tosses his school books into a river and, like his father, packs up to live by him self. He works in a summer camp where he falls in with an affable greaser (played with wit and affection by none other than Ringo Starr). Jim learns about girls, about the niceties of shortchanging customers in the fun fair where he works with his new friend, and about the gnawing difficulties of burying the past. Un able to sort things out, he returns home, where the restrictive working-class life will make his decisions for him.

Music Everywhere. Throughout all this, only the music has been a constant. Getting into a school chum's rec ord collection, Jim puts on a Buddy Holly album with more eagerness than he has shown except when he left home.

Music is everywhere: at the fun fair, at the camp, where Jim meets a seedy group of touring rockers. When he goes home and tries settling in, he still reads the music papers and drops down to the local dance hall, where he hears in the music the possibility of liberation.

Finally Jim packs up again, leaves a wife and a new baby behind, buys a secondhand guitar he is going to have to teach himself how to play.

Jim's future is uncertain because the depth of his talent is deliberately unspecified. He is also, in the best traditions of working-class heroes, a bit of a bastard. That'll Be the Day (the title comes from a great old Buddy Holly tune) has also learned from its predecessors in the school of angry British realism how to present industrial England with fierce but never condescending accuracy.

This movie is the first part of Jim's story. The second, called Stardust, will be released next year. That'll Be the Day is unassuming and pleasurable. An indication that it may be something more is the anticipation with which one awaits Chapter Two.

-J.C.

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