Rock All Night

1957

Crime / Drama / Music

2
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 29%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 29%
IMDb Rating 5.7/10 10 498 498

rock 'n' roll hostage bartender hostage-taking held hostage

Plot summary

Cloud Nine, the local teen hangout, has been taken over by a pair of escaped killers, who hold the local teens hostage. The bartender realizes it's up to him to save the kids.

Director

Roger Corman Photo
Roger Corman

Top cast

Ed Nelson Photo
Ed Nelson as Pete
Jonathan Haze Photo
Jonathan Haze as Joey
Russell Johnson Photo
Russell Johnson as Jigger
Jeanne Cooper Photo
Jeanne Cooper as Mabel
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
571.35 MB
960*720
English 2.0
NR
us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 2 min
Seeds ...
1.04 GB
1440*1080
English 2.0
NR
us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 2 min
Seeds 2

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by davidmvining 6 / 10

Interesting

This might be Corman's most interesting film. Having just gone through all of Joel Schumacher's work, I was reminded of his Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill along with the obvious Robert Altman influences on Schumacher's early work, and here's Corman doing something similar right about the same time Altman was releasing his first documentary. I don't think it quite works, though. The script by Griffith is mostly undone by a weird structure that feels repetitive and then delayed in weird ways, but there's an actual attempt at character that works decently well. It really feels like about 2 years into their careers as director and writer, having made nearly a dozen films already, that Corman and Griffith are just getting better at this movie-making game.At a little dive bar run by Al (Robin Morse), we see The Platters sing a song before they disappear from the film after the first ten minutes (reading up on the film, this was a production issue that Corman's tight scheduling both created and couldn't solve). Into this comes Shorty (Dick Miller), an irate, confrontational young man who contradicts just about everyone. Also, into this comes Sir Bop (Mel Welles), an odd promoter with a fake, greaser patois who's trying to push a new singer, Julie (Abby Dalton) onto Al. After the Platters perform and disappear, the movie focuses on Julie's stage fright, Shorty's unvarnished critique of her performance under those circumstances, Sir Bop's efforts to sell her act anyway with any band who will play, and some side business with more minor characters in the bar. The most entertaining of these is a couple played by Chris Alcaide and Jeanne Cooper who seem so detached from everything happening that they feel like a Greek chorus commenting on the action.The film is only an hour long, there's a great need for efficiency in storytelling, and wasting the first ten minutes on a musical act who doesn't come back while spending the next twenty minutes on small dramatic business without any hint of the larger story (that does come in) is a mistake from a scriptwriting point of view. It's when Jigger (Russell Johnson) shows up, having just robbed a place and being pursed by cops, that things actually get interesting.It's the pressure cooker of emotion that a threat like Jigger represents, waving a gun around and shouting at people to keep quiet. He makes people focus on who they are, and since the character writing is actually half-way decent, especially around Julie and an up and coming boxer, Lester (Beech Dickerson). It's where Julie finds her voice and Lester discovers that despite his profession as a pugilist, he's actually a coward. It's decent stuff.I just wish Jigger was introduced early and there was this sense of tension around who this guy was...does he have something to do with the reports on the radio of a robbery?...that sort of thing. Instead, we get that staccato structure that permeate Griffith's scripts where one section feels completely different from the next. This needed smoothing, something a rewrite could have accomplished had Corman given him the time to do it.The little arcs people have get resolutions. It's nice. Shorty shows he's more than a mouth. Julie shows she can sing. It's good stuff. It is weird that Jigger forces Julie to sing to a record that supposedly only has backup singers on it, though.So, it's actually nearly successful. There are structural issues around the first half that really hold things back, but ultimately, it's a little bottle drama that almost kind of works. Corman is getting better, and it's nice to see.
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Reviewed by redban02 7 / 10

Good old-time movie

The movie is fun. The atmosphere, setting, acting, characters, and dialogue are well-done. I like the music. At only 100 minutes or so, the movie is more like an episode of a TV show than a movie. There isn't much filler, and the climax comes at the right time.

I think that Al, the bartender, steals the show from Shorty, who gets the protagonist role. As a result, the ending doesn't feel as satisfying as it should. One death scene is poorly executed. I didn't like the conclusion for Julia, the singer. Certain character details and backgrounds are neglected. The plot as a whole relies on several coincidences.

But it's still a decent movie.

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