Let the Good Times Roll (film)
Let the Good Times Roll is a 1973 rockumentary / concert film directed by Robert Abel and Sidney Levin. It features numerous stars from the American pop and rock music scene of the 1950s. Summary The film edits together footage of two concerts from 1973, one at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, and a second at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan, during the height of a series of multi-artist tours known as the "Rock and Roll Revival," interspersed with footage of the singers from the 1950s and 60s. It also includes interviews with the singers. Cast The film features performances from numerous stars from the 1950s and early 1960s, including Chuck Berry Chubby Checker The Coasters Danny and the Juniors Bo Diddley Fats Domino The Five Satins Bill Haley and the Comets Little Richard The Shirelles Bobby Comstock The film ends with a rare, and apparently impromptu, duet between Berry and Diddley, who had recorded together before, but were not often filmed on stage together. Style The film uses split screen techniques to contrast the performers' appearances in the 1950s and in the 1970s (as well as clips from 1950s-era films such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf). Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, described it as "world's-fair avant-garde". Themes The film was historically significant because it was one of the earliest 1950s nostalgic themed films that inaugurated that genre. Christine Sprengler argued that the film was an attempt to show "musical milestones" in the context of the times (both political and social), and, like American Graffiti and Grease, sets rock and roll as the soundtrack to the decade. Canby noted that the film may have a possibly unintentional social commentary, with the majority-white audience giving the black fist to the majority-African American performers. He suggests that it implied that "there are no black memories of the nineteen-fifties". Release and reception Let the Good Times Roll received its premiere in New York, New York on May 25, 1973. It was later shown in Finland, Hungary, and Sweden. Steven Otfinoski credits its success with bolstering Bo Diddley's career, which at the time was stagnating. Canby noted that the performers seemed much different than they were during their earlier careers, with gained weight, longer and thinner hair, and Little Richard having "openly embraced androgyny". Overall, he considered the film an "engaging, technically superior concert film that recalls music of the nineteen-fifties". A review in Variety stated, "Columbia's 'Let the Good Times Roll' is a smash recreation of 1950s rock 'n' roll frenzy, a moving and exciting nostalgia trip" that "could become one of the sleepers of 1973." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that it "gives us mostly the music of the late 1950s as performed 15 years later by the same artists. But it doesn’t condescend. It isn't a movie that finds anything camp about Chuck Berry singing 'Johnny B. Goode.' It understands that if the song and the