Go, Johnny, Go!

As if the hilarious cynicism of The Girl Can't Help It had never happened, the almost-charming naïveté of Alan Freed's movies continued, ignoring racialism and presenting a painfully low-budget, cleaned-up version of rock'n'roll to calm parental fears. Hero Clanton (later to perpetrate 'Venus in Blue Jeans', but coming from the raunchy New Orleans school) grins his way stoically from rags to riches via a demo disc played on Freed's radio show. Everyone is so damned decent that the occasional sour comments from Freed and a studio bandleader sound like blasphemy. Laugh if you like, but as well as the crude fictionalising and dreadful miming, the film offers the only moving evidence of Ritchie Valens (even if Freed does rush out half-way through the song), a rare fragment of Eddie Cochran, the great Cadillacs camping through two Coasters-like numbers, and Chuck Berry struggling to be a nice guy in a 'major acting role'.