Music over Words and Sound over Image: "Rock Around the Clock" and The Centrality of

Music in Post-Classical Film Narration

Author(s): Paul N. Reinsch
Source: Music and the Moving Image , Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 3-22
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/musimoviimag.6.3.0003

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Music over Words and Sound over Image:
“Rock Around the Clock” and The Centrality
of Music in Post-Classical Film Narration
Paul N. Reinsch
Abstract. This article argues for the centrality of the Bill Haley and His Comets
song “Rock Around the Clock” in creating post-classical sound through its appea-
rance in Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock. The song turns the cinema
into a music delivery system and relegates the image to perhaps only accom-
panying the sound. The audience for each film also repurposes the cinema space
for active response in the form of dancing and thereby challenges theorizations of
the cinema as a series of images meant to be received by a passive audience.

As Nicholas Dawidoff ’s study of country
music, In the Country of Country: People and
Places in American Music, draws to a close,
the author discusses Lubbock, Texas, and the
musicians that area has nurtured (intention-
ally or not). Dawidoff reveals that singer-
songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore could sing
Hank Williams songs by the age of four, but
Gilmore himself mentions another influ-
ence on his work: “I went to see Blackboard
Jungle . . . The opening of that movie, “Rock
Around the Clock,” it hit me with such an
impact. Probably changed my life. The movie
really disturbed me, but the music, I abso-
lutely loved it forever.”1 Gilmore’s comments
appear in the midst of a discussion of the po-
rous boundaries between country and rock
music both in Gilmore’s own work and in a
larger sense. The experience of Blackboard
Jungle (1955)2 did not make Gilmore become
a musician or introduce him to the power
of music, yet it did have an influence on his
sense of popular music. The film’s justly fa-
mous opening with Bill Haley and His Com-
ets’ version of “Rock Around the Clock” did
more, however, than just help spread rock ‘n’
roll music or turn-on one Texas pre-teen to
rock; Blackboard Jungle creates a break in the
history of film sound and highlights the need
for a more detailed and individual approach
to the history of cinema’s audio properties.
While the historical approach to film
sound has become increasingly developed
through the work of a number of schol-
ars, this area of study normally skips from
the era of “classical” elements to the era of
Dolby, surround and Digital technologies.3 It
is the contention of this essay that American
film sound elements, particularly the music,
between the mid 1940s and the mid 1970s—
or, to put it another way, between Max
Steiner and David Lynch—are doubly taken
for granted. In this period there are numer-
ous aesthetic shifts and sonically innovative
texts deserving of more sustained attention.
The following discussion explores Black-
board Jungle and Rock Around the Clock
(1956),4 the first two cinematic manifesta-
tions of Bill Haley and His Comets’ record-
ing of “Rock Around the Clock,” to suggest
a case for the study of post-classical sound
as both a relatively neglected period of film
history and a transitionary period between
“background” and “foreground” music in
cinema.5 Blackboard Jungle (in)famously
made teens dance in film theaters, and while

music and the moving image 6.3  /  fall 2013 3

©2013 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois

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4 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
Rock Around the Clock incited this behavior
as well, the film additionally inaugurated the
rock film and the teen film in a deceptively
complex package.
The study of film history is always an in-
tervention in film theory as well, and Rick
Altman’s The American Film Musical offers a
vital theorization of image-sound relations
that suggests a model for beginning to sort
through some of the shifts and changes in
the history of film sound. Altman argues
that a core component of the genre is its pre-
sentation of both diegetic and nondiegetic
music, with the former tied to “reality” and
the latter to a “romantic realm.” The musi-
cal brings these sounds and realms together
and guides audiences smoothly between
registers. At particular moments that he la-
bels “audio dissolves,” the status of the film’s
music is blurred and, “the order of priorities
of audio and image track [are] reversed.”6
The film’s narration scrambles the normal
hierarchy of filmic information: “the move-
ment which we see on screen is now an
accompaniment to the music track. A new
mode of causality now appears, a simulta-
neous mode wherein the image is ‘caused’
by the music rather than by some previous
image.” In these moments, “Everything—
even the image—is now subordinated to the
music track.”7 Altman’s conception helps
explain the confluence of aesthetics and
ideology that make the genre so central to
(classical) American filmmaking. The “audio
dissolve” also is powerful evidence for the
fact that a defining element of one of Holly-
wood’s signature genres deviates as a matter
of course from classical norms of sound use.
Perhaps the film musical (the genre mostly
obviously created by the addition of recorded
sound to narrative cinema) also had within it
the seed that led to the fall of classical uses of
sound elements. The “audio dissolve” might
be explored in relation to other genres in
addition to the musical. It might also be his-
toricized. The increasing instances of audio
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dissolves, or moments of similar hierarchical
reversal, is one way to account for changes
between the characteristics of film sound
described by scholars like Claudia Gorbman
and Kevin Donnelly, and between an era of
“background” film scoring and an era where
music “dominates.”
Classical Hollywood sound has been
analyzed with a great deal of precision and
insight, and quite rightly is increasingly
regarded as a vital component in a full un-
derstanding of this period. The Classical
film is a narrative text, and sound (perhaps
especially music) works to assist the goal
of storytelling. For example, Claudia Gorb-
man’s Unheard Melodies nicely articulates
the norms of classical scoring, including its
“inaudibility”: “Music is not meant to be
heard consciously. As such it should subor-
dinate itself to dialogue, to visuals i.e., to the
primary vehicles of the narrative.”8 A few
pages later she adds that the music’s “volume,
mood, and rhythm must be subordinated to
the dramatic and emotional dictates of the
film narrative.”9 As most commonly defined,
Classical scoring works primarily to help the
images (production design, lighting, actors,
make up, costumes) relay narrative informa-
tion—the very thing the image track does
regardless of the presence (or absence) of a
soundtrack. In Settling the Score, her work
on music in Classical Hollywood, Kathryn
Kalinak argues: “First and foremost, music
served the story, and the classical score was
generated from a set of conventions which
insured unobstructed narrative exposition.”10
Of course since the advent of the “talkies”
cinema nearly always provides fixed and re-
corded aural information, usually including
music. The incorporation of Dolby technolo-
gies, surround sound, digital sound and the
like, along with the work of innovative and
sonically inclined directors such as David
Lynch, have spurred audiences and scholars
to continue to analyze how cinema offers
sound. Early in The Spectre of Sound, Kevin
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 5
Donnelly notes that contemporary cinema
features a preponderance of “sync points”—
“explicit instances of a dynamic convergence
between film and music.”11 Of these sync
points he writes: “At their most obvious, they
manifest ‘stingers,’ the brief blasts of sound
that emphasize action in thriller and horror
films, but their proliferation suggests that
screen music should no longer be conceived
as simply the ‘accompaniment’ to the un-
erring primacy of the image.”12 Donnelly’s
theorization evokes Altman’s “audio dissolve”
and pointedly analyzes a cinema histori-
cally removed from the classical era Gorb-
man and Kalinak describe. Later Donnelly
states: “Film music’s relationship with film is
parasitic, yet it is also symbiotic. It enhances
films, yet at times obliterates their regular
processes and dominates proceedings.”13 For
film music to “obliterate” and “dominate”
the normal address of cinema—and to do so
with considerable frequency—plainly sug-
gests that the notion of a “classical” use of
music is perhaps becoming a minority prac-
tice. How the norms of narrative film music
become near exceptions can be analyzed
with more historical specificity; labeling the
postwar / pre-Dolby changes in film sound
“post-classical” encourages a more precise
historical study and a reconsideration of the
various meanings of “classical” sound in cin-
ema. In this category one can begin to prop-
erly situate and explore cinema’s first uses of
“Rock Around the Clock.”
Side A: Blackboard Jungle
as Teenage Dance Party
The use of “Rock Around the Clock” in
MGM’s high school film Blackboard Jungle is
justly famous and at least mentioned in nu-
merous discussions of film history. The film
continues to be examined as a Glenn Ford
vehicle, a Sidney Poitier showcase, a Rich-
ard Brooks film, an MGM social problem
expose (not the studio’s typical métier), and
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more. But Blackboard Jungle’s opening with
“Rock Around the Clock” playing under—or
over, and eventually, through—the opening
credits makes the film the first to use rock
‘n’ roll sounds in a mainstream American
film. This is an important historical first,
but the aspects that remain most in need of
analysis are Blackboard Jungle’s presentation
of the song, and the film’s near demand that
audience members rethink their relationship
to the film “screen.” Many writers also note
that Blackboard Jungle addresses the postwar
teen audience directly, and acknowledges
their growing market clout. Thomas Doherty
argues that because of the postwar rise of
teens and their surprising buying power,
Hollywood could no longer make films for
a single mass audience, or even primarily
adults: “The rise of television and the col-
lapse of the old studio system destroyed that
kind of universality. Since the 1950s, mov-
iemakers have been forced to narrow their
focus and attract the one group with the
requisite income, leisure, and gregariousness
to sustain a theatrical business.”14 Though
the label “teenager” became common in 1944
in the United States, as Jon Savage argues in
his exhaustive study Teenage: The Prehistory
of Youth Culture: 1875–1945, youth culture
developed over the course of more than half
a century. With the end of the Second World
War, however, the world was now set for the
age of the teenager, and Savage concludes:
The many possible interpretations of
youth had been boiled down to just one:
the adolescent consumer. Coming to
prominence through an intricate ecology
of peer pressure, individual desires, and
savvy marketing, the Teenage resolved the
question posed by the war: what kind of
mass society will we live in?15
Hollywood itself turned more to market re-
search than ever before in the postwar years
and reluctantly determined that they were
not doing enough to attract the teen audi-
6 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
ence, an audience growing larger ever year
in part due to rising birthrates in the US.16
The surprising success of, and response to,
both “Rock Around the Clock” and Black-
board Jungle indicate the shifting focus of
the film industry, an industry slower to ac-
knowledge the teenager than the music and
fashion industries.
Blackboard Jungle solicits the teen audi-
ence in part by offering teenagers in the
diegesis. The film is an effective high school
melodrama of teen violence and includes
several nuanced performances, most notably
those of Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow as
the school’s most influential and wayward
students. Sociologically, the presence of Bill
Haley and His Comets’ version of “Rock
Around the Clock” in this film about ju-
venile delinquents solidified the nascent
connections between youthful delinquency
(and criminality) and rock music. While the
film’s presentation of troubled urban teens
may have felt a little tired in 1955, the music
in such a film was quite new. “Rock Around
the Clock” bridges the credits to the film’s
diegesis as students dance in the schoolyard
and bang trashcan lids in time to the tune
and even mockingly dance. As through an
unseen radio in the schoolyard, the song’s
volume increases as new English teacher
Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) approaches
the school. The music stops when he moves
into the building and this further suggests a
diegetic presence. Of course one way a num-
ber of films (musical and otherwise) avoid
the definitive separation of credit sequences
from the film’s diegesis or narrative is
through the music. However, unlike the pre-
vious year’s Rear Window (1954) for example,
the opening music for Blackboard Jungle
links the credits to the narrative. It is pre-
existing music designed to be listened to and
danced to and it plays undisturbed as the
credits (addressed only to the audience) fade
to black and the film’s narration moves to a
presentation of the film’s diegesis. The blur-
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ring of the distinction between credits and
diegesis, and the status of the music as di-
egetic or nondiegetic, are appropriate for cin-
ema’s first attempt to visualize rock. Though
not technically an example of Altman’s
“audio dissolve,” in this opening scene “Rock
Around the Clock” is indisputably dominat-
ing; audiences are as aware of the song as the
teenage boys onscreen. It provides a rhythm
and suggests some of the aggression to come.
The serialization of the film (rather than the
novel) published in the Los Angeles Herald-
Express describes both “the furious beat and
strident vocal of a phonograph record” and
“the loitering teenaged boys . . . a few danc-
ing together in expert mockery” as Dadier
approaches the school.17 The phonograph re-
cord goes unnamed, however. “Rock Around
the Clock” plays again at the end of the film
as the good but conflicted student Miller
(Poitier) walks away from Dadier to bridge
the conclusion to “The End” onscreen. If the
song provides aggression in its first appear-
ance, here it reinforces the triumph of the
film’s good guys: one a dedicated (and physi-
cally strong) teacher and the other a bright
student headed for better things. The song’s
lyrics are not terribly appropriate to the nar-
rative in either instance (“Put your glad rags
on and join me”), but the song’s energy and
insistent rhythm overwhelm the film’s visual
address and potentially draw the audience’s
attention away from the screen entirely.
Blackboard Jungle is an industry film that
directly addresses the audience, some of
whom participate by dancing along with
the film’s music. Here sound and its source
are not concealed but emphasized. “Rock
Around the Clock” does not sooth the audi-
ence or prepare them for a fantasy or dream-
like experience. Attending a screening of
Blackboard Jungle, at least in these opening
minutes, is only relatable to Plato’s cave if
that is the name of a dance club. The song
literally rouses the audience from their seats
and issues from speakers which are larger
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 7
and more powerful than the puny speakers
teenagers had access to at home or in cars.
The song—especially during the credits—is-
sues less from the “screen” than blasts from
the theater speakers. Through the credits, the
visual material tells the audience who made
the film, that it is set in a school (the credits
appear as chalk writing on a blackboard),
and little else. What seems inarguable is that
audiences, and particularly teens, were not
paying attention to the film screen, much
less being engulfed or enraptured by it.18 If
anything, these audiences were paying at-
tention to the cinema speakers, and the rock
‘n’ roll coming from them: “White kids had
never heard a back beat number quite that
LOUD . . . if at all. Hearing the recording on
a phonograph or radio missed the reverbera-
tions bouncing from one theater wall to the
other.”19 As experienced by the (young and
possibly dancing) audience, the film is less
a melodrama than a celebration of recorded
music and the technologies which make its
construction and reception possible, even if
only for a few minutes.20
Whether or not a different song placed
at the opening of Blackboard Jungle would
have caused the same responses is a ques-
tion impossible to answer but also difficult
not to ponder. Jimmy Preston’s “Rock This
Joint,” for example, was made earlier, features
a driving beat and certainly offers a raucous
sonic atmosphere that could fit the filmic
presentation of teen violence. Preston’s song
even lyrically addresses “rock” like Freedman
and Myers’s “Rock Around the Clock” and
many other songs in the early rock era. Yet
Milt Gabler’s clean and precise production
of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” is
a significant part of that recording’s appeal,
and his work offers a pleasing amount of
echo. But perhaps the single best reason that
the song works so well as the opening to
a film is that the song itself features an ar-
resting and distinctive opening. While Phil
Spector’s production of “Be My Baby” offers
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the most famous and often imitated drum
introduction in popular music, the drums at
the beginning of “Rock Around the Clock”
are perhaps just as influential. The sharp and
loud snare hits promise the energy of the
song instantly and before Haley has sung a
note, they signal a new way to begin a film.
To open a film with the drums of “Rock
Around the Clock” is to immediately estab-
lish a new relationship between audience
and screen. Importantly as well, Blackboard
Jungle offers audiences a longer version of
the song than available elsewhere. To make
the song play through the film’s credits and
into the presentation of the film’s diegesis,
the filmmakers “stretched it beyond its origi-
nal two minutes and eight seconds by duping
the second instrumental break—the amped-
up vamp with everybody wailing along with
Joey D’Ambrosio’s honking saxophone—and
inserting it right up front, after Bill Haley’s
first vocal verse.”21 Here the instrumental
break, that occurs after “8, 9, 10, 11 o’clock
rock” normally, is added to the song after
the first verse and chorus (when screenplay
and song credits appear on screen) to cre-
ate a unique version of the song that might
be called the “Blackboard Jungle” mix, a 12
inch remix, or perhaps even the extended
dance mix. By any name it provides teens
with more dance time than the “official” ver-
sion that Decca put back into stores after the
success of the film. While not advertised as
such, and probably unnoticed by most audi-
ence members then and now, the only way to
hear this version of the song is in Blackboard
Jungle—whether at screenings, at home, or
online through something like YouTube.22
Audiences in both the United States and
England gleefully took the song’s (extended)
invitation to dance to heart and also fa-
mously destroyed theater property. Some
theater owners, though happy with the film’s
ticket sales, began to complain about youth
dancing in the aisles during the song (and
vandalizing their theaters). Denisoff and
8 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
Figure 1.
More time
to dance
Romanowski discuss the links between vio-
lence, “Rock Around the Clock,” and Black-
board Jungle and argue that the publicity
helped sell the film:
The amount of vandalism and violence
associated with the film appears to have
been minimal. There were instances of
misconduct, but most took place at live
shows and record hops. Unfortunately,
this distinction was rarely made. The fan-
fare did create a mystique for the movie,
making it a boxoffice smash.23
Certainly reports helped keep the film in the
public discourse.24 Misconduct did occur,
in part because while the speakers and song
encouraged dancing, the cinema spaces dis-
couraged just this activity. The first wave of
film theaters came about by adding screens
to existing performance spaces that included
stages and the allowance or even promise of
live performance (and response, if only in
the form of applause). Yet since the Times
Square Rialto opened in 1916 cinema theaters
have leaned toward offering a screen and
rows of immovable seats obediently facing
the screen.25 The film space discourages indi-
vidual, much less vocal or physical, response
and clearly demarcates humans from the
presentation of light and sound. Also not
surprisingly, many theaters expressly forbid
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dancing and one can hardly fault owners
for denying audience members the ability
to do more than sit. At Blackboard Jungle
screenings displays of authority from theater
owners, even as simple as requesting that
audience return quietly to their seats, were
sometimes met with displays of defiance,
including vandalism.26 Audience members,
particularly teens, therefore were able to
mimic the actions of the film’s teenagers in
resisting authority by insisting that they be
allowed to dance, or failing that, seeking
revenge through the destruction of property
(something else that occurs within the film’s
high school). It is worth noting as well that
audiences noted the music before being told
to by the media. Comment cards from a
preview at Encino Theatre in Encino, Cali-
fornia on February 2, 1955, provide concrete
evidence of audience response to the film.
While a few audience comments criticize
the music (“Sound too loud. Dialogue poor”
and “Don’t like loud jazz27 at beginning and
end,” for example) many more compliment
the film’s music and presentation of music. A
few examples: “I loved the introduction ‘the
drums.’ Music was fabulous,” “The opening
music has great effect!,” “I loved the theme
song. Bet is will sell a million!” and “Loved
Bill Haley’s music.”28 A few days later in New
York a preview screening caused Al Altman
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 9
to send this message to Brooks: “Audience
reaction sneak preview Jungle excellent stop.
They started to keep tune with the drum
beats when picture opened.”29 Here is an au-
dience almost drumming along with session
player Billy Gussak,30 and also imitating the
behavior of some of the teens in the film’s
first presentation of the school. These pre-
view comments are a warning that the song
is going to cause a different set of responses
than other Hollywood features. Reports of
violence and dancing (and actual dancing
and violence) helped market the film, and
soon Bill Haley’s song—one that had barely
caused a ripple on its initial release—was
sitting at the top of the charts and penetrated
popular culture more deeply than film.
How exactly this complicated weave of
texts and industrial matters was created
continues to be a subject of considerable
dispute. Various parties take credit for the
“discovery” of “Rock Around the Clock” and
suggesting its inclusion in the film, including
writer-director Brooks.31
Richard Brooks’ own copy of the screenplay
on file at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick
library at least demonstrates that the inclusion
of “Rock Around the Clock,” and rock music
as a genre, came well after the shooting script
was set and in its language—both typed and
handwritten—demonstrates the still-forming
definition of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid 1950s. The
text begins with a statement of the impor-
tance of music to the film, but music other
than rock: “Inasmuch as modern jazz enters
the daily life and speech patterns of today’s
youth in America, this film will be scored en-
tirely with jazz, swing, blues and sentimental
ballads. Source music is carefully indicated.”32
Yet out to the side, written in pen and surely
by Brooks himself is the defiant declaration,
“and rock!” The screenplay also proclaims
that “Music and sound are major characters
in this story” and handwriting in pen off to
the side adds: “We’ll have to fight ‘em to get
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‘em to let us use Rock music in movie. Try
for Previn as composer. If ‘no’ fight to buy
the record 78rpm ‘Rock Around the Clock!’
They’ll say ‘no!’—but—really necessary!” The
willingness, or perhaps desire, of Brooks to
“fight” for rock is interesting here and more
than mere rhetoric. The director is not simply
the earliest adapter of rock in film but also an
advocate. His notes in the screenplay indicate
plainly his conviction that both rock music
as a genre, and this particular rock recording,
were paramount to the impact of Blackboard
Jungle and its effort not simply to document
youth culture but speak to that culture at
the same time. The notes are indications of
Brooks correcting his own writing (and think-
ing); Brooks gets it right with something like a
second pass.
Somewhere in the fall of 1954 Brooks
becomes a rock convert and correctly real-
izes that his film needs rock ‘n’ roll music.
After his initial alterations on the first page,
the screenplay is dotted with descriptions
of music stricken out and marginal notes
added about rock music or “Rock Around
the Clock.” The film does need to simply add
rock ‘n’ roll to the mix of popular sound but
instead rock needs to be included in place
of other forms. Brooks, with every hand-
written plead or reminder for rock music,
moves toward the creation of the rock film.
Dadier’s walk up to the school notes that
a radio “blares” a “hot swing number” and
“ROCK” is handwritten underneath. In the
right margin is a note for the song and a re-
minder to get the actors to move to this spe-
cific song: “‘Rock Around the Clock’ get kids
to move in rhythm to music.”33 While the
newspaper serialization mentions the “furi-
ous beat and strident vocal” of the music
in this first scene and how some students
move in time to it, the screenplay on its first
page notes that “Other boys jitterbug with
each other to the brassy music.” Later, after
Dadier has proved his physical superiority
10 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013

against his much younger student foes and An Interlude: Other Spaces /
returns to the school, the screenplay reads: Other Speakers
“Rick continues walking. The tension builds
While “Rock Around the Clock” was bound
in ***** silence except for street noises
in the popular imagination with Blackboard
and distant hot jazz” and “rock music” is
Jungle, and MGM’s own trailer solidified
written by hand to replace the stricken
this link,40 MGM had no corporate ties to
phrase.34 When Dadier and Josh Edwards
Decca and sales of the recording did not
leave the bar a marginal handwritten note
directly benefit MGM financially. The vari-
reads: “Start (O.S.) ‘Rock Around the Clock’
ous releases and even versions of “Rock
now—distant.”35 After the teachers rebuff
Around the Clock” provide interesting in-
the attack of some evil students and the po-
sights into the 1950s music business and its
lice show up to assist them, the screenplay
connections—or lack thereof—with the film
reads “****** continues playing in b.g.” and
industry.
“Rock Around the Clock” is written above
Decca Records initially released “Rock
the marked out passage.36 The screenplay
Around the Clock” on May 20, 1954 with
later links rock music to violence and crime,
little fanfare, and the record sold moderately
but only through handwritten corrections.
well. MGM paid Decca $5000 for the rights
As the students get ready for the robbery
to use the song three times in Blackboard
the screenplay reads “Rhythm jazz beats out
Jungle but could have owned the song out-
from nearby juke box in bar” and the hand-
right for only 50% more ($2500) in a deci-
written “rock music” sits in the margin.37
sion emblematic of how one industry did
Not surprisingly on the screenplay’s final
not yet fully acknowledge its connections
page a marginal note indicates that “Rock
with the other.41 Soon after the film’s release,
Around the Clock” should be the sound that
radio requests for “Rock Around the Clock”
“comes from bar across the street.”38
exploded and audience attendance for the
The late and nearly unplanned union of
film quickly accelerated. Decca rushed the
“Rock Around the Clock” and Blackboard
single back into production in May of 1955
Jungle creates a template for other marriages
and managed to meet the surging demand.
of cinema and rock. After Blackboard Jungle
Meanwhile, perhaps quickly regretting their
genres other than the musical increasingly
decision on the song, “MGM attempted to
present pop(ular) music as both underscore
musically capitalize . . . [by] producing a sin-
and performance numbers. Additionally,
gle titled ‘Rock Around the Clock’ backed by
specific song and artist choices were often
the ‘Love Theme’ from the movie,” both per-
motivated by economic decisions (in terms
formed by the “MGM Studio Orchestra.”42
of cost and / or connection to a company) as
While this release put the melody of “Rock
much as other concerns.39 While this moment
Around the Clock” on radio stations that did
when teens repurposed cinema theaters into
not play rock or rhythm and blues and may
dance halls has not often been repeated, the
have encouraged adults to consider attend-
reception of Blackboard Jungle demonstrates
ing Blackboard Jungle, the orchestral version
(again) that audiences will buy cinema tickets
of the song disappeared quietly.
in order to hear new and different sounds
As the Decca and MGM versions of the
and possibly even to interact with a film
song suggest, Blackboard Jungle thrust
performance. Though some dismissed “Rock
“Rock Around the Clock” into the middle
Around the Clock” as noise or at least music
of struggles over how consumers listened to
that was itself too loud, its success encouraged
recorded music and over what music they
other filmmakers to use similar noise in film.

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reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 11
listened to. The “Speed Wars” of the 1950s
pitted the 78rpm disc against the 45rpm
disc, which was first issued in 1949 by RCA
records (the previous year saw the release
of the 33 1/3rpm disc by Columbia records).
Tellingly, Decca released “Rock Around the
Clock” in both speeds to cover the company’s
risks and not surprisingly the 45rpm ver-
sion quickly outpaced the “older” format.43
It is no accident that when Brooks thought
of a physical copy of the song he wrote “78”
rather than “45” in his copy of the screenplay
and so betrayed his separation from the film’s
teen characters and teen audience. Teenagers
may have had more disposable income than
ever before, but the lower price for 45rmp
discs and turntables further encouraged their
purchase. And in another potential overlap
between the diegesis of Blackboard Jungle
and the behavior of the film’s audience, the
film presents teens rejecting 78rpm records
and the music they contain. When the ruf-
fians attack math teacher Joshua Y. Edwards
(Richard Kiley) and gleefully destroy his rare
collection of Bix Beiderbecke 78s, they are
not simply resisting institutional authority
(and a teacher’s transparent attempt to win
their favor), but rejecting a type of music
and the medium used to transmit that music.
Cinematically their actions benefit from
the fact that the shellac on 78s shatter much
more cinematically than vinyl 45s or 33 1/3
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records, but here again the world of the film
and the world of the audience have the po-
tential to merge.
Finally, Blackboard Jungle also allows a
consideration of the era’s publishing war. In
the film, the act of destroying 78rpm jazz
records potentially aligns the teens with the
music publisher BMI, which catered to in-
dependent songwriters and local music (like
rock, and rhythm and blues). ASCAP, on
the other hand, was the venerable home of
“real” music, and the company used racially
charged language in its attempts to maintain
its market share against upstart BMI. Among
many striking quotes from producer and
songwriter Billy Rose is this: “Not only are
most of the BMI songs junk, but in many
cases they are obscene junk, pretty much
on the level with dirty comic magazines.”
And one more for good measure: “When
ASCAP’s songwriters were permitted to be
heard, Al Jolson, Nora Bayes, and Eddie
Cantor were all big salesmen of songs. Today
it is a set of untalented twitchers and twisters
whose appeal is largely to the zootsuiter and
the juvenile delinquent.”44 The twist in this
discussion is that “Rock Around the Clock”
is an ASCAP song and through Blackboard
Jungle gives pleasure to the delinquents who
like “obscene junk,” and works to promote
“untalented twitchers and twisters.” “Untal-
ented twitchers and twisters”—like career
Figure 2. Shellac
smashing
12 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
musician and mid-30s singer-songwriter
Bill Haley.45 To complicate matters further,
the students in Evan Hunter’s 1954 novel
destroy Edwards’ jazz records but express a
preference for Tony Bennett, Perry Como,
and the like rather than music along the
lines of 1951’s “Rocket ‘88’” (a song that Bill
Haley and the Saddlemen covered only a
few months after Ike Turner’s Sun records
original).46 Evan Hunter’s students are like
those in the typed version of the Blackboard
Jungle screenplay in that they do not listen to
rock ‘n’ roll. Their actions and (fictional) age
put them in a fascinating position of overlap-
ping with, and providing commentary on,
their real world counterparts in the audience
(dancing or not).
Side B: Rock Around the Clock
and the End of Background Music
Blackboard Jungle and its cinematic followers
move film away from classical sound in more
than one sense. If Max Steiner writes “clas-
sical” music for (classical) films, Bill Haley
and His Comets’ rock music is decidedly
post-classical in comparison. Even if “in the
background,” Steiner wrote (and borrowed
from) what most everyone agrees is music by
classically trained composers, while rock was
called a tuneless cacophony that nevertheless
pushes its way to the foreground. Rock films
build on the example of Blackboard Jungle
and present music that addresses a teen audi-
ence. Producer Sam Katzman’s Rock Around
the Clock offers rock music as an attraction
and as something like underscore, and the
film’s model of the “compilation” score now
creates intertextual relationships that always
address more than one audience. Doherty
argues that Rock Around the Clock is “the
first hugely successful film marketed to teen-
agers to the pointed exclusion of their elders.
By showing that teenagers alone could sus-
tain a box office hit, Rock Around the Clock
pushed the motion picture production strat-
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egy toward the teenpic.”47 Rock Around the
Clock offers teens performances of recorded
music and demonstrations of how to dance
to this new music. Enterprising low budget
producer Katzman48 combined the influence
of Blackboard Jungle and its use of “Rock
Around the Clock,” the talents of director
Fred F. Sears, the structure of a musical revue
(the film presents a variety of music and per-
formers and culminates in a television show
which unites the musicians), and more than
a pinch of exploitation savvy to alter the mu-
sical and usher in the turn toward electricity-
dependent music in cinema. Katzman began
filming on January 6, 1956, wrapped produc-
tion in 13 days, and screened the film in a
Washington D.C. theater on March 14 to suc-
cessfully cash in on the (perhaps temporary)
craze for rock music and more specifically
“Rock Around the Clock.”49
The uses of rock in Rock Around the Clock
illustrated the bubbling to the surface of
sound elements in postwar American film.
While the appearance of rock music in film
was greeted with less scorn than was its
intrusion on radio, as noted by Jeff Smith,
defenders of classical scoring denigrated
the inclusion of this newest form of popular
music, particularly rock: “Often deemed
musically inappropriate and unsophisticated,
the pop soundtrack is usually dismissed as a
concession to the greed and commercialism
of the film producers.”50
In her analysis of The Graduate Susan
Knobloch identifies “two key apprehen-
sions” shared by critics of rock films: “Films
employing rock recordings feel narratively
deficient, and yet rock-scored films seem
overcrowded, overloaded with distracting
and disunified information.”51 Knobloch’s
comments here encourage the address of
post-classical cinema and its loosening of
classical storytelling norms. The second half
of this quote suggests not just the string of
spectacular events rock films offer as narra-
tive but perhaps as well the wealth of content
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 13
that rock / pop songs provide through inter-
textuality, instrumentation and lyrics. The
use of songs to connect scenes and seem-
ingly fill in narrative gaps most noticeably
in montage sequences carries the potential
of simultaneously creating new cracks in the
text’s already shaky presentation of story.
The union of rock and film in Black-
board Jungle is fortuitous for both parties
but the relationship is not exactly carefully
managed. In the wake of the texts’ shared
success, Hollywood and the minor studios
worked quickly to combine rock and film
in order to cash in on what most (includ-
ing Katzman) considered a temporary fad.
In this period the major studios also made
tentative efforts to sell theme songs, but rock
remained on the fringes.52 The economic
pressures were certainly real, as the industry
continued to adjust to the court decisions
of the late 40s, the continued loss of audi-
ences after the highs of 1945 and 1946, and
the ascendancy of television. The film indus-
try’s efforts in the mid-1950s illustrate the
late and still forming understanding of the
overlapping markets for popular music and
cinema.53 While studios controlled publish-
ing rights for much of the music in their
films, theme songs are only a tentative in-
vestment of time, energy and resources into
this merging of markets. As Richard Barrios,
among others, argued, by its very nature the
musical always created and overlapped with
the sale of recordings and sheet music. Yet
the theme songs and rock songs of the 1950s
were not like the “original cast recordings”
of Broadway shows turned into films, but
rather they were the exact recording heard
in a film, and a recording whose existence
and popularity often pre-dated the existence
of the cinema text. Also film companies had
not really considered moving into or taking
over record production, perhaps because
they were still smarting from having the
government cut off their exhibition wings.
Though the influence of these rock films
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is indisputable, in the 1950s rock music in
American cinema was a decidedly minor
practice. Rock was a minor practice on radio
as well: “In sheer numbers of stations, those
that featured ‘easy listening’ or ‘beautiful
music’ or ‘golden records (oldies)’ or main-
stream pop by Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, or
Perry Como easily outnumbered those that
played rock ‘n’ roll.”54 In other words, most
radio stations played the sort of music loved
by the teens in Hunter’s novel, Blackboard
Jungle (rather than Brooks’ Blackboard
Jungle). In this sense, rock films and rock
radio stations of the mid-1950s represented
something of an avant-garde. Each was out-
side of mainstream media production: early
rock was largely the domain of independent
record labels and rock films were largely the
purview of independent producers.
Both rock music and the rock film would
become the domain of large companies but
not for a few years, and the studios remained
slow to financially control the music fea-
tured in films. As Denisoff and Romanowski
state of early rock films, “The goal, of course,
was to lure customers to the box office,
not the record stores. Producers like Sam
Katzman signed name artists with estab-
lished hits to star.”55 In this sense the use of
singers in rock films is comparable to the use
of stars in popular cinema generally where
casting helps secure financing and especially
works to attract an audience. Yet if Katzman
had a stake in record sales his films surely
would send costumers to the record store.
Some film talent and studios did have a
financial stake in the performance of record-
ing artists, particular recordings, or publish-
ing, but films were and are too expensive to
feasibly act only as advertising for music.56
Yet rock films did drive consumers to record
stores, if only as an unintended and uncon-
trolled aftereffect. While a filmgoer may
purchase a ticket because of a single artist, it
is also reasonable to leave the cinema with
the desire to purchase recordings from one
14 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
of the other artists offered in the film. The
presentation of “name artists” performing
“established hits” brings audiences to cinema
theaters to see these artists who had not,
and might not ever, visit the town in ques-
tion, but also importantly to hear the songs
played louder and more publicly than was
possible in the home. As Blackboard Jungle
demonstrates, the cinematic presentation of
rock music in darkened, parent-free space
also allows for dancing.
Rock Around the Clock is sonically in-
novative yet narratively unoriginal with a
plot modeled on Orchestra Wives (1942),
a Glenn Miller film where he is the Bill
Haley-like purveyor of new sounds. Music
manager Steve Hollis (Johnny Johnston)
stumbles across Bill Haley and His Comets
at a dance in the fictional backwater town
of Strawberry Springs and his eyes quickly
turn into dollar signs when he witnesses
teens dancing ecstatically to Haley’s music.
Hollis’s first goal is to keep alive his career as
a manager of dance bands, but this is soon
combined with his efforts to woo dancer Lisa
Johns (Lisa Gaye). In this way Rock Around
the Clock fits Altman’s analysis of the show
musical where the success of a romantic
heterosexual relationship is tied up with the
success of a show.57 Like Blackboard Jungle,
Rock Around the Clock opens with “Rock
Around the Clock” playing over / with /
against the credits but this first narrative pre-
sentation of rock establishes that the proper
response to the music is to move rather than
watch. Instead of observing the source of
the music (the musicians and instruments),
the diegetic audience for this music chooses
instead to dance. Haley’s comments in this
scene about rock ‘n’ roll are also suggestive,
but even more so in terms of the cinematic
presentation of rock music. When out of
town interlopers ask about his performance,
Haley responds: “All you do is play the music
upside down.” In this scene and others, the
cinematic presentation of rock music turns
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the hierarchy of sound and image upside
down with music that is “upside down.”
The cinema audience can, and is per-
haps encouraged to, ignore the screen (the
ostensible source of the sounds of a given
film) and instead pay attention to their own
dancing or the dancing of their peers in the
cinema theater space. The diegetic audience
imitates the teen audience for Blackboard
Jungle and encourages the theater audience
for Rock Around the Clock to follow suit.
Potentially the audience for Rock Around the
Clock even learns steps from Johns just as the
film’s diegetic audience does (though likely
not with such astounding speed). In part be-
cause of his occupation, Hollis immediately
sees continuity between rock and earlier
forms of popular music rather than any real
break. He notes that the music makes teens
dance (“they dance—and I’d like to know
why”) but he also understands that the new
audiences will need instruction and so Johns
and her dance partner brother Jimmy travel
with the band with Hollis’s insistence to
teach new audiences the “correct” responses
to the music: energetic dancing.58 Hollis is
wooing Johns, to be sure, but this decision to
employ the dancer also helps eventually en-
sure the success of Bill Haley, rock music and
rock dancing (within proscribed spaces) as
commercially and ideologically viable forms
of cultural expression within and beyond the
diegesis of Rock Around the Clock. With the
help of Johns, Hollis resists the temptations
of agent and booker Corrine Talbot (Alix
Talton) and arranges for Bill Haley and His
Comets to share their music with the coun-
try through a live television broadcast. Here
the film reveals its big surprise: Hollis and
Johns are already married. The couple and
show are each presented as a great success
as the film ends. This concluding act also
inaugurates the standard third act / climax
of the 1950s rock film: a slight adjustment to
the show / backstage musical that features
technology (television and the film / televi-
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 15
sion camera) pushing aside the diegetically
present human audience.
Cinema audiences naturally once again
danced in the exhibition space to “Rock
Around the Clock”59 in part because they
had the experience of Blackboard Jungle
already and because Rock Around the Clock
encouraged the film audience to identify
with the diegetic audience and their enthusi-
astic response to the performance / presen-
tation of rock music. The film was overtly
about efforts to keep Americans dancing,
yet when the film itself created the desire to
dance, by working to prevent dancing in film
theaters, the culture demonstrated its desire
for there to be a clear separation between
the presentation and response to art forms.
The response to both films articulated main-
stream culture’s belief that movies were not
for dancing even as Rock Around the Clock
overtly and diegetically encouraged dancing
through Johns’s actions.
For Dawson, the film’s plot does not pro-
mote attention to the screen and is “simply
there to string musical interludes together
and give teenagers time to roam the aisles
or neck in the balcony without missing
anything. They could look up at the screen
at any moment and instantly comprehend
where they were in the story.”60 While cer-
tainly true, audience members may also be
utterly unconcerned with the plot, much less
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Figure 3. The
correct response
their location within the plot. The film and
its sounds offer audio pleasure and the op-
portunity for dancing.
Whether for the plot, the music, or both,
enough citizens attended the film for it to
gross around $4 million on a budget of
$300,000. Like Blackboard Jungle, its success
was due in part to both planned and un-
planned publicity, with communities work-
ing to prevent rock dances and expressing
anxiety about screening the film.61 More than
Blackboard Jungle, Rock Around the Clock
solicited and created an audience more in-
terested in the music, the theater’s speakers,
and the communal experience of the music
with its potential for communal dancing,
than any cinema plot. The film even offers a
documentary quality beyond preserving the
look and behavior of some of rock’s first per-
formers and dancing techniques. Bill Haley
and Comets’ vibrant performance of “Rudy’s
Rock” in the film’s climax was recorded live
on the set and provides the film a(nother)
unique first: the first cinematic sync spec-
tacle of rock performance.62
The band also performs the titular song in
the background of the last scene, but it is the
song’s use as something like underscore that
remains to be discussed. As Hollis struggles
to promote the group in the face of Corrine’s
resistance, Alan Freed appears (as himself)
and pledges to help, proclaiming “you don’t
16 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013

have to sell me on rock ‘n roll.” A very brief
montage follows which shows the group’s
rising popularity as their music penetrates
the culture beyond just the patrons of the
West River Club whose flashing sign begins
the sequence. The film’s narration features
overlapping images of the band performing,
audience members dancing, and Hollis and
Corny LaSalle (Henry Slate) gleefully look-
ing almost into the camera as their plan takes
flight. Then images of a record spinning and
Freed ringing a bell and blowing a whistle
while seated behind a microphone show
him at work plugging the song and visually
explains how Bill Haley reaches audiences he
can not see. All this information also shares
the screen briefly with the official declara-
tion of the band’s success. The final image
of the sequence is of the undated Vol. XLIX
no. 1 issue of Variety screaming, “­HALEY’S
ROCK-ROLL DANCE BIZ WHIZ” and
this signals the end of the montage and the
beginning of the next more relaxed presenta-
tion of narrative. The film transitions to a
hand (revealed to be Talbot’s) holding the
same issue of Variety and slapping it disdain-
fully.63 This montage is intertextually rich
and does much more than advance the plot.
It proclaims that “Rock Around the Clock” is
one of the prime reasons for rock’s growing
mainstream popularity, and the immediate
reason for Bill Haley and His Comets’ suc-
cess. It retroactively explains why in the first
performance scene of Rock Around the Clock
Haley slyly remarks to Hollis and LaSalle:
“Are you serious? You mean you’ve never
heard of Bill Haley and the Comets?” Most
audience members knew exactly who Bill
Haley was, and largely because of the titu-
lar song which they may have already even
heard blaring from cinema speakers. Hollis
and LaSalle are not only unaware of the new
(dance) music—they are also evidently un-
aware of Blackboard Jungle. Or perhaps they
are aware of the film but correctly surmised
that they were older than the film’s ideal au-
dience member.
The montage also serves as both a re-
minder of the main reason the film exists,
and a testament to the mutually beneficial
relationship of rock and film. Cinema helped
turn rock ‘n’ roll into mass culture with films
like Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the
Clock. The montage includes images of the
band performing which means the song is in
some way diegetic, but most importantly it
suggests the use of rock music as underscore
that is now a norm for cinema. Time and
space are collapsed and the song refuses to
remain tied to the activities of the band. The
montage of “Rock Around the Clock”—and
two others featuring “Happy Baby” and
“Mambo Rock”—display filmmaking at
the level of visual communication which is

Figure 4.
A rich display

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reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 17
not particularly sophisticated (though the
overlapping images are at times surpris-
ingly rich). The combination of sound and
image(s) in each case, however, remains
exciting. Perhaps the relatively uninteresting
visuals are not merely a product of the film-
makers’ skills, budget, or available technol-
ogy. These sequences combine sound and
image in a manner that privileges sound.
The rock songs are the real “show” and the
images may only provide something like a
(flickering) light to dance by. This inversion
of the image / sound hierarchy, a variation
on Altman’s “audio dissolve,” spreads rapidly
and irrevocably from Rock Around the Clock
to others genres and cinemas. Such moments
may not artfully advance the narrative, con-
dense time, or collapse space but they do
present a rock song for at least a verse and
chorus. Montage sequences which match a
rock song and perfunctory images in a rudi-
mentary editing pattern may offer a middle
point between the visually magnificent
work of creators like Slavko Vorkapich for
Classical Hollywood films and those which
structure Michael Bay’s contemporary block-
busters and get a little faster, louder, longer
and more numerous each year. In an essay
on rock scoring David Shumway argues:
Whereas the goal of the traditional film
score was to cue an emotional response
in the viewer without calling attention
to itself, recent sound tracks, consisting
mainly of previously recorded material,
are put together on the assumption that
the audience will recognize the artist, the
song, or, at a minimum, a familiar style.64
The “Rock Around the Clock” montage
particularly spreads well beyond the diegetic
concerns of Rock Around the Clock; as sound
overtakes the image, the text opens up to
other texts and other media. Though pre-
classical cinema relied on known audio ma-
terial for the live performance of music, the
introduction of recorded music in film as the
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final piece of classical filmmaking allows the
incorporation of specific performances of
songs, and performances that are necessarily
the result of technology. Though referring to
Hollywood film production in a more recent
period Shumway articulates a change that
began with cinema’s second use of “Rock
Around the Clock.”
With this second use, Rock Around the
Clock worked to reclaim “Rock Around the
Clock” from those who linked it to violence:
filmmakers, studio marketing executives, the
popular press, and anyone who denigrated
teen culture. Blackboard Jungle solidified
existing cultural links between teens, rock,
and violence but Rock Around the Clock and
other early apologetic rock films sought to
sever these same links.
Rock Around the Clock engages in a dia-
logue with known information about the
titular song and its most famous performer.
It also engages in a conversation with Black-
board Jungle at the level of both diegesis and
theory. The film’s echoes of Blackboard Jungle
continue the debate over the popular percep-
tion of rock and teenagers. While Blackboard
Jungle unapologetically links the song with
disobedience and violence, no violence mars
the narrative of Rock Around the Clock, and
as the film progresses it is clear that in this
presentation of rock ‘n’ roll (marketed in
print ads and posters as “the whole story of
rock and roll”), the music has connections
only with joy and dancing (and electricity).
Rock music can unite previously disparate
groups in their love of music and desire to
dance. Doherty writes that the film portrays
“rock ‘n’ roll as a valid teenage activity with-
out undue discussion or inquiry”65 and sum-
marizes the ideological work undertaken by
other early rock films: “By placing the ulti-
mate reins of rock ‘n’ roll power in the hands
of straight business types (for reasons of dra-
matic economy and romantic subplotting,
usually female), the teenpic deflates whatever
uncomfortable portents of evil influence
18 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
the rock ‘n’ roll talent itself conjures.”66 Rock
Around the Clock simply and explicitly ar-
gues that rock is not sinister, that teens are
not prone to violence, and that mixing teens
and rock results only in new (and exciting)
forms of dance.67 The film demonstrates that
dancing should be done at rock shows even
as it creates dancing in the cinema theater
aisles, just as Blackboard Jungle had done
earlier. In the vocabulary of the music in-
dustry, Rock Around the Clock can be called
an “answer record”68 to Blackboard Jungle
because it rebuts the other film’s connections
between rock and delinquency and does
so through the use of the earlier text’s basic
vocabulary. Rock Around the Clock presents
Freed’s version of rock and teen culture, a vi-
sion also constructed in part as a response to
Blackboard Jungle, as suggested in his com-
ments to listeners on March 23, 1956: “the
most sickening thing I’ve seen in a long time
is a marquee of one of our prominent Broad-
way movie theaters showing the picture The
Blackboard Jungle . . . called the ‘bold story
of a teenage terror,’ and I think it’s probably
the most sickening thing I’ve ever seen.”69
He is sickened twice over because teenagers
are “the greatest, most wonderful age-group
in America” and rhetorically adds for good
measure, “Since when has it become a crime
to be a teenager?”70
Conclusion
A consideration of these first uses of a single
rock song, “Rock Around the Clock,” sug-
gests how much remains to be studied in the
history of American film sound. Audiences,
and especially teenage audiences, staged a
rebellion against classical sound through
their responses to Blackboard Jungle and
Rock Around the Clock. Or, to put it another
way, teens accurately interpreted both films
as rejecting the norms of classical sound. In
Unheard Melodies, after comments on the
background nature of classical film scoring,
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Gorbman quotes composer and musicolo-
gist Leonid Sabaneev stating that it is “bad
business” when music comes out of the
background and follows his statement with
her own response: “Bad business, precisely,
for it is good business to give ticket-buyers
what they have come for, namely a story, not
a concert.”71 While certainly true that main-
stream cinema is a narrative form, it is not
always the case that audiences attend solely,
or primarily, for the story ostensibly on offer.
The musical, for example, foregrounds music
in a manner that necessarily puts pressure
on the classical norms, and when the musi-
cal offers a range of performers (revue, show
musical, concert film) whose work is for
sale and designed to be consumed as pre-
recorded music, the cinema starts to feel like
a pre-recorded music delivery system.
Rock music is not “inaudible”; the volume,
mood, and rhythm of rock refuses to be sub-
ordinated to the film image. And rock music,
whether offered in a melodrama like Black-
board Jungle or displayed in a show musical
like Rock Around the Clock, challengers our
sense of film sound history, our concep-
tions of classical sound, and even provides
the opportunity to physically respond to the
performance / presentation of music: known,
loved, or newly discovered.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Carly Marino for invaluable research
assistance. In the completion of this essay Laurel
Westrup challenged my thinking (and writing)
about rock films in fundamental ways. My thanks
as well to Gillian Anderson, Ron Sadoff and the
anonymous reader for helpful advice and feed-
back. This essay began as work undertaken while
a graduate student supervised by David E. James
at the University of Southern California and was
shaped by his knowledge and guidance.
notes
1. Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country:
People and Places in American Music (New York:
Pantheon, 1997): 298.
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 19
2.  Blackboard Jungle, dir. by Richard Brooks
(1955; Warner Home Video, DVD 2005).
3. Along with Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard
Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana UP, 1987), other important arguments for
a historicization of film sound include Kathryn
Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical
Hollywood Film (Madison, WI: U of Wiscon-
sin P, 1992), Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art,
Trans. Clauda Gorbman (New York, Columbia
UP, 2009), Todd Berliner and Philip Furia, “The
Sounds of Silence: Songs In Hollywood Films
Since the 1960s,” Style 36:1 (Spring 2002): 19–35,
Charles Schreger, “Altman, Dolby and the Sec-
ond Sound Revolution,” Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New
York: Columbia UP, 1985) 348355, John Belton,
“1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution.”
Sound Theory / Sound Practice. Ed. Rick Alt-
man (New York: Routledge, 1992) 154–167, James
Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (New York:
Routledge, 2008), K. J. Donnelly, “The Classical
Film Score Forever? Batman, Batman Returns
and Post-Classical Film Music,” Contemporary
Hollywood Cinema, Ed. Steve Neale and Murray
Smith (New York: Routledge, 1998) 142–155, and
Gianluca Sergi, “A Cry in the Dark: The Role of
Post-Classical Film Sound,” Contemporary Holly-
wood Cinema, Ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith
(New York: Routledge, 1998).
4.  Rock Around the Clock, dir. by Fred F. Sears
(1956; Sony Picture Home Entertainment, DVD
2006).
5.  American Graffiti (1973) also pointedly opens
with “Rock Around the Clock” and the song is used
for the opening credits to the TV spinoff Happy
Days (1974–1984). The song’s use, in the form of a
new recording by Bill Haley, for Happy Days and
continued appearance (in multiple versions) in
films such as The Karate Kid part II (1986) is surely
also worthy of more sustained attention.
6. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988) 69.
7. Altman 71.
8. Gorbman 73. Though not universally ac-
cepted, the influence of Gorbman’s analysis and
language can be seen in the degree to which her
work is quoted in film aesthetics textbooks. For
example, in the section on “narrative film music”
in their textbook, Corrigan and White mention
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Gorbman and the “principle of inaudibility” but
no other scholars. Here note that the authors, like
many others, unfortunately drop the quotation
marks around the term “inaudibility” that Gorb-
man uses throughout her discussion. Timothy
Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience:
An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Bedford / St.
Martin’s, 2012): 198. For a response to Gorbman,
see Claudia Joan Widgery, The Kinetic and Tem-
poral Interaction of Music and Film: Three Docu-
mentaries of 1930’s America, Ph.D Dissertation,
University of Maryland, 1990, p. 18
9. Gorbman 76.
10. Kalinak xv.
11. Kevin Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Film
and Television Music (London: BFI, 2008) 11.
12. Donnelly 11.
13. Donnelly 20.
14. Doherty considers the rise of films for teen-
agers in the 1950s and 1960s, a development firmly
tied to the appearance of new music, specifically
rock. Rock was one of a series of exploitation
cycles. Doherty’s focus is not on music, but rock’s
participation in this new cinema receives discus-
sion and his work is valuable for its address of
scores in the 1950s. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers
and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Mov-
ies in the 1950s, rev. and expanded ed. (Philadel-
phia, PA: Temple UP, 2002) 2.
15. Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth
Culture: 1875–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2008) 465.
16. Doherty 48–53. In this section Doherty also
quotes a survey for the Motion Picture Herald
Institute of Industry Opinion from 1956 that in-
dicates the lack of understanding and coordina-
tion within the industry: “The need for pictures
appealing to the 15 to 25 age group was listed as
the most important by all classes of exhibitors
and producers as well, but distributors placed it
fifth” (52).
17.  Los Angeles Herald-Express, March 17, 1955 p. 1.
Richard Brooks papers, Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
18. Certainly most teens were not taking notes
about who made the film, but neither was every
teen slashing a theater seat with a knife or danc-
ing in the aisles. Enough teens were, however,
to create some widely reported incidents that
quickly morphed into media events and so linger
to the present.
20 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013
19. Denisoff and Romanowski 17. Race is cer-
tainly an important issue in this quote and for
studies of the history (and present) of rock music.
There is a voluminous literature on the subject
but these issues fall outside the boundaries of the
present discussion. For one entry point, and a
reading of Elvis as a progressive cultural force, see
Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Cham-
paign, IL: U of Illinois P, 2005).
20. “Rock Around the Clock” itself (in its most
famous and original version) is the result of dif-
ferent takes of the song mixed together. The song
depends on technology not just in the form of
electric guitars and amplifiers but recording tech-
nology. See Dawson 85–86.
21. Dawson 118.
22. As of this writing, Apple’s iTunes still does
not sell this version either so Blackboard Jungle
continues to provide a unique version of “Rock
Around the Clock.”
23. Denisoff and Romanowski 25.
24. Dawson reveals that Bill Haley’s “Crazy,
Man, Crazy” similarly became caught in the web
of media, rock and delinquency through its ap-
pearance in the 1953 CBS television production
of William Inge’s Glory in the Flower. That text
features James Dean as a troubled young man and
Haley’s song bookends the film just as his work
opens and closes Blackboard Jungle. Jim Dawson,
Rock Around the Clock: The Record that Started the
Rock Revolution! (San Francisco, CA: Backbeat,
2005) 54.
25. At the extreme end of this is Peter Kubelka’s
design for the “Invisible Theater” for Anthology
Film Archives. See Sky Sitney, “The Search for the
Invisible Cinema,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005):
102–113.
26. Dawson recounts that a Boston theater
manager was running a first reel of the film with
no sound to prevent dancing and also protect the
structural integrity of the balcony. See p. 126.
27. These comments point to the fascinating
transition point between labeling a song like
“Rock Around the Clock” a rock ‘n’ roll number
or a jazz (or “hot” jazz) recording (among other
options). Brooks regards the song as clearly a
“rock” song, as his screenplay notations (described
beginning in the next paragraph) demonstrate.
For a discussion of how films (including the those
under discussion here) participate in the forma-
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tion of rock ‘n’ roll and the parameters of the
definition, see Peter Stanfield, “Crossover: Sam
Katzman’s Switchblade Calypso Bop Reefer Mad-
ness Swamp Girl or ‘Bad Jazz,’ Calypso, Beatniks
and Rock ‘n’ Roll in 1950s Teenpix,” Popular Music
29.3 (October 2010): 437–455.
28. Richard Brooks papers, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences.
29. Al Altman teletype message from MGM
New York office. Richard Brooks papers, Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences.
30. Gussak and guitarist Danny Cedrone were
session musicians for the recording of “Rock
Around the Clock.” Haley later hired Charlie
Higler and Dick Boccelli (AKA Dick Richards) to
play drums though Rock Around the Clock features
Ralph Jones.
31. Dawson summarizes Brooks’ claim that he
heard it on the radio, but considers the story of
Glenn Ford’s son playing the song repeatedly at
home during meetings between Brooks and his
father to be the “more feasible” claim. See 113–117.
32. Script page A1, dated 10/7/54. Richard
Brooks papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
33. Script page 1, dated 10–7–54. Richard Brooks
papers.
34. Script page 39, dated 10–7–54. Richard
Brooks papers.
35. Script page 49, dated 10–7–54. Richard
Brooks papers.
36. Script page 53, dated 10–13–54. Richard
Brooks papers.
37. Script page 70, dated 10–20–54. Richard
Brooks papers.
38. Script page 134, dated 10–7–54. Richard
Brooks papers.
39. For the best discussion of the complex inter-
actions between film and music industries, espe-
cially in the pivotal 1960s and 70s, see Jeff Smith,
The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film
Music (New York: Columbia UP, 1998).
40. One trailer for the film promotes the song
but fails to mention the film’s exclusive extended
version. It begins with the shot of Dadier first
approaching the school and “Rock Around the
Clock” occupying the soundtrack. Unlike the
same scene in the film, here there are no diegetic
reinsch : Music over Words and Sound over Image 21
sounds to compete with the rock song. A male
voiceover addresses the audience and answers a
question that many did not need to ask: “You are
now listening to ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ This is
the theme music for MGM’s sensational new pic-
ture Blackboard Jungle.”
41. Denisoff and Romanowski 11.
42. Denisoff and Romanowski 13. Both re-
cordings can be found on YouTube. “Rock
Around the Clock”: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yhqqlPR3lOM. “Love Theme from
‘Blackboard Jungle’”: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=lUjcuSK_cJ4
43. Dawson 133.
44. Quoted in Denisoff and Romanowski 36.
45. For a clear account of Haley’s fascinating
life and career, the best single resource remains
John Swenson, Bill Haley: The Daddy of Rock n
Roll (London: W.H. Allen, 1982). For a discussion
of Haley’s final years see Michael Hall, “Falling
Comet,” Texas Monthly June 2011. Available on-
line: http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/falling
-comet
46. Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle: A Novel
(1954; Cambridge, MA: Bentley, 1971) 168.
47. Doherty 57.
48. Katzman’s avant-garde credentials are sig-
nificantly enhanced by the fact that he helped Ron
Rice make his only film Flower Thief (1959–60)
through his contribution of 16mm aerial film car-
tridges.
49. Dawson 145.
50. Smith 4.
51. Susan Knobloch, “The Graduate as Rock ‘n’
Roll Film,” Spectator 17.2 (1997): 61.
52. Denisoff and Romanowski 10.
53. Which is not to suggest that such behavior
was entirely new in the postwar era. See Ap-
pendix II of Richard Barrios’ A Song in the Dark:
The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford UP, 2010) for an impressively researched
list of songs released from early musicals. See also
Katherine Spring, “Pop Go the Warner Bros., et
al.: Marketing Film Songs during the Coming of
Sound,” Cinema Journal, 48.1 (Fall 2008): 68–89.
54. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the
American Imagination, from Amos ‘n’ Andy and
Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard
Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999) 228.
55. Denisoff and Romanowski 23.
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56. Some artists took advantage of their cross-
media opportunities more effectively and with
more astuteness than studios because they were
free to partner with companies in different fields.
Actors, directors, producers, and agents all saw
their power increase in the postwar era and took
on the responsibilities of the studios. Singers-ac-
tors were particularly well suited to take advantage
of the new opportunities. Doris Day, for example,
founded Arwin Productions, her own publishing
firm and included 4 songs she owned in 1954’s
Young at Heart. See Denisoff and Romanowski 10.
57. Altman 200–269.
58. This is especially apparent when Talbot
books them for a Hartford senior prom for the
Mansfield School for Girls in a move designed
to “break” Hollis. When an old woman spits out
“Barbaric!” at Haley’s performance of “Razzle-
Dazzle” it is up to Lisa Johns and brother Jimmy
to save the day. Though the two dance alone for
a minute, the young people soon transition from
clapping along to offering their own versions of
rock couples dancing. As Talbot says that she
still will not book Bill Haley, Hollis defends not
so much the music as the prescribed and dem-
onstrated response: “You see what Lisa and her
brother are doing out there.”
59. There are also reports of dancing and audi-
ence mayhem from the film’s screenings in Eng-
land, and not long after the film’s run Bill Haley
and His Comets toured, interestingly, cinemas.
See Dawson 167.
60. Dawson 147.
61. Dawson 153.
62. Dawson 149. The film features “Rock
Around the Clock” as it moves to the closing title
“The Living End” and the soundtrack includes
the sounds of the audience clapping and snapping
in an apparent attempt to make this recording
seem live.
63. She is not pleased and her anger only in-
creases when assistant Mike Todd (John Archer)
storms in and says ostensibly to Corrine but also
clearly to any adults who can hear the film: “Boss
you can’t go on ignoring this rock ‘n’ roll stuff
anymore. Every hotel and club in the country is
wiring for information.”
64. David R. Shumway, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound
Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia,” Cinema
Journal 38.2 (1999): 36–37.
22 music and the moving image  6.3 / fall 2013

65. Doherty 66. 68. An “answer record” is a direct response of

66. Doherty 67.
67. It is interesting however that at the Man-
sfield School for Girls prom a young woman’s
threat to cancel funding for a new library is the
final push to allow the rock show to happen as
the older generation readies to pull the plug on
Haley’s performance. Diegetically, then, rock
needs power in the cultural sphere to have a
chance to spread, and here Rock Around the Clock
may elliptically permit an audience to reflect on
the “payola” scandal which later ended Freed’s run
and tarnished the spread of rock music.
one record to an earlier hit song. For example,
not long after the release (and success) of The
Silhouettes’ “Get a Job,” in 1957 it was “answered”
variously by “I Found a Job,” “I Got Fired,” “I Lost
My Job,” and, perhaps even more pointedly, “Got
a Job.” For a concise discussion see Jay Warner,
American Singing Groups: A History from 1940s to
Today (New York: Leonard, 2006) 291.
69. Douglas 231.
70. Douglas 231.
71. Gorbman 76.

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