Blu-ray Review: Rock ‘n’ Roll High School Joins the Shout! Factory

Allan Arkush’s anarchic ode to rock ‘n’ roll rebellion gets a major 4K upgrade as well as some choice new supplements.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High SchoolThe release of George Lucas’s American Graffiti in 1973 unleashed a groundswell of films and television shows that wistfully gazed back at the “good old days” of the late 1950s and early ’60s, before the “loss of innocence” signaled by the JFK assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Fueled by a double LP’s worth of period needle drops, Lucas’s film presents an anodyne, nostalgia-hazy view of the era intended as a kind of comfort food for the turbulent early ’70s. Conversely, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School taps into the primal energy and anarchic brio of early rock music as the ideal analogue for the emergence of the punk movement in the face of late-’70s social anomie and economic stagnation.

This parallelism between time periods carries through to the film’s visual technique, which evokes the sight gag-packed pages of Mad magazine and the cartoon-inflected films of Frank Tashlin, particularly his rock ‘n’ roll music satire The Girl Can’t Help It, from which director Allan Arkush unabashedly purloins a scene. The punk-rock anthems of the Ramones also effectively bridge both eras, since their albums would typically include a cover song that highlighted their disparate musical influences—including the surfer-dude-friendly “California Sun” and the sock-hoppy “Do You Wanna Dance?”—both of which turn up on the soundtrack here. Not to mention the fact that, like most airplay-dependent early rock ‘n’ roll music, their propulsive singles almost always clock in at a radio-friendly three minutes or less.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School affectionately tweaks many of the conventions of high-school movies from the 1950s. Newly installed principal Evelyn Togar (Mary Woronov) displays all the sartorial severity and gleeful sadism of a women’s prison warden. The student body’s everyday needs are better served by the entrepreneurial Eagelbauer (Clint Howard), whose swanky office hides behind the homely façade of the men’s room stalls. (The character’s name, incidentally, is lifted from Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living.) If Miss Togar represents the “mindless authority” of the political system, as radio DJ-turned-Greek chorus Screamin’ Steve Stevens (Don Steele) helpfully glosses the situation at one point, then Eaglebauer stands in for the ostensibly helping hand of the free-market economy.

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Perhaps the most innovative shift in narrative emphasis, however, has the love story between lonely quarterback Tom Roberts (Vincent Van Patten) and aspiring physicist Kate Rambeau (Dey Young) taking a decided backseat to the rebellious self-assertion of rock-and-roller Riff Randell (P. J. Soles). Riff isn’t looking for love, despite her avowed affection for Joey Ramone’s pizza-eating habits. Riff wants to become a songwriter—a career woman, in other words—and her one true goal is to deliver her tunes to the Ramones’s doorstep. The opposition that Riff faces from the puritanical Togar, whose disciplinarian mindset she describes as being “stuck in the 1950s,” ultimately prompts her to stage an insurrection at Vince Lombardi High School, where, after all, “winning is better than losing.” In a way that clearly presages Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, the standoff will end with the complete destruction of the school.

The specific details of Miss Togar’s objection to rock music (“lethal to mice”) are reductions to absurdity actually based, amusingly enough, on authentic “scientific” studies and newspaper accounts of the music’s deleterious effect on susceptible listeners. But somewhere just beyond the film’s keen-edged parody, there are intimations of truly, horribly repressive institutions. The lengths to which Miss Togar will go in order to destroy the source of this teenage rebellion recall nothing so much as the Nazi’s book-burning bonfires. Nor is this the only invocation of the Nazi era in the film. When the cafeteria staff are up against the wall, being pummeled by the Tuesday surprise, their pleas echo the defense frequently proffered by German soldiers at the Nuremberg trials: “We were only following orders.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School actively embraces teenage anarchy and rock ‘n’ roll rebellion in a real way. This is perfectly in keeping with the films produced by Roger Corman, which almost always offered some sly social criticism tucked away in the Trojan horse of exploitation filmmaking. It’s not entirely a joke, therefore, when, at the end of film, Screamin’ Steve offers to bring the explosive hijinks of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School to your school. And just in case you don’t happen to go in for the detonator, you can always embrace the radical inclusivity of punk rock. Like the Ramones, invoking Tod Browing’s oddity-embracing Freaks, used to sing: “Gabba gabba hey, we accept you, one of us.”

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Image/Sound

Shout! Factory’s new 4K restoration of the film from the original camera negative constitutes a significant improvement over their 2010 Blu-ray, which was released under the now sadly defunct “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” imprint. Details of the costumes and set design stand out in palpable depth—and, when it comes to a film this laden with sight gags planted as background details, that’s a good thing. Flesh tones are lifelike, primary hues really pop (witness those molten blues and reds in the concert scene), and grain levels are satisfyingly filmic. On the sonic front, a Master Audio mono mix replaces the older Dolby Digital. The lossless track lends some solid ambience to the crowded hallway and audience scenes, while the central concert performance still sounds a little on the rough-and-ragged side. This is an unavoidable consequence of the low-budget filmmaking: The Last Waltz, this isn’t. Suffice it to say, though, that Rock ‘n’ Roll High School likely will never sound any better than it does here.

Extras

Shout! Factory presents their “40th Anniversary Edition” of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School packaged in a shiny steelbook edition with the iconic William Stout poster art emblazoned on the front and a cheeky “Togar Sucks” graffiti tag scrawled across the back. The big new extra here is “Class of ’79: 40 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” a 70-minute deep dive into the film’s conception, production and legacy, tracing its evolution from the Animal House derivative Girl’s Gym to the Saturday Night Fever-inflected Disco High and on to its final incarnation. This one piece effectively synthesizes nearly all of the information presented in the various commentary tracks and other, earlier bonus materials. Talking-head contributors include writer-director Allan Arkush, co-writers Joe Dante, Richard Whitley and Russ Dvonch, cinematographer Dean Cundey, and critic Nathaniel Thompson. The other new supplement here is a brief introduction by Arkush, apparently filmed in his home office, to a Slasher Film Festival screening of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, complete with a goofily engaging reenactment of one of the Ramones’s songs using bobblehead dolls.

Shout! ports over all the other bonus materials from their 2010 Blu-ray. The archival featurette “Back to School” adds more personal reflections from actors P.J. Soles, Mary Woronov, Clint Howard, Dey Young, and Loren Lester, as well as Marky Ramone and producer Roger Corman. It’s an often amusing piece, and there’s very little overlap with the newer making-of material. “Staying After Class” reunites actors Vincent Van Patten, P.J. Soles, and Dey Young around a high-school lunch table to reminisce about their experiences on set. Soles brings along some cool mementos: a Ramones lunch box and a signed copy of the now-rare soundtrack album. There are a grand total of four commentary tracks that team up various configurations of the cast and crew, and they run the gamut from downright raucous to a bit more stately in their presentation. There are separate short interviews with Corman and Arkush, as well as a selection of radio and TV spots and trailers.

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Overall

Allan Arkush’s anarchic ode to rock ‘n’ roll rebellion gets a major 4K upgrade as well as some choice new supplements.

Score: 
 Cast: P.J. Soles, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Dey Young, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, Dick Miller, Don Steele, Lynn Farrell, Alix Elias, Loren Lester, Daniel Davies, Grady Sutton, The Ramones  Director: Allan Arkush  Screenwriter: Richard Whitley, Russ Dvonch, Joseph McBride, Allan Arkush, Joe Dante  Distributor: Shout! Factory  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: PG  Year: 1979  Release Date: November 19, 2019  Buy: Video

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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