#EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS MOVIE#
#EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS SERIES#

Davidson and Arlene Davidson, based on the novel by P. It contains some strong language.Ī Different Beat EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS, directed by Martin Davidson screenplay by Mr. ''Eddie and the Cruisers'' is rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''). And Helen Schneider, as the tambourinist, looks sultry but distinctly out of place, since she's a young woman playing what was then - and still is, for the most part - very much a young man's game. Ellen Barkin, as the reporter, has the film's most awkwardly written role. Unlike the other Cruisers, who include Matthew Laurance and Joe Pantoliano, he isn't forced to shift frequently from 1963 to the present and back again as a result, they all seem old for the early scenes and not old enough for today.

Pare makes a fine debut he captures the manner of a hot-blooded young rocker with great conviction, and his lip-synching is almost perfect. So the anachronisms are a greater mystery than that of Eddie's disappearance. Davidson obviously cares a lot about the era, and there's plenty of other evidence that he knows how it looked and sounded the same can be said for John Lyon, a k a Southside Johnny, who served as the film's technical adviser. Nor were there then many bands with personnel like the Cruisers': a few young white rockers, a black saxophonist who looks twice their age, and one woman, who plays the tambourine. Eddie's music sounds good, but it also sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen's, and it would not have been the rage in 1963.

#EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS MOVIE#

Other aspects of the movie are inexplicably wrong. Some of the details ring uncannily true, like the slick ''oldies'' nightclub act that one of the Cruisers is still doing nearly 20 years after Eddie's supposed death. These are triggered by an interviewer named Maggie Foley (Ellen Barkin), who wants to tell the band's story on her television show.

#EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS SERIES#

Frank, now an English teacher, remembers his time with the Cruisers in a series of flashbacks. This is done through the character of Frank Ridgeway (Tom Berenger), nicknamed Wordman, who joined the Cruisers as a foil to the visceral, hard-rocking Eddie.

While the mystery works its way toward a somewhat unsurprising and positively Gothic denouement, the film goes about its real business: re- creating the heyday of Eddie and the Cruisers, and contrasting that time with the present. They also wonder where the ''Season in Hell'' tapes have gone, since the album was never released and the tapes would undoubtedly be valuable. Eddie read enough of Rimbaud to make an album called ''Season in Hell,'' and his friends wonder if he didn't, like the poet, willfully vanish. It's about Eddie (Michael Pare), a New Jersey rocker who hit the big time in 1963 and then drove off a bridge. ''Eddie and the Cruisers,'' which opens today at the Loews State and other theaters, attempts to enliven the rock-history formula by adding new elements of pretension and mystery. For another, rock seems to be much more easily embodied than explained. The behind-the-scenes drama - the wild ambition, the wheeling and dealing, the image making - convey such different sentiments from the music's explosive, euphoric feeling that there's bound to be a built-in incongruity, for one thing. Not even the better efforts in this genre, from ''Stardust'' and ''The Idolmaker'' to ''The Buddy Holly Story,'' have captured anything akin to the excitement of the music itself.

THERE hasn't yet been a successful movie about the early days of rock-and-roll, even though the subject is certainly capable of generating a lot of emotion.

Eddie and the cruisers