CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Booed, Rude And Tattooed

RUDE BOY

Produced and directed by Jack Hazan and David Mingay (Atlantic Releasing Corp.)

Toby Goldstein

First, know this—the Clash have disavowed Rude Boy. Second, know this—it is not great cinematic art or expertise we’re talking about here.. But ultimately, know this—if the Clash are your heroes, and you can’t get enough of Strummer’s crumbling choppers or Paul Simonon’s Grecian profile, and most of all, quake before the steamy electrical storm the group generates onstage, shell out the bucks and suffer through the dialogue.

Rude Boy is in fact a schizophrenic enterprise. The film-half that produces lots of misplaced giggles and far too many yawns is a musical romance that could be subtitled “boy meets band, boy gets band, boy loses band. ” Co-s;tar Ray Gange, a tompletely ordinary council-flat kid whose main expression implies mental vacancy, wants to roadie for his pals, the Clash. Well, it beats working in a grotty porn shop, don’t it? Too bad this yobbo would rather drink himself into a stupor or get laid than do any useful work with the equipment. Naturally, his goofing off makes him an easy target for the band’s practical jokes. Even when he’s kicked off the tour, Gange never really gets worked up, but quietly shuffles back to his miserable flat where he contemplates the Clash having turned into stars, and thenceforth decamps to America to begin an exciting new career in construction. No, that la'st bit isn’t part of the film, but is what Gange decided to do, looking no future in the face. Lucky us.

Having dispensed with its plotless story line and dodgy chit-chat, we can move to Rude Boy’s real substance—the Clash in concert.

‘Filmmakers Jack Hrzan and David Mingay followed the band around for at least a year, encompassing the span between the release of their first album and Give ’Em Enough Rope. The performance segments are played in chronological order, showing the band’s growing musical sophistication, pinpointing from song to song their increasing ability to focus their massive - catalytic energies,'

Pity that the Clash’s offstage conversations are so utterly banal that their hard-core musical politics are compromised. If there’s one visible reason for the group’s rejection of Rude Boys, it may be their dismay at being cast as good-time boys, growing ever more big-headed as they evolve from cellars to halls and travel in nice cars instead of sloppy vans. If indeed the Clash live life as compulsive creators, Rude Boy does them a disservice, with its go-nowhere “up the system” discussions and proliferation of slag wqrds tossed about every few seconds.

But then there are the lovely moments—of Joe Strummer behind a piano, cracked teeth beaming through a wide smile as he plays a gentle version of “Let The Good Times Roll’ and gets transported. Or the intimate focus on Strummer, as he stands alone on the studio, singing “All The Young Punks” to the group’s recorded tracks, saliva spraying from his mouth, brow in furrows as he attempts to alchemize pure belief onto a skinny piece of wax. Rude Boy may undercut grace with clunkiness, and alternate too-brief points of satisfaction with lengthy boredom, but when it comes to passing the tests of which legends are being made, the rudies don’t fail.___

Bachelors For Dollars!

THE DATING GAME '

(Syndicated) __> _

It was an American institution for nearly 15 years. Through all of them, intellectuals (viewers who never miss 60 Minutes) bewailed its utter mindlessness. Through the last several of them—after its producers began urging contestants to try to make their opposite numbers 1 damp between the legs or tumescent—persons of delicate sensibility rebuked it savagely for being wanton, prurient, even concupiscent. It was The Dating Game, and it most assuredly was mindless and wanton, prurient and’even concupiscent.; But it was also the best half-hour of American commercial teievison.

Night after night, week after week, month and month, and—yes! year after year, it allowed us to observe one another in that Real Life situation in which most of us feel most vulnerable—face-toface with members of the opposite sex to whom we’ve made ourselves out to be pretty and witty, charming and (at least during the past several' seasons) shuming urns of burning funk sexually.

Oh, how we relished the cruel and hilarious spectacle of smug simps and cocksure pipsqueaks coming out from around the partition that hid bachelors from bachelorette to discover that they barely came up to the chins of young women to whom they’d characterized themselves as The Original Mr. Stud! The delicious humiliation!

How our hearts went out to the poor couples who, having first laid eyes on one another only 14 seconds before, had to hold on to one another like actual Christian newlyweds while they were told where they were being sent for their date.

The embarrassment1 And how our hearts continued to go out to them as they learned, in the show’s underbudgeted final seasons, after it went off ABC and into syndication, that they weren’t going to be flown to any romantic foreign capital at all, but to some godforsaken disco/pizzeria in the San Fernando Valley, 15 minutes by taxi the Chuck Barris Stages.

You could watch every soap on the airwaves for a months and not have as many tears jerked as you would be a single episode of The Dating Game! And these weren’t paid professionals, but actual living Americans, your friends and neighbors, and my own!

The truculence and rancor! Who can forget the night in 1978 that one particularly dim bachelorette decided that it would be wonderfully cute to make a trio of bachelors vying for her favors pelt themselves in the face with pies? How could she not have realized that the two she spurned might well feel that since they’d been such fabulous sports, she certainly ought to be as well, and would give her a taste of her own medicated shaving cream? Such was her rage and shame after these two guys wreaked their vengeance that she wept Uncontrollably through the announcement that she and the lucky sod she’d selected would be flown to actual swinging London for their date. We laughed until we wept ourselves!,

Or how about the time a really haughty ex-model type explained to emcee Jim Lange that she hadn’t chosen Bachelor No. 2 because “his answersbored me to tears”? When he came around the partition to confront the tactless bitch who’d affronted him so grievously, Bachelor No. 2 was asked what he thought of the haughty model-typers transparent jeans. He coolly looked her up and down until she squirmed, and then looked her up and down some more, and then and only then finally snorted, “Jim, they bore me to tears. ” Oh, how that haughty model-type longed to become transparent herself!

The lust and the vengefulness, the shameless self-aggrandizement and the shame! The Dating -Game more Vividly displayed a wider range of human frailties than any other program on the tube, counting award-winning PBS dramas from abroad, andevery lastbitof itwasreal.

Mind you, we haven’t talked about half the reasons for its greatness until we’ve talked about ' its master-of-ceremonies. If ever a game show( host deserved to be carried around on the shoulders of the adoring populace of Videoland, to be showered with tickertape from on high, to be panegyrized and praised for the rest of his days, that game show host is The Dating Game’s JimLange.

When, in the laid-back 70’s, male contestants began showing up at their tapings in clothing with which Jim wouldn’t h$ve deigned to polish his auto, did he demand that het in turn, be allowed to wear something other than his traditional tuxedo and frilly shirt—in which he looked like the maitre d’ of a Holiday Inn coffee shop that had gotten acid in its water supply and decided that it was one of The Great Restaurants? No, Jim dutifully donned his formal wear until the bitter end.

When it came time to advise a couple of dewy-eyed kids in love that they weren’t going to be sent anywhere near Rio or New Orleans or even Palm Springs, but to some godforsaken disco/pizzeria 15 minutes by taxi from The Chuck Barris Stages, did Jim ever inject a note of even the faintest disdain in his mellifluous baritone, as though to suggest, “Hey, / know this date sucks—it’s the show’s tightass producers who are to blame?” Not a chance: Jim was too loyal

Finally, at show’s end, when, after throwing their kiss, he and the two couples who’d been united over the preceding 30 minutes’ course were supposed to dance until fade-out behind the closing credits, did Jim ever appear resentful that he was never provided with a partner, or even once lose his cool and bellow, “Not even a white person can be expected to dance to music like .this every night for 14 years”? Jim most certainly did not, but rather smiled a smile that would have thawed frozen popovers had you placed them near enough to your set, snapped his fingers, and seemed always to be geting off a treat on every harrowing bar of what was surely the most mercilessly corny closing theme in game show hisfory. And there are those who will tell you that television provides American youngsters with no viable adult role models. Ha!

If the brains of its leaders produced more of the biochemical that seems to gush through Jim Lange’s vein, the world wouldn’t be in the mess that it’s in. Since he and The Dating Game left, television just hasn’t been the.same.

John Mendelssohn