BY FRANK LOVECE

DURAN DURANS S'NG BLUE S'IVER

Directed by Michael Collins. Concert portions directed by Russel Mulcahy. Thorn EMI cassette. Beta Hi-Fi, VHS Hi-Fi. 85 min. $29.95 ord associations: Dog? Cat. Pencil? Pen.
Duran Duran? MTV. No other group is so closely iden-

tified with rock video as is Duran

Duran, and no other is so well represented on tape and disc-the

group stars in at least four titles and shows up in two or three more. Small wonder critics tend to accuse the synthfop quintet of being a superficial "video band." So what does the group do to help dispel this image? lt releases a video documentaryguasi-documentary, actual ly. Thanks to the quasi part, this may not be a bad idea. Presidents and terrorists use television to change their image, and Duran Duran here seems to have taken lessons from Rapmaster Ronnie himself. ln-between

verite looks at the band's eatly:84 tour, and some quite cinematic concert sequences, the group gets to plead its case with world-weary sincerity. lnsists lead singer Simon LeBon, "We're not the kind of band created by a management company." Perhaps not, but as director Bloodhound showed us, Duran Duran doesn't seem the kind of band created by a love of music, either. Whether getting snapped by Scavullo or taped for ltalian TV, whether screening call-in questions that don't help the image, or kissing cheek with tour-sponsor Coke, Duran Duran seems every bit the product critics say it is. lronically, but not too surprisingly, Collins shows the band members now getting more than a
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little annoyed at getting a little more it. Come Dec. 3, 1968, and his first than they bargained for. big TV appearance in years, my budPart of the reason is that Collins, a dies and I sneered (like Elvis, we rock-video newcomer, has a devilish found out later) at the mere thought eye for detail. His documentary porof watching. We shouldn't have. Everything tions, done with widescreen masking, 'around him here may have been only capture both the silliness of Duranmania and the grimness of crowdfair-to-middlin', but Presley himself crushed kids getting carted away on was greaf. Story of his life, stretchers, with lots of those local I suppose. cops someone must rent to stand Yet even after finally seeing this around and look disgusted. "comdback" special (available only on videodisc and quasi-legal casMulcahy's concert footage, filmed settes until now), I'm still not ready in squarish TV compositions, neither to pray at St. Elvis' grave. After havadds to nor subtracts from this busiing long ago given him only the hisnesslike image. The band moves surprisingly well on stage, and its songs torical reverence and occasional foot-tapping that a rock'n'roll pioneer are all hooky and hummable. Judging deserves, seeing him here-performfrom the soundtrack, though, the audio seems to have been sweetened ing at length and in color and not in ancient black-and-white snippetsconsiderably after the fact. has, however, made me realize in my This'd be misleading if Sing Blue gut just exactly what Elvis Presley Silver were a real documentary, of was responsible for. course, but from what Collins shows Obviously, you can read anywhere us, it's also predictable. Duran Duran about his taking r&b and gospel and is a video band, he seems to be sayother black musical idioms, and ing, and video allows re-takes. delivering them in a way true to its roots and yet palatable to white teens. And you can listen to the countless reissues of his old stuff, the mid-fifties rock that must've seemed at the time like Sex Pistols you could hum to. Yet to appreciate the phoenix in all his colors, this TV special may be requisite. Not the trappings of the special itself, now. Despite producer-director Binder's reasonably sure handling of Elvis-the-approachable-legend,'purt near everything else in the show is vomitous. The dancing girls, meant to be sexy, are merely comical "Star Trek" aliens. The wholly inappropriate orchestra tends to sneak up behind Presley and then strangle him with strings. Worst of all is toward the end, an interminable musicalproduction number that takes the worst of "Shindig" and Las Vegas and spits it out in one hairy ball. All this working against him makes EIY'S '68 COMEBACK Presley's triumph so much the SPEC'AI. sweeter. His hits he tosses off Directed by Steve Binder. Media sincerely but succinctly, understanding the compression of televicasseffe. Beta Hi-Fi mono, vHS HiFi mono. 76 min. $29.95. RCA CEDsion and so not launching into long format disc. Mono. 76 min. No suginstrumental breaks and repetitious gested retail. choruses. And during the older, lesser-known rock and gospel songs, lvis Presley was a corny fart he old truly wakes up from his years! l- when I was growing up. The long, self-imposed stupor. greaser hair, thoie stuplO moviesThe show's best moments are he crooned molasses through the when Presley and some of his sixties, which was hardly the time for original band members sit on a
VHS Hi-Fi VCR courtesy GE

small, square stage surrounded by a manageable audience of, I presume, network-executives' kids. Here, as nowhere else on the show, he's selfeffacing and funny, telling stories, poking fun at his image, joshing with his warhorse compatriots, not even

tabloid accounts of a rapist The

Traveler resembles, and The Traveler himself tries to see his runaway daughter in every young blonde. Davies presents us with themes at once significant and overly familiar: the loss of innocence, conforming to

taking his own hits seriously. ("Love Me Tender" starts out with a giggle,
followed, perhaps prophetically, by the sweetly sung "You have/made my/life a/wreck-ah mean compleete. .. .") Later, he turns a nervous stutter into a risque joke. Elvis Presley's best possible audience, it seems, was one of a few intimate millions.

authority, mindless competition, day-

#
ing. Davies' is a serious-minded allegory where songs punctuate rather than propel. Strangely, it is the unconventional Bowie's quite conventional piece that works out the better. ln it, Bowie plays the dual roles of a Ziggy Stardust/Screaming Lord Sutch-type glam rocker called Screamin' Lord Byron, and of a Woody Allen-ish billboard paster named Vic. ln the course of trying to impress upon a royal blonde bitch that he's close buddies with Screamin' Lord B, Vic humiliates and embarrasses himself to half-comic/ half-pathetic effect. It's hard to feel sorry, though, for a boob like Vic, who did weave himself into the whole mess. lt's also doubt-

to-day drudgery. This is deliciously ambitious, more akin to tragic opera than to movie musicals. And the film's four songs are excellent, summing up his points far more coherently than does the rest of this work.
H is stream-of-consciousness narr ative starts out with immense promise, though, as Davies draws a deft illustration of rabbit-frightened middleclass nightmares. Yet he soon loses his grip on the narrative's multiple times, locales and characters, and his platitudes start wearing thin once you see that neither his plot nor his people are going anywhere. That may be the point, but a storyteller should be able to create a boring or inflammatory character without having to bore or inflame his audience. This is strange. Davies is neither stupid nor naive, and he's long proven himself both a master storyteller and a pop craftsman able to give mass audiences what they want and elevate them at the same time. I suspect, then, judging from both the punk-rock chick who slides into a limo, and the wispy blondes that overrun this effort, that all is not as it appears. Davies seems to be working out both his first marriage and his relationship with Chrissie Hynde in a f ree-association tour through

DAV,D

BOWTES

JAZZIN,

FOR BLUE JEAN

Directed by Julien Temple. Sony cassefte. Beta Hi-Fi, VHS Hi-Fi. 20 min. $19.95

fo

THE KINKS: RETURN

wATERroo

Directed by Ray Davies. RCA| Columbia casseffe. Beta Hi-Fi, VHS Hi-Fi. 60 mins. approx. Release date unscheduled at press time.
emember movie musicals? Fred Bing 'n' Bob, maybe even Dick 'n' Ruby? Did you think they were merely quaint relics of a bygone era? Think again. Just as rock videos are simply 1930s music shorts updated, now the movie

ltl'n'Ginger,

Fl

musical is back-only thanks to that

source-of-all-things, A Hard Day's Night, and such recent post-"Thriller" developments as these works by David Bowie and Ray Davies, the movie musical has undergone a.few changes. While Give My Regards to Broad Sfreef is a more obvious descendant of the old school(s) than, say, Pink Floyd's The Wall, the hallmarks of

ful Bowie (along with co-scripters Terry Johnson and Julien Temple) really wants us to. While Bowie may be reflecting on what life might have been like had he not become a rock star, he's not delving any deeper.
This thin slice of baloney is just filling around Bowie/Byron's nicely visual performance of "Blue Jean" and the characters, while realistic,
are still archetypes: The girl (Louise Scott) is even listed in the credits simply as "The Dream."

his brain.
Pop

art-art

intended for the

masses-should be, however, accessible. Art intended only as personal

vision can be, but cannot be limited in order to be. When a popular artist puts a film such as this on a massmarket videocassette and on TV, this informs us that it is meant for mass consumption. So what else can it be but frustrating when Waterloo hides its real purpose-a workout for Davies' id1 ego and superegobehind a camouflage more artsy than artful? Music video is still pubescent, though, and these two worksBowie's trying to make us laugh, Davies'trying to make us think-are done with such sincerity and commitment that even Davies isn't any more misguided than Columbus, who never

the old are being reshaped-though not redefined-by the new. Among the older traits is the primary dictum that the story serves to prop up the songs. Another is that the chalacters be archetypes, and yet another that an aura of fantasy (though not necessarily whimsy, i.e., West Side
Story) pervade. Blue Jean and Waterloo simultaneously adhere to and update

Davies'vision, on the other hand,

is serious, serious fare; heavy, as we used to say. The plot, such as it is,
concerns a middle-aged middlemanager on his ritual morning train ride. Archetypical ly, writer-director Davies calls him "The Traveler." Fantasy and reality intermingle: Punks and accountants get on and off, Monty Pythonesque old ladies read

these expectations. Bowie's effort is a conventional boy-meets-girl, boyloses-girl tale with a sweetly cynical twist and some hilarious self-tweek-

did find China.

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