Year:  1957
Rating: 5.0

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This Roger Corman film begins with The Platters performing two songs in a swank nightclub before they announce they need to take a break and will return later. They never do of course because in reality Corman only had their services for one day and used another one of their songs in his film Carnival Rock. In the same scene Shorty (Dick Miller) gets into an altercation with a drunk patron and gets tossed out of the bar. The film then shifts to a neighborhood bar that has fewer customers than I do trust funds but still has a band playing. These are the Blockbusters, an obscure Rockabilly band from the 1950's who bang away on their guitars. They play a few songs. Then an attractive girl (Abby Dalton) shows up and auditions for two songs. She isn't very good but lovely in a wholesome manner. One of her songs is The Great Pretender which had been an enormous hit for The Platters.


By this time half the movie is over and there has been less plot than hair on Yul Brenner's head. The film was clearly thrown together quickly when Corman was told by AIP that he could use The Platters for a day. The scene with them was shot very nicely - but I would guess the rest of the film was shot later and doesn't look nearly as good. To fill out the rest of the film Corman bought the rights to a TV show from the Jane Wyman Show and fiddled with it a bit. But it still looks and feels like a 30 minute TV show. But not a terrible one. Some good dialogue in fact is passed between characters, in particular the bartender and his friend.


Customers slowly drift into the bar - Shorty shows up, a newsman, a bickering couple, a fight manager with his fighter and the fighter's wife, a promoter (Mel Welles) who talks in hip jive, a guy in the protection racket and two men who sit at the bar and drink. Lo and behold a plot begins to emerge as Shorty provokes everyone because he is . . . well short and has a chip on his shoulder larger than the Grand Coulee Dam. But the drama really breaks out when the two guys at the bar turn out to be killers on the run. In the TV show one of the killers was played by Lee Marvin which would have been worth watching. It all gets resolved in a very TV way - again like in Carnival Rock I am surprised how Corman seems to pull back on this punches. This was part of a double feature with Dragstrip Girl which sounds like a classic but sadly doesn't seem to be up on YouTube as this film was.