Leaping from jukebox star to rocking at the movies, Vintage Rock celebrates Little Richard’s film career on the big and small screen…

There comes a point in every rock’n’roller’s life when he’s called to take his place on the silver screen. For Little Richard, that moment came when he was invited to sing the theme song of the 1956 Jayne Mansfield vehicle The Girl Can’t Help It. As well as singing over the title sequence, Richard also appeared in the flick singing Ready Teddy and She’s Got It alongside performances by Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, The Platters and many others.

It wasn’t the first rock’n’roll movie, but it was Hollywood’s first big-budget attempt to showcase the new music trend in vibrant colour. The sharply scripted and still entertaining romantic comedy starred Tom Ewell as a washed-up agent tasked with turning Mansfield’s dizzy blonde Jerri (a knowing caricature of Marilyn Monroe’s screen persona) into a star at the behest of a fading mobster played by Edmond O’Brien.

Director Frank Tashlin began his career in cartoons, and the film overflows with visual gags – not least during a sequence in which Mansfield wiggles down a street to the accompaniment of Richard’s title song. While Richard sings lines like “If she winks an eye the bread slice turns to toast” and “beef steaks become well done”, Mansfield’s exaggerated hour-glass figure has a similar effect on everyone that she passes. A man turns to gawp and a block of ice dissolves to water in his hands. As a milkman stares, the bottle in his hand sends its contents jetting into the air – a pretty naughty joke for 1956! As she ascends the stairs of an apartment block, a neighbour is so mesmerised by her legs that his glasses shatter. Mansfield’s figure resembles a living cartoon; in fact, a paperboy remarks, “If that’s a girl, I don’t know what my sister is!” In another scene, the camera lingers lovingly on her derrière as she walks across a room to the appropriate accompaniment of Richard’s She’s Got It.

She’s Got It

Although The Girl Can’t Help It is revered as a classic rock’n’roll movie for its performances by Richard, Vincent, Cochran, Domino and others – all of them captured in their prime in gloriously rich Deluxe Color – it’s a curiously un-rock’n’roll film in most other respects. Tom and Jerri look like characters from an earlier era; Jerri makes no attempt to sing rock’n’roll, and Tom’s efforts to make her a star could easily be set to a backdrop of jazz or big band music without changing a word of the script.

In fact, the rock’n’roll sequences have a curiously tacked-on feel with little or no connection to the plot. When Tom takes Jerri to a rehearsal room, for instance, we see Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps belting out a feral rendition of Be-Bop-A-Lula in another room, but there is zero plot reason for them to be there. Eddie Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock is merely shown on a television that the other characters are watching.

Richard’s performance of Ready Teddy and She’s Got It, meanwhile, takes place in a high-class night club more befitting a song by Frank Sinatra. While King Richard pounds the ivories for all he’s worth, women in evening dresses and stoles decorously draw on cigarette holders at tables with muted table lamps. Despite the incongruous setting, however, it’s a classic performance by Richard, who stands at the piano on legs of rubber while his sax-honking band sway in the background.

Ready, Set, Go Man Go

Upon release, the film received mixed reviews – probably because the newspaper critics in that era weren’t rock’n’roll fans, and weren‘t hip enough to see that Mansfield was affectionately sending up Marilyn Monroe rather than being a second-rate copy of her.

The musical sequences nevertheless made an impact, not least in England, where they afforded a 16-year-old John Lennon his first sight of rock’n’rollers who had previously only been heard on record. The glimpse of those rock gods in the flesh spurred his ambitions and ultimately led to him forming The Beatles. When Lennon met Paul McCartney, the latter showcased his skills by performing Twenty Flight Rock in the manner that he’d seen Cochran sing it in the film.

Some have also speculated that a scene in which a band perform Rock Around The Rock Pile in prison uniforms inspired Elvis Presley’s iconic big-screen production of Jailhouse Rock the following year.

If nothing else, The Girl Can’t Help It gave Little Richard one of the finest songs of his career. Whereas his previously self-penned songs like Tutti Frutti employed sped-up blues-style couplets, the film’s theme song was equally lascivious but in a more knowing and sophisticated way.

Composed by Bobby Troup, it painted the sort of visual images that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were providing for The Coasters and Elvis. The song fitted Richard like a glove while at the same time moving his sound forward. The backing vocalists raucously chanting the title in call-and-response style was another new element that added to the record’s charm. Although it barely cracked the Top 50 in the US, the song reached No.9 in the UK.

Hollywood Goes Rock

The Girl Can’t Help It hit the cinemas in time for Christmas ’56, and the same month saw Richard on the big screen in the Bill Haley vehicle Don’t Knock The Rock. Shot in black and white, this was a more typical ‘jukebox film’ of the day with a plot about a town that bans rock’n’roll and a young singer (Alan Dale) who puts on a concert starring Richard, Bill Haley and The Treniers to show the disapproving town elders that they have nothing to fear from the new music fad.

As a sequel to Haley’s previous film, Rock Around The Clock, the flick suffered from the law of diminishing returns at the box office, but remains essential viewing for another prime performance from Richard, belting out Long Tall Sally and Tutti Frutti with one leg propped up on the ivories and his sax player dancing on the piano. A mid-song cutaway shot to Haley clapping along with the beat at a nearby table adds to the moment’s magic. The film also includes Haley’s cover of Richard’s Rip It Up.

Don’t Knock The Rock is notable for an appearance by Alan Freed as himself. The following year, the pioneering DJ got his own film, Mister Rock And Roll, and Richard was among a roster of contributors that included Chuck Berry, Clyde McPhatter, The Moonglows, Lavern Baker and Frankie Lymon. The late ’57 release coincided with Richard’s rejection of secular music to become a preacher, but no one would have predicted that when the film was made. He’s seen miming to his R&B chart-topper Lucille, and was singled out for illustration on the movie’s poster, in full rock’n’roll mode, with his leg up on the piano as he played.

London Calling

It was a decade later before Richard made his next cinema appearance in one of the last ‘beach party’ movies, Catalina Caper. This comedy mystery, which starred Tommy Kirk, was built around the McGuffin of an ancient Chinese scroll, but as with most movies of its ilk the plot was just a means of stringing together a bunch of musical numbers with extended shots of tanned teens dancing in their swimwear.

The picture was originally to be called Scuba Party and Richard, who was prominently featured on the posters, sang a song of that name on the between-deck staircase of a ship at sea, surrounded by dancing adolescents. Times had changed, musically, and it was a funky number rather than a rock’n’roll song. Clad in a tight-fitting lamé suit, however, he made the sunny tune his own with his trademark vocals.

Music has probably never changed more in one decade than it did during the 60s, when The Beatles took pop to places so different to the records of the rock’n’roll pioneers that at times there was almost no discernible bridge between the two styles. But although the 60s were a lean time for the rockers of Little Richard’s generation (with the exception of Elvis), a thirst for the moonshine kick of raw, ’50s-style rock’n’roll never went away.

By the cusp of the 70s, a nostalgic revival was on the cards. It all began at the Toronto Rock’n’roll Festival in 1969 which, ironically, only sold tickets when John Lennon was added to the bill in a last-minute act of desperation by the promoters, but which as a result gave Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent and Bo Diddley the chance to show a new generation of teenagers that they were far, far from being washed-up oldies. Richard’s electrifying portion of the show – which ended with him stripping to the waist and throwing his sweat-drenched shirt into the crowd – was released on DVD in 2009.

Three and a half decades before that, Richard got to work his magic in cinemas with the 1973 theatrical release of The London Rock’n’roll Show, filmed at Wembley stadium the previous year and featuring a similar bill of artists to Toronto. “I want you to know that I am the king of rock’n’roll!” Richard proudly announced, and went on to prove it with a set of songs including Good Golly, Miss Molly and Jenny, Jenny that was more frantic and intense than any of his big screen appearances in the ’50s. Clad in an orange waistcoat studded with reflective squares and no shirt, he looked like a caveman trying to beat his piano keys to death.

Great Gosh A’mighty!

One of Richard’s biggest breaks in the movies came when he was invited to appear in the 1986 hit comedy Down And Out In Beverley Hills, which starred Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler as Dave and Barbara Whiteman, a rich but dysfunctional couple who take in a suicidal homeless man, played by Nick Nolte, who ends up showing them and their offspring what’s missing from their gilded lives.

Richard played Dreyfuss’s neighbour, record producer Orvis Goodnight. When Dave’s romp with his maid accidentally sets off the burglar alarm, a swarm of cops descend on his house with helicopters and dogs. The disturbance brings Orvis across the street to deliver a searing rant about how the police all but ignored a genuine break-in at his own multi-million dollar property. “I know why I don’t get the protection that I need,” the producer storms, “because I’m black! Ain’t no black man supposed to live in Beverly Hills.” The tirade sears through the film, because Richard doesn’t remotely play it for laughs. They say good actors deliver truth, not pretence, and in the singer’s hurt eyes we can see all the injustice he endured in his musical career because of his colour. He should have won an Oscar for that brief scene alone.

The film’s crowning glory, however, comes when Orvis morphs back into Little Richard for a climatic performance of Great Gosh A’mighty! during a scene in which a party descends into a riot. Richard wrote the song with organist Billy Preston, and in its impassioned lyric finally reconciled his religious beliefs with his rock’n’roll soul, belting out the spiritual message of “I’ve been seeking, I’ve been searching, trying to find peace of mind” over some classic piano pounding punctuated by signature “whooo’s”. It was a staggering return to classic form and the single rose to #42 on the American chart, his highest entry – in fact almost his only entry – since Baby Face, nearly 30 years earlier in 1958.

The song and movie returned Richard to mainstream prominence and he became a regular chat show guest. As he told Joan Rivers during one of many TV appearances at the time, “It brought my name back.”

Killer Cameos

Richard’s speech as Orvis was delivered with such power that it’s a shame he has never been given a full-length dramatic role on screen. His other film and TV appearances have tended to be short, light-hearted appearances. In the 1988 children’s sci-fi comedy Purple People Eater, based on Sheb Wooley’s novelty record from 30 years before, he played the mayor, but although he delivered a speech with evangelical passion, he wasn’t given anything memorable to say.

In the 1990 animated TV series Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures he voiced a cartoon version of himself for a scene set in a recording studio at the dawn of rock’n’roll. Then, a few years later, he continued his cartoon career by singing the theme song to PBS children’s TV series The Magic School Bus. Penned by Peter Lurye, it was a rather fine and catchy number on which Richard’s piano riffs could be clearly heard and his exuberant vocals were as distinctive as ever.

Richard also made a live action appearance in the Disney Channel’s 1990 TV film, Mother Goose Rock’n’Rhyme, in which a cast of rock stars including Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper and Stray Cats played various fairytale characters. The ever-theatrical Richard looked happily at home in a long pink wig for a boogie-woogie-style musical number as Old King Cole.

An adult role came along in the Columbo episode Murder Of A Rock Star. Fortunately, Richard wasn’t the star who got bumped off, but the programme did offer up the entertaining sight of Peter Falk’s dishevelled detective nodding along happily to the beat as Richard sang on stage in a smoky nightclub sequence.

Richard also made a guest appearance in the beach-set soap Baywatch, which starred David Hasselhoff as a Los Angeles lifeguard. In a 1995 episode called The Runaways, the singer played a camp and flamboyantly-dressed beach café server called Maurice. They had to change his name, because they could hardly contrive a plot in which Little Richard found himself working in a seaside café. There was no attempt to disguise the actor’s true identity, however, thanks to a jokey script that included such lines as “Good golly, Miss Molly… don’t do that!” and “What flavour is it? It’s my favourite – tutti frutti!”

The episode concluded with Richard doing what he does best, singing Good Golly, Miss Molly on a revolving stage on the beach, while the Hoff joined in on backing vocals and the rest of the cast pranced around them in the sunshine.

Get On Up

In 2000, it was Richard’s turn to be portrayed on screen in the NBC TV biopic Little Richard. Directed by Robert Townsend, the film traces his childhood, his rise to fame, his rejection of rock’n’roll to become a minister and the eventual return to rock during a British tour in 1962. Despite that relatively short timespan, there is no shortage of music and incidents to keep the film rattling along at an unflagging pace. Leon’s often camped-up performance sometimes seems to have taken its cue from Dennis Quaid’s cartoonish impression of Jerry Lee Lewis in the 1989 movie Great Balls Of Fire.

He’s always watchable, though, and the film mixes some playful sequences with affecting moments of drama, not least in its reconstruction of Richard’s traumatic early life, where he’s convincingly played by Deandre Dupois as a child and Ty Hodges as an adolescent. Carl Lumbly is particularly effective as the father who can’t accept his son’s effeminate side. Perhaps the best comment on the biopic’s authenticity came from Richard himself on Donny and Marie Osmond’s TV chat show. Shown the clip where his father rejects him, the singer simply broke down in tears.

Although Leon Preston Robinson IV – generally known simply as Leon – did a fine job of recreating Richard’s youth, he wasn’t the last actor to step into the rocker’s gold lamé shoes.

In 2014, Richard was played by Brandon Mychal Smith in the impressive and critically-rated James Brown biopic Get On Up. In the movie, Smith delivered a convincing impression of Richard on stage, rocking a riotous roadhouse in an electric blue suit while Brown looks on in search of a role model. At one point, Richard exclaims to Brown: “I’m gonna be bigger than Cleopatra!” Little Richard couldn’t have put it any better himself.

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Featured image credit:  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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