Cracked Actors
The year--1992. The place--the Southampton ABC cinema. The film--the sci-fi epic Freejack, in which Mick Jagger appears as one "Victor Vacendak" a villainous "bone jacker" who favours rather natty Darth Vader style helmets--and who thereby caused instant audience hilarity on his each and every appearance. Cinemagoers with long memories knew that interesting head-gear was quite a theme with Mick, for back in 1970 his starring role in Ned Kelly had given the world a bandit of no fixed accent who seemed to spend most of his time bemusedly wandering Australia whilst wearing a stove pipe on his head.
Freejack, in addition to being a poignant reminder of the days when Emilio Estevez was a film star, is celluloid proof of the perils of using a pop star as a cinematic actor. The case for the defense might cite Performance, the nihilistic masterpiece of 1968 where Mick is imaginatively cast as a brain-addled rock star but a re-viewing demonstrates that the film is largely dominated by the incredible acting of James Fox. By contrast, Mick provides us with an excellent example of a pop star who was adroitly cast for his persona whilst the real thespians carried the narrative. There are fine examples of this phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic from the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night and Help! and David Essex in That'll Be The Day to David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Then there is Flaming Star, one of the few films where Elvis received decent direction, Slade in Flame, Bob Geldof in The Wall, Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo and Eminem in 8 Mile.
Leaving aside those actors-turned-musicians such as Phil "Calamity The Cow" Collins, any pop singer who aspires to film stardom should also look at the film CVs of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin--both excellent film actors when they could be bothered. Some singers--Cher and Marvin "Meat Loaf" Aday for instance--have even proved highly serviceable character actors, but the most to be fairly expected is for a pop star who settles for unpretentious B-film theatrics. Anaconda would have been far less of a picture without the stalwart presence of Mr. Ice Cube and who could deny the charm of 1965's Three Hats For Lisa, which not only starred Joe Brown but remains one of the rare films where Sid "Carry On" James sings and dances?
But the case for the prosecution is equally compelling. Early 1960s American cinema churned out approximately 34,678 utterly anodyne "Beach Films," all of which boasted the same plot (and several of which featured Doug McClure) whereas British films of the same pre-Beatles era specialised in the type of second feature that, to quote a cynical producer, demonstrated that "Not only can they not sing or dance, they also can't act!" There is a certain masochistic pleasure in watching visibly terrified pop stars rooted to their chalk marks as they read their lines with the verve and passion of a railway tannoy announcer but at least these modest offerings had a running time of less than one hour and many incidental pleasures, such as a jiving Jackie Collins in Rock You Sinners. However, pop singers who imagine themselves to be full fledged actors of major films are a far more dangerous proposition for the alert film-goer and so let one particular motion picture stand as an awful warning. Yes, 1985's The Bride stars Sting as Baron Frankenstein...
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