Review of The Buddy Holly Story (1978) by Edith N — 04 Feb 2011

And Richie Valens Gets No Lines.

I'll admit that I'm not much into '50s rock in general. Not an Elvis fan. Not much for Little Richard. And, no, not all that into Buddy Holly, either. So while I know there are plenty of errors in this portrayal of Buddy Holly's life, I mostly had to look them up. (Though I did know that "Clear Lake," as in that little town in Iowa, is two words.) However, we've covered more than a few biopics around here, and you can't trust any of them. These movies don't really portray a person. They portray our image of a person, or what someone wants to be our image. It isn't just that the real Crickets had already sold their stories for another Buddy Holly biopic; given that Buddy Holly's wife was Puerto Rican, it increases dramatic tension to have one of them be racist, especially given the music industry in those days.

Holly is portrayed here by pre-brain damage Gary Busey, who was over ten years older when cast than Holly was when he died. He's just your standard kid from Lubbock, Texas. No one special. He and a couple of friends, Jesse (Don Stroud) and Ray Bob (Charles Martin Smith), have a band, and they're having a bit of a hard time of it, given that they don't want to play the dopey quasi-country everyone wants them to play. They're among the people playing proto-rock and roll, which isn't going over well. And then someone hears their record, and someone gives it air time on a radio station in Buffalo, New York, and these three country boys are suddenly thrust into the big time. One of the secretaries at the label is the lovely Maria Elena Santiago (Maria Richwine), and Buddy falls for her hard. And there are your standard rich and famous arguments, and then he gets on a plane one snowy night.

Because that's the thing. Everyone knows how this story ends. We all knew how [i]La Bamba[/i] was going to end. And while the Big Bopper (Gailard Sartain) has appeared in both movies, there has yet to be a Big Bopper biopic. Maybe his life isn't as interesting. But let's take a quick poll, here. How many of you are singing "American Pie" in your head right now? Indeed, while I hadn't realized Buddy Holly had been married, I then wondered how that had never crossed my mind. After all, Don McLean read about his widowed bride. (She's shown as pregnant, so I've looked it up; she miscarried shortly after his death.) And you can't end the story anywhere else. You can't stop with him on Ed Sullivan, because we know the road from there. Maybe not in detail, but we know the last stop, and you can't avoid that.

This isn't a bad film, really. Obviously, it shouldn't be your source for actual biographical information about Buddy Holly, but if you're getting your information about people from movies, you haven't read this far into my review, because you don't care. They don't seem to have tried to make him difficult or tortured or any other of the go-to attitudes for musicians; he doesn't even drink much. They even got everyone to play their own instruments, and Gary Busey does his own singing. And the most implausible thing in the movie, that he goes to talk to his beloved's aunt (Gloria Irizarry) to ask for permission to court her, is actually closer to truth than a lot of the other stuff in the movie. And the acting is decent, the writing is decent, and the filming is decent. Decent all the way 'round, apparently.

I have realized just now that I really have no clear image of Gary Busey from an actual acting job he's done. Looking through his IMDB page, I have learned that I have actually seen a few things he was in, but almost never willingly and not recently enough to remember. I just have this mental image of Crazy Ranting Guy, even though I don't think I've even really seen interviews with him. In fact, Graham and I are having a spirited game of "Gary Busey or Nick Nolte?" (I've seen several Nick Nolte movies willingly!) It pretty much just seems as though pop culture has invaded my head without a real source for it. Interesting, really. It's like I don't think I've seen anything with Chuck Norris in it, but I can pretty much give you a description of any Chuck Norris movie. There are just some people who have places in pop culture; this is Gary Busey's. Maybe it's the brain damage.