Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)

This movie has everything. Suspense, love, great music.

I grew up in South Jersey during the 60's. (To us natives it is either North Jersey or South Jersey) and actually played in a garage band during high school.I lived down the street from where they filmed Doc's apartment and spent many summers "Down the Shore". I remember almost all the locations in the film. Anyway, for me this movie is a trip down memory lane. There are really very few goofs and the producers got it right for the 60's in Jersey. I first saw this in 1985 on video. I am currently looking at it 26 years later. Still tugs at the heart strings as it did a quarter of a century ago!

In 1983 reporter Maggie Foley (Ellen Barkin) goes searching for the members of a 60s rock group that is becoming popular again--Eddie and the Cruisers. Eddie (Micahel Pare) died in 1964--but his body was never found. She talks to ex-member Frank Ridgeway (Tom Berenger) and discovers there are some tapes from their last recording session that were never released. They seem to have disappeared but someone is looking for them--and it might be Eddie! A decent idea totally ruined by a boring script with some truly terrible dialogue. There are some good actors here--Berenger, Barkin, Pare and Helen Schneider--but they can't do much with this script. The saving grace is some good acting and the music. All the songs were done by John Cafferty and his Beaver Brown Band and they are good-- especially "On the Dark Side" which became a belated hit one year after this came out. This isn't a terrible movie--it's just overly predictable and badly written. This was an understandable bomb in theatres in 1983 but became a hit on cable the following year. It also made Cafferty and his band popular for a few years. Worth catching for the music. Also it's kind of funny seeing Pare badly lip-sync to Cafferty who sounds NOTHING like him! A 6.

Every time I watch this movie(and I do - over and over), the scene where Frank introduces his first song to the band - nearly whispering it in a high, cracking falsetto: "...from out of the shadows she walks like a dre-eam...", and while the other band-members giggle and squirm as though they're in 8th grade and just saw Mary Ellen's tidy-whities when the wind blew her skirt up - Eddie's silencing them and kindly guiding Frankie The Wordman's stumbling efforts toward something that can really get your blood moving("This is Rock 'n Roll!" he exclaims joyfully)always makes me marvel at the unexpectedly-good acting coming out of pretty boy Michael Pare'. I always think the same thing: 'How did Martin Davidson get that out of him? Why, in every other movie I've seen him in, did other directors fail to tap into that?' When you see this movie, you absolutely know that it isn't Pare's fault that he's so wooden elsewhere...because if he can do it here - he can do it anywhere, right? With the right director, the answer is yes. The proof is here; right here, in his very authentic portrayal of an artist trapped in the too-confining skin of a 60's rock star(Eddie: "If we can't be great, then there's no point in ever making music again!"). But don't just watch this movie for Pare'. Everything works. Everybody rocks. It all goes together just like...yeah, I'm gonna say it: words and music.