User Reviews

The world was a safer place when there were coffee bars.For a brief shining hour coffee bars became the places where young people socialised even if they were old enough to drink alcohol.Because old people didn't go into coffee bars,they went into pubs.They drank Guinness,Watney's Red Barrel,port and lemon and gin and orange.They wore greasy old sports jackets with a row of pens in the top pocket,headscarves,had big handbags and snappy suspicious fox terriers.Then they got drunk and fought each other.It wasn't what young people wanted to do,and no Italian-suited advertising manager had yet thought to tell them that they should. So as our elders and betters sat in a fug in the saloon bar complaining about us we sat in a fug in a coffee bar complaining about them. We listened to Elvis,Cliff,Tommy,Fats,Gene and Bill Haley on the jukebox. Lonnie Donegan was popular but skiffle was usually the music of choice of the grammar school kids and they all sat round the one table occasionally looking longingly at the juke box. Into this oh-so-innocent world came one Terry Dene.Possibly even in a way like that portrayed in "The Golden Disc".However his arrival came about he was soon tackling the Marty Wilde-Billy Fury brigade of 2nd string English rock n' rollers on their own turf.He seemed a pleasant enough young man with none of the danger of Elvis or Gene and none of the Brylcreemed chubbiness of Cliff,or the cheeky cockney sparrowness of Tommy.Largely his appeal was to girls whose mums chose their records for them. It was still a grown-ups' world.They had fought for it and by God they were going to hang on to it."Spineless and spoonfed",TV personality Gilbert Harding called our generation.Our musical taste was ignored or patronised and "The Golden Disc" unwittingly depicts this acccurately. We had yet to discover that money talks,even our money. By the time we did,Terry Dene had disappeared into oblivion,having had his chance and missed it. In the film Terry is so completely dominated by grown-ups that he doesn't even pretend to rebel.He sings some fairly banal songs in an anxious-to -please voice,as if he knows he is only going to have one go round this particular track and he'd better give it his best shot.You have to feel a bit sorry for him,he was called up into the army and promptly had a nervous breakdown due to his being unsuited to the military life unlike Elvis who took to it as a duck to water. As a record of how bad British pop music was at the time "The Golden Disc"is worth seeing for a procession of embarrassed looking acts doing their schtick.Remember,we used to pay good money to go to see them. As a film per se,it has absolutely nothing whatsoever going for it. Within a few years the Italian - suited admen had us drinking in pubs and the days of the coffee bars were over.Now we sat around in a fug in the saloon bar drinking Guinness,Watney's Red Barrel,Port and Lemon,gin and orange then fight with each other.There is a moral there somewhere.

THE GOLDEN DISC is a dated British musical comedy drama from 1958, set at the beginning of the new wave popularity for rock and roll in the UK. Lee Patterson, the imported Canadian star of fare such as JACK THE RIPPER, plays a struggling coffee shop owner who decides to help out an up and coming singer after he hears him one night. What follows is a laborious plot involving trials and tribulations involving record companies and labels, but it doesn't really shine much of a light on the industry. There are a lot of musical numbers but they're not quite as lively as those found elsewhere, such as in SIX-FIVE SPECIAL.

This film is typically 1950's and deserves to be judged as from that era. It stars Lee Patterson, Mary Steele,and is used as a vehicle to showcase the talents of would-be teenage songster Terry Dene who performs four of the twelve songs.

The plot as with most 1950's and 1960's rock musicals is pretty thin.

Lee Patterson and his girlfriend Mary Steele with the help of her trendy aunt convert a creaky Coffee House to a kind of pre-disco joint where all the hormonal teenagers can flock to. The only customer in the creaky Establishment is the wonderfully morose Richard Turner, who even gets a look-in at the transformed Coffee Bar, which ends up by a sleight of imagination as a recording studio.

Of course the songs are a missmash of different music genres and are not all strictly rock in an age of the jukebox, long hooped dresses, jeans, trousers and sweaters effervescently proclaiming teenage love for this or that artist.

While other early British 1950's musicals stake their claim to be the first rock'n'roll movie, this one comes closest to depicting the birth of home-grown rock and is a proto version of the real thing as was performance-wise Tommy Steele. Without these pioneers how could the later and purer versions have learned to avoid the pitfalls.

No, we must applaud this movie which was a low budget affair, for trying to portray the helterskelter of youth if not the angst - that was left to a later era.