Fame (1980)

Directed by Alan Parker. Starring Barry Miller, Maureen Teefy, Paul Montgomery, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean, Gene Anthony Ray, Antonia Franceschi, Irene Cara, Jim Moody, Ann Meara, Boyd Gaines, Eddie Barth, Albert Hague, Tresa Hughes, Joanna Merlin, Richard Belzer. [R]

Shallow, untidy chronicle of the trials and tribulations of several students at New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, starting with their auditions and following them from freshman year through senior year graduation. Inspired by Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line, but it’s actually less a full-blown musical than an ensemble teen drama that gets interrupted now and then by intimate performance pieces and enthusiastically erratic song-and-dance eruptions as crowds of kids suddenly fill cafeterias, city streets, and the like to blow off steam. Naturalistic performances from the younger members of the cast run hot-to-cold but mostly slum it out in the lukewarm, the chief issue being that so few of them exhibit the sort of raw talent that would suggest they belong at the school in the first place, let alone have a promising future as performance artists. Parker treats Christopher Gore’s mosaic of melodramas in terms of gritty urban realism, unromantic and irresolute, maneuvering for superfluous scrapes into darker waters like a multiracial abortion, “casting couch” sleaze, and (most absurdly) punctuating a suicide feint with a punchline; the facsimile of urgency is weakly generated by the abrupt, Fosse-style editing frenzy, which only distances the viewer further from empathy. Michael Gore’s original score won an Academy Award; the title song, which he co-wrote with Dean Pitchford, also nabbed one. Spawned a TV series, a stage musical, a reality television competition spinoff, and a 2009 remake.

48/100