Something of a companion piece to Rock All Night, especially with the presence of the musical group The Platters in both, Carnival Rock is more of a plot-driven exercise than the earlier film. Adapted from a teleplay by Leo Lieberman, who also wrote the adaptation, it's a little drama about unrequited love that ends up feeling a bit overlong for something of a wane story. It didn't grab me in any way, lacking the exploitation of his work with Charles Griffith but without the depth of a great script. It's not bad, but it ends up feeling kind of limp overall.
Christy Cristakos (David J. Stewart) runs a little carnival on a pier, and it's not doing well. The only good thing about it is his star discovery, Natalie (Susan Cabot), a pretty girl with a good voice who really should be heading upwards on her career any day now. Whether it's infatuation because she's young and pretty or that she represents something like a next step in career for him as well (I'm probably reading this into the script, none of it is addressed), he has fallen in love with her. Being more than twenty years older than her and responsible for signing her paycheck, she's polite but increasingly firm that she's not interested. All of this gets observed by Christy's right-hand man Ben (Dick Miller) who can see the situation far more clearly than Christy can.
Christy has another problem, though. He took a loan from some gangsters, mainly represented by Stanley (Brian Hutton), who have come to collect. Christy knows that things will pick up by the weekend because of Natalie will surely bring in the crowds then, but Stanley has little patience. He also has a secret: he and Natalie are in love.
So, it's the makings of an interesting drama, but I think I blame the writing first and foremost for the lack of punch. It's overwrought, especially from Christy's point of view. As played by Stewart, there's no real depth of emotion, it just feels like swinging for the fences. Natalie ends up feeling like a background player for a long stretch, relegated to looking on worryingly as other people take center stage. The best character is probably Ben as played by Miller who, similarly to what he did in Rock All Night, functions as something like a smart aleck running commentary on what's going on. However, Miller actually has the chops and the wherewithal to provide some hint of emotion in his interactions, especially with Christy.
The film goes into tragedy in the final act with Christy losing everything, relegated to taking a job as a pratfall-taking clown to make ends meet (that we never seem him take a pratfall feels like a mistake). His tragedy feels thin and unpersuasive, though, a good bit of that being because we never really see him as that pathetic. We do get that haunting look of him as the sad clown the one time we see him, but there needs to be this ironic display of him trying to entertain while being sad and seeing Natalie happy to make things connect.
I do like the direction they take with him in the final moments, though. He gets desperate and suicidal, and it elicits some nice imagery, even if I feel like the journey to that imagery was empty. It's an embrace of fire that doesn't go quite as far as it probably could (budget limitations would be my guess), but it's strong stuff anyway.
So, it's melodrama, but it never really convincingly builds the situation, especially at a character level. The structural problems with Griffith's scripts have been replaced by thinner characterization and no real focus on the drama. Part of it is probably that Christy's obsession with Natalie is obviously one-sided from the very start making him much creepier than intended, I think.
I mean, I've seen worse from Corman, but this feels more like a wet squib of an effort. Competent enough to get through but not enough to be memorable or worthwhile.
