Rock'n'Roll (1959)

Original title

Rock 'n' Roll

Directed by

Lee Robinson

Genre

documentary film

Country

Australia

Runtime

1h 20m

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a 1959 concert film shot in Australia. It captures performances by local rock and roll artists like Johnny O'Keefe and The Delltones. The film was lost for decades before being found and restored.

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What happens

Rock 'n' Roll is a 1959 Australian rock and roll concert film filmed at Sydney Stadium during the Lee Gordon's Rock 'n' Roll Spectacular shows, directed by Lee Robinson. Performers include Johnny O'Keefe, The Delltones, The Devils and Johnny Devlin. All acts are from either Australia or New Zealand. American singer Fabian's performance was also shot, but this was cut from the Australian version of the film as the producers did not wish to pay the fee his management requested. They did, however, discreetly keep the Fabian sequence intact in some versions of the film that were sent to New Zealand. The film is the only full-length rock'n'roll concert film from the 1950s shot anywhere in the world. It was considered lost for decades until March 2020, when a print of the Australian version (sans Fabian) was discovered by Mark Iaria in a suitcase on a nature strip in the suburbs of Melbourne. The print was eventually restored to excellent condition, digitised and screened around Australia from 2021, then uploaded to YouTube in 2024. Rock 'n' Roll is in the public domain, having fallen out of copyright in the 2010s. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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