La Bamba (1987): Exuberant Music Biopic of a Life and Career Cut Tragically Short (Review)

It’s back to 1987 for this week’s Criterion Collection release and a time when everyone began to kid themselves that they could speak Spanish for a summer thanks to the chart-topping hit from Los Lobos of the same name – La Bamba

A rock and roll biopic, La Bamba tells the true story of the first Latino rock star, Ritchie Valens, whose career was tragically cut short when, on a snowy and freezing cold February night in 1959, just eight months after breaking into the music industry, he died in the plane crash that also took the lives of fellow rockers Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. He was just seventeen years old. The accident was later immortalised as ‘the Day the Music Died’ and, in 1971, Don McLean’s melancholic, epic eight-minute track, American Pie, would pay tribute to the tragic event and its aftermath. ‘The Day the Music Died’ had previously been dramatised in 1978’s The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey as the bequiffed and bespectacled Lubbock-born rock star, but, with the 1950s being an understandable rich seam for boomer filmmakers in the 1970s and ‘80s (see also Grease, American Graffiti, Stand By Me, Diner, The Outsiders, Great Balls of Fire and Grease 2 – the latter only if you really must!) it was unsurprising that someone else would wish to take a shot at it, and refreshing that it would be Valens they wished to place centre stage.

That someone would be Luis Valdez, playwright, screenwriter, director, and father of the Chicano film and playwriting movement. Born in California to migrant farm labourers from Mexico, Valdez had been working steadily in the theatre from the mid 1960s until achieving break out success in 1978 with his play Zoot Suit, based on a true story about a group of Mexican-Americans wrongfully accused of murder, which played to more than 40,000 people across 46 weeks at LA’s Mark Taper Forum, before transferring to Broadway in 1979, making Valdez the first Chicano director to have a play presented on Broadway. A film adaptation, directed by Valdez, followed in 1981, securing him the attention of Hollywood. La Bamba was to be his entry into mainstream cinema, achieving overwhelming box office success.

Starring as Ritchie Valens is the then twenty-five-year-old Filipino-American actor Lou Diamond Phillips. A virtual unknown at the time, Phillips delivered an electrifying, yet light and intuitively sensitive central performance that catapulted him to the Hollywood A-list and the infamous ‘Brat Pack’, starring in Young Guns the following year (as well as its sequel, Young Guns II, in 1990) as well as the critically acclaimed Stand and Deliver for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe, also in 1988. Indeed, much of La Bamba’s cast were ‘unknown’, arguably indicating the lack of opportunity available in Hollywood for non-white actors. Starring as Valens’ toxic, unpredictable older half-brother Bob Morales is Esai Morales (no relation), most recently seen as Tom Cruise’s suave nemesis in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, but who was then probably best known for his role as Sean Penn’s rival in the 1983 crime movie Bad Boys.

As Bob’s long-suffering wife Rosie, Valdez cast Elizabeth Peña, who had worked her way through several guest spots in numerous TV series before appearing in Down and Out in Beverly Hills a year earlier. It’s also worth mentioning that, playing Ritchie’s white, blonde, middle-class high school sweetheart Donna, was Danielle von Zerneck, who herself would have been best known at the time for a twelve-month regular stint on TV soap General Hospital. Each performers seizes the opportunity La Bamba provides them, with Morales in particular giving a barnstorming depiction of an otherwise cinematically conventional cliché; the older sibling whose breadwinner status is cast in the shadows by their kid brother’s sudden fame and adulation. Bob Morales is not a sympathetic individual by any means. In fact, he’s an adulterer, an abuser of both alcohol and narcotics and is shown to repeatedly rape Rosie to get his ‘conjugal rites’, and yet Esai Morales manages to imbue within his performance something that affords the audience the ability to understand his impotent rage even when we cannot condone it. The scenes in which he strives to practice drawing cartoons so that, like Valens, he can become good at something creative too, are rather moving. 

Valdez’ screenplay is a very pleasing and symbiotic one, despite having to adhere to standard and stereotypical conventions of the music biopic and coming of age genres. The story of Valens is, of course, a tragic one of unfulfilled potential and the question of ‘what might have been?’ had he lived; what more music would his incredible talent have gifted the world? Would he have married his high school sweetheart Donna, the inspiration behind his most successful single of the same name? All questions we will never know the answers to now, because Valens’ premature death at just seventeen ensures his life and career was one of unfinished business.

La Bamba opens with a seemingly innocuous sequence of children at play in the school yard, accompanied by the hazy 1959 Johnny and Santo instrumental Sleep Walk. Initially (and largely because of that track’s inclusion) we are left to presume that this scene is contemporaneous to the time period in which the film is set in, but then disaster strikes – a plane falls out of the sky, causing destruction. What we are witnessing, we realise, is a recurring nightmare of Valens’ regarding an actual event in his life from two years earlier – the 1957 Pacoima mid-air collision that Injured over seventy people and killed eight, three of whom were children of the Pacoima Junior High School. Valens could have been one of the fatalities in the playground that day (indeed, his best friend was one) but he was spared because he was attending a family funeral. The tragic irony is that Valens’ was left terrified of flying as a result, and Valdez has an equally darkly ironic message to deliver here; fate, or the Angel of Death, has as much unfinished business with the doomed Valens as he himself will prove to have with the music industry. And the song that plays on the radio over the scene of Valens’ funeral cortege at the close of the film? Sleep Walk, bringing everything full circle. 

If all this sounds rather dark, foreboding and tragic, it’s fair to say that La Bamba is, in the main, as exuberant and effervescent a movie as Valens’ music. This breezy, cotton candy optimism is best evinced in Diamond Phillips’ engaging central performance. He may not be a dead ringer for the real Valens, but he easily captures his talent and zest for life, presenting a deeply likeable, sweet young man with a talent he is keen to share and a desire to bring the Mexican culture he was proud of into the mainstream music industry as exemplified in his rock and roll flavoured recording of La Bamba, a traditional Mexican folk song he had learnt to play as a child. One of the movie’s most joyous sequences is the first time Valens plays his version to a live audience at Alan Freed’s 1^st Anniversary Rock ‘n’ Roll Show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater. Not only do the crowd lap it up, but hurrying to the wings to enjoy his performance are Valens’ fellow artists on the bill, Eddie Cochrane (played by Stray Cats’ Brian Setzer) and Jackie Wilson (Howard Huntsberry) in a lovely moment of gleeful solidarity.

This Criterion Blu-ray release comprises of a New 4K digital restoration of the movie approved by Valdez himself, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, with audio commentaries featuring Valde and actors Lou Diamond Phillips and Esai Morales, along with producers Stuart Benjamin, Taylor Hackford, and Daniel Valdez. There’s also a new interview with Valdez and an edition of El Rey Network’s The Director’s Chai featuring Valdez in filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. An archival making of from 1987, audition footage featuring Phillips, Morales, Peña and Rosanna DeSoto (who played Connie, Ritchie’s devoted mother) and a trailer concludes the extras. Unavailable to this reviewer, the release will also include an essay by critic Yolanda Machado.

Mark’s Archive – La Bamba