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| Orion Pictures | Release Date: June 30, 1989 |
Starring:
Alec Baldwin, Dennis Quaid, John Doe, Joshua Sheffield, Lisa Blount, Mojo Nixon, Stephen Tobolowsky, Steve Allen, Trey Wilson, Winona Ryder
Summary:
The life and career of controversial rocker Jerry Lee Lewis.
Great Balls of Fire makes the most of this abundant raw material by keeping its focus tight (barely two years in a career that has spanned 30), its characters outrageous and the conflict between Lewis and his self-righteous cousin Jimmy Swaggart unresolved. [30 June 1989, p.H5]
Great Balls of Fire would be an entertaining evening even if it preserved nothing more than Lewis' songs -- rerecorded by Lewis with all the soul and groin-stirring fury that he has preserved during three decades. It also has an often-dazzling comic impersonation of Lewis by Dennis Quaid, a goofy ballet of awesomely confident struts and brags. [30 June 1989, p.1]
Great Balls of Fire! doesn't shake your nerves or rattle your brain; at times, though, it gets on your nerves. Even so, it's a just-tolerable junk-food chronicle of the brief era when Jerry Lee Lewis threatened to heist Elvis' ''King'' crown. [30 June 1989, p.5D]
What's missing most conspicuously from Great Balls of Fire is an interest in the historical and cultural context that made Lewis' career possible - that moment when a dying rural tradition intersected with a booming urban economy to create a whole new kind of music and with it, a whole new America. McBride treats the '50s as a joke - a montage of "Leave It to Beaver" complacency and H-bomb panic. The truth is more complex than that, and a better story. [30 June 1989, p.A]
Great Balls of Fire, like "La Bamba," is thin on the meaning of the life in question, but big on '50s Billboard nostalgia. It's lightweight archaeology, a bent American Bandstand biography. Something has slipped away from McBride, Quaid and Fields: the truth, the heart, the soul. All that's left is the hip.
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More fanciful than factual, less likable than either The Big Easy or Breathless, McBride's previous two features, the movie tries hard to re-create the euphoria of 50s rock films, but the poor-white milieu is treated with such crude derision that all the characters wind up seeming like two-dimensional geeks.
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