Fame

Fame is a genuine treasure, moving and entertaining, a movie that understands being a teen-ager as well as Breaking Away did, but studies its characters in a completely different milieu.

Alan Parker has come up with an exposure for some of the most talented youngsters seen on screen in years. There isn't a bad performance in the lot. The great strength of the film is in the school scenes -- when it wanders away from the scholastic side as it does with increasing frequency as the overlong feature moves along, it loses dramatic intensity and slows the pace.

The first half hour of the film, showing the school auditions, is superb. But it's hard to care when every tear-stained monologue is no more moving than an audition piece. Michael Seresin's photography is so beautiful that everybody in the film looks as if they could be famous, and the surface glossiness serves only to falsify the emotions further. [23 May 1980]

The film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life.

This is a wonderfully simple idea that succeeds very well indeed: take a bunch of kids from New York's High School of Performing Arts and let them strut their stuff. Fame shows us how much life there still is in moribund genres like the musical.

The film is cut at such a frenzied pitch that it's often possible to believe (mistakenly) that something significant is going on.

Like Parker's earlier features, Fame is a stylistic self-advertisement. The locale has shifted, but one recognizes the identical false urgency and coy tumult. Parker seems destined to spend his career whipping up ephemeral picturesque frenzies. [20 June 1980, p.C2]