The rock and roll film came into being at the same time as the music began to make itself known. The use of "Rock Around the Clock" in The Blackboard Jungle was one of the first instances of this type of music serving as background to a film, though it was only used in the titles and was not embedded into the film itself in any significant degree. The music was popular, though, and within a short time films specifically about the music were being produced. The early films were primarily intended to assuage parental concerns, though they usually had an attitude of defiance as well. Over time, though, rock became more and more associated with the idea of the outlaw. Performers in the early films were clean-cut types trying to make a success with something new and innovative, but over time this image shifted to the musician as outlaw. This change is associated with the development of the anti-hero in the 1950s and with the growth of the counter-culture in the 1960s, a social movement based on challenging the establishment and thus more open to the idea of the outlaw as a social manifestation of protest.
The outlaw as a manifestation of social ills, or the outlaw as anti-hero, predated the era of the rock film. One of the most important films showing this was The Wild One with Marlon Brando (1954), a film in which a motorcycle gang encounters prejudice in a small town and in which the establishment/anti-establishment pattern was created. When rock music moved into films, though, it was not at first associated with this pattern. Rather, it was presented in terms of the backstage musical. Bill Haley and the Comets were seen in Rock Around the Clock basically as themselves, and several films of the era tried to present the history of the music and to show the difficulties faced by those who had developed it and now wanted to market it. Ehrenstein and Reed (1982) cite Shake, Rattle and Rock (1956) as a film that epitomizes this a...