That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Stardust (1974) are two of the great rock films. Both feature David Essex as the rising (and eventually falling) star Jim Maclaine. This review of their joint appearance on DVD appeared in Word, September 2003.
At the end is a capsule review for the same magazine in June 2006.

That’ll Be The Day
Director Claude Whatham
Starring David Essex, Ringo Starr, Penelope Leach, Robert Lindsay

Stardust
Director Michael Apted
Starring David Essex, Adam Faith, Larry Hagman

In bed with a pair of beautiful blonde girls – twin sisters at that – Jim Maclaine has the contented look of a man who feels he has taken the right course in life. A few years earlier he had decided to become a rock star and a rock star he became. But at what cost to his soul? And can the good times really roll forever? These are the dark doubts that will gnaw at Jim Maclaine, and they underscore these two fine British films of the early 1970s. A parable in two halves, That’ll Be The Day and Stardust amount to a cautionary story indeed. The next time you are invited to bed by beautiful blonde sisters, you may want to bear it in mind.
    Or maybe not. But you will enjoy the DVD. David Essex plays Jim Maclaine, a youth whose choirboy prettiness conceals a turbulent spirit. In That’ll Be The Day we meet him as a bored teen in drab, post-war Britain. Revolted by the purgatory of small town respectability, he walks out on his A-levels in search of sex, adventure and the new-fangled American rock’n’roll. He runs away to the seaside and lands a job in a holiday camp, where he’s adopted by a worldly Teddy Boy called Mike (played by Ringo Starr). He watches with interest as girls flock around the visiting rock act Stormy Tempest (Billy Fury) whose band includes a manic drummer played by Keith Moon. Under Mike’s seedy tutelage, Jim acquires some rudimentary seduction skills – rare is the maiden who can refuse a Babycham and a packet of crisps.
     When the chalets close for winter, Mike introduces Jim to work on a travelling fair, where the rockin’ sounds of Buddy Holly and Little Richard reverberate over the squeals of girls in dodgem cars. Mike takes care to educate his protégé in every trick and fiddle (“Remember, it’s a shillin’ for you and a shillin’ for them”), and Jim is a willing pupil. In time, however, realism compels him to go home – to the job in his mother’s grocery shop, early marriage to a local girl and, with awful swiftness, fatherhood. Yet the call of the wild cannot be ignored. The first film ends with Jim walking out on his family and buying an electric guitar…
     The story might be slight but it’s told with lots of charm. Ringo Starr and David Essex perform with a grit that neither would later be noted for. And I've always loved the look of this film. Though the actors’ hairstyles are of imprecise vintage, That’ll Be The Day does 1950s England brilliantly, from the chintz and linoleum of terraced parlours to the gaudy tat of its places of public gaiety. It’s no surprise to find it was filmed on the Isle of Wight, always good for a period flavour 20 years behind the mainland.
Stardust is a heavier proposition. Jim becomes a pop star with his beat group The Stray Cats and, by 1967 or so, he’s a drug addled rock legend, making quasi-religious concept albums. The character of Mike, who has become Maclaine’s personal manager, is now played by a convincingly wily Adam Faith. The old pals plot and fornicate their way through the music industry’s snakepit, menaced by its nastiest inhabitants and not above the odd spot of skullduggery themselves. (Every sacking, you’ll notice, is signalled by an arm around the shoulder and the dread words, “Fancy a drink?”)
     Given its bigger budget, exotic settings and a certain loss of focus, Stardust is the less likeable of the two films. But its feel for the dynamics of decadence is exactly right. The journalist Ray Connolly, author of both stories, was intimately familiar with the pop business and was shrewd enough to know the first requisite of stardom is not talent, but selfishness. To Jim Maclaine, other people exist only as abstractions. The question is whether his detachment will prove fatal.
     To that extent he is a difficult character to feel sympathy for, and we watch his final turmoil with more curiosity than concern. But the fiendish machinery of stardom has seldom been more cleverly revealed. And these two films are still a treat. They are, if you will, the serious Spinal Tap.

Capsule review for The Word June 2006:-

Cute as a button but ripe for moral corruption, the young David Essex starred in this 1973 film as a restless schoolboy in 1950s Britain, bent on becoming a rock’n’roll star. Yet more urgent, though, is the need to get his end away – and what better ruse than a summer job in a holiday camp? Soon he is tutored by a sly Scouse Teddy Boy (Ringo Starr) whose own way with the gentler sex involves some Babycham, crisps and a quick tickle “to see if she’ll go”. The film of Ray Connolly’s book is more than a cheeky romp, however: sexual conquests follow in profusion for the Essex character, but they are horribly cold transactions. In the sequel to That’ll Be The Day, our boy becomes the pop deity of Stardust, where his emotional selfishness will be fatally indulged. Given the choice, will he accept the love of one good woman over the bodily devotion of thousands? Take a guess.

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