The Ballad of Billie Blue | |
---|---|
Directed by | Ken Osborne |
Screenplay by | Robert Dix William Kerwin Ralph Luce |
Story by | Robert Dix William Kerwin Ralph Luce |
Produced by | Robert Plekker |
Starring | Jason Ledger Renny Roker Sherry Bain Ray Danton Sherry Miles Bob Plekker Erik Estrada Johnny Green Bruce Kimball |
Cinematography | Ralph Waldo |
Edited by | Renn Reynolds |
Music by | Richard Wess |
Release date |
|
Running time | 107 mins |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Ballad of Billie Blue (Jailbreakin') is a Christian-themed film that stars Jason Ledger, Renny Roker, Ray Danton, and Sherry Bain. It also features Erik Estrada. A country singer who has a problem with alcohol is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit.
A country music singer played by Jason Ledger is wrongly convicted of a crime and as a result ends up being on a Southern chain gang. [1] Marty Allen in a serious role plays a reporter for a scandal newspaper who reports on the singer. [2]
The film premiered in Grand Rapids, Michigan in February, 1972. [3] The film opened Thursday April 20, 1972 at the Holland Theatre and was showing for a week. [4] It was scheduled for screening at the Peoria Christian Center on Saturday, July 19, 1975. [5] The film was showing at the Grand Theatre in July 1976. [6] An organization called Christian Young People had the film showing at the Ottawa Technical High School at 8PM, April 26, 1979. [7]
The film was nominated for two Image Awards. [8]
The film was released on video with the title Jailbreakin'. It has also been released as Star-Crossed Roads. The video release is 78 minutes. A review by HR in 1972 running time as 107 minutes. Another source noted that a release of the film through Gateway Films had it 90 minutes. [9]
Hanko Herman of The Reformed Free Publishing Association referred to it as "a filthy piece of pornography" in his article "The Christian And Movies" that appeared in Issue: 11, 3/1/1972. This was due to some of the content in the film. [10]
Johnny Green of Johnny Green and the Greenmen appears in the film. He band also contributed to the music. [11]
H.R. Pufnstuf is an American children's television series created by Sid and Marty Krofft. It was the first independent live-action, life-sized-puppet program, following on from their work with Hanna-Barbera's program The Banana Splits Adventure Hour. The seventeen episodes were originally broadcast Saturday from September 6, 1969, to December 27, 1969. The broadcasts were successful enough that NBC kept it on the schedule as reruns until September 4, 1971. The show was shot at Paramount Studios and its opening was shot at Big Bear Lake, California. Reruns of the show returned on ABC Saturday morning from September 2, 1972, to September 8, 1973, and on Sunday mornings in some markets from September 16, 1973, to September 8, 1974. It was syndicated by itself from September 1974 to June 1978 and in a package with six other Krofft series under the banner Krofft Superstars from 1978 to 1985. Reruns of the show were featured on TV Land in 1999 as part of its Super Retrovision Saturdaze Saturday morning-related overnight prime programming block and in the summer of 2004 as part of its TV Land Kitschen weekend late-night prime programming block, and it was later shown on MeTV from 2014 until 2016.
Christian Michael Leonard Slater is an American actor. He made his film debut with a leading role in The Legend of Billie Jean (1985) and gained wider recognition for his breakthrough role as Jason "J.D." Dean, a sociopathic high school student, in the satire Heathers (1988). He has received critical acclaim for his title role in the USA Network television series Mr. Robot (2015–2019), for which he earned the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film in 2016, with additional nominations in 2017 and 2018.
The 87th Precinct is a series of police procedural novels and stories by American author Ed McBain. McBain's 87th Precinct works have been adapted, sometimes loosely, into movies and television on several occasions.
Jackie DeShannon is an American singer-songwriter and radio broadcaster with a string of hit song credits from the 1960s onwards, as both singer and composer. She was one of the first female singer-songwriters of the rock and roll period. She is best known as the singer of "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and "Put a Little Love in Your Heart", and as the writer of "When You Walk in the Room" and "Bette Davis Eyes", which became hits for The Searchers and Kim Carnes, respectively.
Elmore John Leonard Jr. was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are Hombre, Swag, City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky, Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of Sight and Tishomingo Blues.
The police procedural, police show, or police crime drama is a subgenre of procedural drama and detective fiction that emphasizes the investigative procedure of police officers, police detectives, or law enforcement agencies as the protagonists, as contrasted with other genres that focus on non-police investigators such as private investigators.
Buford Hayse Pusser was the sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1970, and constable of Adamsville from 1970 to 1972. Pusser is known for his virtual one-man war on moonshining, prostitution, gambling, and other vices along the Mississippi–Tennessee state line. His efforts have inspired several books, songs, movies and a TV series. He was also a wrestler known as "Buford the Bull" in the Mid-South.
Lasse Braun was an Italian pornographer, film director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and researcher.
Christopher McDonald is an American film, television, theatre and voice actor.
The Dark Knight is a 2008 superhero film directed by Christopher Nolan from a screenplay co-written with his brother Jonathan. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it is the sequel to Batman Begins (2005) and the second installment in The Dark Knight trilogy. The plot follows the vigilante Batman, police lieutenant James Gordon, and district attorney Harvey Dent, who form an alliance to dismantle organized crime in Gotham City. Their efforts are derailed by the Joker, an anarchistic mastermind who seeks to test how far Batman will go to save the city from chaos. The ensemble cast includes Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Morgan Freeman.
Creature Features is a generic title for a genre of horror TV format shows broadcast on local American television stations throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The movies broadcast on these shows were generally classic and cult horror movies of the 1930s to 1950s, the horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s, British horror films of the 1960s, and the Japanese kaiju "giant monster" movies of the 1950s to 1970s.
Terror in the Aisles is a 1984 American documentary film about horror films, including slasher films and crime thrillers. The film is directed by Andrew J. Kuehn, and hosted by Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen. The original music score is composed by John Beal.
John Crawford was an American actor. He appeared in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, called "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim", and in several Gunsmoke episodes. He had a key role in the 1975 film Night Moves, a crime thriller starring Gene Hackman. He also played the mayor of San Francisco in 1976's The Enforcer, the third Dirty Harry film featuring Clint Eastwood, as well as the Chief Engineer in Irwin Allen's classic 1972 box-office smash and disaster-film epic The Poseidon Adventure.
Ray Danton was a radio, film, stage, and television actor, director, and producer whose most famous roles were in the screen biographies The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) and The George Raft Story (1962). He was married to actress Julie Adams from 1954 to 1981.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s, when the combined momentum of the civil rights movement, the Black power movement, and the Black Panthers spurred black artists to reclaim power over their image, and institutions like UCLA to provide financial assistance for students of color to study filmmaking. This combined with Hollywood adopting a less restrictive rating system in 1968. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime. After the race films of the 1940s and 1960s, the genre emerged as one of the first in which black characters and communities were protagonists, rather than sidekicks, supportive characters, or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
The Joker is a character portrayed by Heath Ledger and the main antagonist in Christopher Nolan's 2008 superhero film The Dark Knight. Based on the DC Comics supervillain of the same name, he is depicted as a psychopathic criminal mastermind with a warped, sadistic sense of humor who defines himself by his conflict with the vigilante Batman. In the film, the Joker tests how far Batman will go to save Gotham City from descending into chaos by targeting the Caped Crusader's allies, including police lieutenant James Gordon and district attorney Harvey Dent.
This is a list of British television related events from 1973.
Renny Roker is a promoter and actor. As a promoter, he has been involved in both music and sport. He also ran various record labels with his brother Wally Roker in the 1970s. As an actor his career which really started in the 1960s has carried on through to the 2010s.
Kent Osborne aka Ken Osborne is a film director and occasional actor. The films he has directed have mainly been exploitation types. His films include Wild Wheels in 1969, Cain's Cutthroats in 1971, The Ballad of Billie Blue in 1972, Women Unchained in 1974 and Hollywood Confidential in 2008.
Sherry Bain, was an actress from Los Angeles, California. She started her career in some exploitation films. She co-starred with Robert Fuller in The Hard Ride in 1971, Wild Riders in 1971, The Ballad of Billie Blue in 1972, an episode of Bearcats!, Pipe Dreams in 1976, Poco... Little Dog Lost in 1977, and Wild and Wooly in 1978. By the early 1970s, her career was moving and she was on the verge of major stardom.