David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Review: Amazing
Grace)
Amazing Grace
In the 1960 film The
Entertainer English music hall comic and jaded hack Archie Rice (Laurence
Oliver) recalls hearing an old black woman sing a spiritual: “If I ever heard
any hope or strength in the human race (it was from her) singing about Jesus,
or something like that.” But Archie never heard Aretha Franklin. In the sphere
of music, by now the music of the spheres (she died last year at 76), there is
no other Aretha. Amazing Grace must
be her best memorial, yet it isn’t funereal.
Her double-record “Amazing Grace” (1972) is still the
top-selling gospel album. Alan Elliott, future music man (Atlantic Records),
heard it first at age 8, felt heaven’s tectonic plates shifting, and after long
effort delivers his joyful thanks. Elliott rescued the unfinished, unreleased
film from mythic limbo. It had “technical problems.” Hollywood pro Sydney Pollack
(Tootsie), directing this labor of
love at a black Missionary Baptist church in L.A. in January, 1972, lacked
docu-savvy. He didn’t use a clapper slate to sync image edits with the audio.
Franklin felt bitter about it (there had been giddy talk about a “gospel Woodstock”). Although Pollack, before
dying in 2008, gave Elliott his OK, Aretha was very tetchy about legality and
legacy (and money) and even sued the devoted rescuer. Finally her estate made a
deal, and Elliott assembled this anthem of Arethanosity (want an auteur credit?
Call it an Aretha Franklin film).
Not so much backed as embraced by a small, rootsy band
and the Southern California Community Choir of Rev. James Cleveland (unleashing
his rugged soul pipes and playing piano), Franklin was almost 30. She is in
control but shows the pensive dignity she probably had in girlish gospel days for
her preaching dad (who appears on film). Aretha’s loose, flowing outfits are church-right,
though no make-up could withstand the coming sweat in a hot church. Soon she
has everyone sweating, shaking, rising, calling, responding (a joy-flung hankie
will come flying past Aretha’s head to the camera). Her shout notes are
rousers, breaking through the floorboards of heaven, calling Jesus for love and
mercy. The climax of the first night (maybe the movie) is the title song. She gives
it new life, prepping the coming of the glory with softly sung intervals,
repeats, high notes like rockets. Old master Cleveland, overcome, leaves the
piano briefly to pour his tears into a cloth.
“She’s the reason why women want to sing,” said singer
Mary G. Blige, with pardonable excess (say amen always for song sisters Bessie,
Billie, Ethel, Rosetta, Ella, Mahalia, Dinah, Nina, Etta, Betty, Eartha and Aretha’s
mentor seen up-front, Clara Ward). This is never the conquering show-biz
swagger by which Aretha reduced Belushi and Ackroyd to awed gapers with “Think”
in The Blues Brothers (Pauline Kael wrote
that she “smashes the movie to smithereens”). This is young Aretha looking back
to when she was really young, but now a mature artist whose blazing power extends
the fervent, swinging tradition of black worship. Mahalia Jackson was a spiritual
locomotive, feeding primal soul coal into a furnace of belief. Franklin’s train
burned a more sensual and urban fuel.
The wall painting of Jesus is garish, the camera work often
ragged (but always authentic), the choir can sound a little under-miked, glimpses
of Mick Jagger add nothing but a taste of white admiration, but Franklin fuses
it all in herself, as a personal hallelujah. Amazing Grace is a vital sacrament of black musical communion in a
ghetto church, during another hard time (Dr.
King was gone, Ali was recently beaten, and the insidious Southern strategy was
entrenched under Nixon). Thanks to Franklin and the tenacious Elliott, it is
more accessible than ever, and trans-racially profound. When Franklin offers testaments
like “Mary Don’t You Weep,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and (singing at the piano) the
wonderfully gradual and reflective “Never Grow Old,” the heart comes home to
truth. Aretha be praised.
SALAD (A List)
12
Remarkable Movies About Real Singers:
In order of arrival: The Buddy Holly Story (1978, Gary Busey as Buddy Holly); Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980, Sissy
Spacek as Loretta Lynn); La Bamba
(1987, Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens); Mahalia Jackson: The Power and the Glory (1997, Mahalia as
herself); What’s Love Got to Do With It
(2003, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner); Beyond
the Sea (2004, Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin); No Direction Home (2005, Bob Dylan as himself); Walk the Line (2005, Joaquin Phoenix as
Johnny Cash); La Vie en Rose (2007,
Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf); Marley
(2012, Bob Marley as himself); Florence
Foster Jenkins (2016, Meryl Streep as Flo) and Maria by Callas (2018, Maria as herself).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
We’re
letting Orson relax this week, knowing he would like our substitute, one of the
funniest letters ever sent by a Hollywood screenwriter. Blacklisted but still
productive, Dalton Trumbo wrote to a friend on Oct. 6, 1957: “Cecil Blount
DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was
previewed this week for a company of 263 archangels in a temple of strawberry
meringue especially built for the occasion on the Paramount back lot. Y. Frank
Freeman led vespers with a reading from the letter of ‘a Protestant church
leader’ to the effect that ‘the first century had its Apostle Paul, the 13th
century had St. Francis, the 16th had Martin Luther and the 20th
has Cecil B. DeMille.’ After heaping portions of the Sacred Host had been
served up in a rich sauce with seconds for everybody, DeMille himself, clad in
the rosette of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, appeared among them on a
Technicolor screen to explain his affection for the Almighty. The picture was
then revealed.” (From David Kipen’s new book Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
In
grand, rocky vistas and bedrock emotions, the ancestor of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is John Ford’s Western The Searchers: “In 1956 The Searchers gripped me with its first
shot: a door opening to Monument Valley, the moment that ‘permeates all of
Wenders’s films’ (Alexander Graf). Ethan (John Wayne) is like Travis a terse
loner embedded in rage. Travis’s bid for redemption is his son. Ethan must save
himself by not killing his niece, abducted by Indians. Lean, brooding Harry
Dean Stanton was no Wayne, and that massive icon could not have inhabited
Travis, but as searchers they are spiritual siblings.” (From the Harry Dean
Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book
Starlight Rising, available from
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
The
Golden Calf receives its due in The Ten
Commandments. That’s Edward G. Robinson in white, on the left. (Paramount
Pictures, 1956; director Cecil B. DeMille, photography by Loyal Griggs.)
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