January's Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman: MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM on Netflix

This post is written by our monthly 

correspondent, 

Lee Liberman

It’s 1927, Barnesville, GA, and Ma Rainey is holding forth in a tent packed with swaying, ecstatic fans: 

"My bell rang this morning,  I didn’t know which way to go.  I had the blues so bad I sat down on my floor. Daddy Daddy Please come home to me.  I’m on my way crazy as I can be…."

 Or in Prove It on Me Blues: 

"Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men. It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, Makes the wind blow all the while. Don’t you say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me. You sure got to prove it on me." 

 Ma says: “that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing cause that’s a way of understanding life.” Bawdy, butch, snaggle toothed, Ma Rainey grew her fame as mother of the blues out of the misery of Jim Crow South, says director George C. Wolfe. Blacks told their story through the blues, singing “I will not be passive... I will be defiant in my existence, I will be joyful… and I will dare you to try to stop me in my defiance.” (Below, Wolfe, c, with Viola Davis as Ma, and Chadwick Boseman, as Levee)

The uncertainties of the cotton crop and the brutality of share-cropping led to the great migration north (1915-1970) of six millions, offering wage labor in factories and the deceptive lure of a better life.

Ma Rainey helped herself to a pinch of hope—she grudgingly left her home in Columbus GA at the pinnacle of her career to record her music with her band for Paramount Records in Chicago. Born Gertrude Pridgett, She began performing as a teenager, and traveled with minstrel and vaudeville shows. Later she combined minstrelsy forms of the 1800’s with country blues that she heard on the road (archival photo below). 

“Her blues is a blues of defiance, not...of despair”, explains Wolfe. And coming from so adoring a following, Ma brought her own agency with her. Says Coleman Domingo, bandmember Cutler in the film, “she didn’t cop to the social norms of what a woman should be…she was loud...brash. She...wanted her money up front...she demanded respect…'This is my gift. This is my talent. You want me to sing, you honor it'.” Ma knew that to the white recording studio owner, her music rang the studio cash register; he would give her no deference once her songs were recorded — so she extracted what deference she could up front. 

Viola Davis quoted in the NYT: “In Ma Rainey, everybody’s fighting for their value and the thing that holds us back is being Black...I wanted that to be a part of Ma Rainey... what lay in the heart of her being. Which is: I know my worth.” Davis captured her rage and entitlement in her affect. (below, she arrives annoying late to the recording session with assorted demands).

A proud bisexual, Ma mentored a young Bessie Smith, who became much better known and easier to represent, more marketable than Ma, herself. Hence it took playright August Wilson (below, 1945-2005) to resurrect Ma Rainey from the 1920’s and give her voice in one of his cycle of plays about everyday lives, winning 3 Tony’s following its original Broadway run.

Ma arrives to even more approving social politics of the Georgia of today — the film is an awards contender for both Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. Wolfe described Ma’s affect as ‘Black Southern Kabuki...a kind of style and look and glamour’, drawing on the look of Apollo Theater chorus girls who used watered-down shoe polish on their faces — Ma’s cross of minstrelsy and black southern expression. 

Wilson chose a Chicago rehearsal and recording session at the peak of Ma’s career to write her into life. While she brought her long history with her, Chadwick Boseman’s character, Levee, the youngest member of the band, represents the agency of youth. Levee has his own arrangement to a Ma song, and he beats it to death to get his way until a confrontation occurs between him and the older band members, then with Ma. 

But Levee is thwarted, showing us, as we learn his history and the baggage he carries on his back, that the black experience is rarely not at the wrong end of the stick. Said Viola Davis (NYT, 12/20/20): “There was a transcendence about Chad’s performance, but there needed to be. This is a man who’s raging at God, who’s lost...his faith. So [Boseman has] got to...go to the edge of hope and death and life in order to make that character work. Of course, you look back on it and see that that’s where he was.

And so we arrive from slavery and early Black expression to the present-day of near majority minority population that has led to violent backlash — an openly racist administration (2017-2021) and resistance to the backlash by Black Lives Matter, growing demands for reparations, fixing unequal policing and justice, and presence in our politics of more black and minority leadership. For her part, Ma Rainey helped justify the rewriting of social norms for black and gay artists — I exist, I am who I am. 

NOTES:

Here is the NYT obit for playwright August Wilson, with discussion of his definitive and poignant contribution to the suffering of Black America

This is the final tweet from the account of Chadwick Boseman, August 2020. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is dedicated to him; it was his last time on screen. 

NBC offered this tribute to his extraordinary life: A Tribute for a King 

In I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, Raoul Peck reminds us of James Baldwin's continued relevance

TrustMovies came of age at just about the time that James Baldwin -- essayist, novelist, playwright, short-story writer and the deepest thinker regarding race in America that had yet appeared -- hit his creative stride. To my mind this man (born in 1924, died in 1987) remains still the deepest thinker about race in America we've had, combining first-hand experience with thoughtful, honest analysis to reach the kind of conclusions that America, particularly its white contingent, had not been able to even form, let alone digest, on its own. It still, for the most part, has not.

All of which makes Raoul Peck's fine documentary (the filmmaker is shown at left) -- using only the words of Mr. Baldwin, along with archival film clips in which he (and a few others) speak -- so important and relevant to our current time. One listens to his words here with as keen an ear as possible (you may want to watch the film a second time), simply to better be able to take it all in. The documentary ostensibly jumps off from Baldwin's plan to write a book on the lives/deaths of three important figures from recent black history -- Medgar Evers (shown below, with Baldwin),

Martin Luther King (below, right) and Malcolm X (below, left) -- all of whom Baldwin knew. He did not live to complete this book, leaving behind only a minimal manuscript, so the film uses this, as well as his other writings, along with the archival (and some much closer to present-day) visuals, to give us Baldwin's look at America. The view isn't pretty, and it forces us -- especially those left-leaning, "right-thinking," would-be liberals among us -- to assess our own past and present and how seriously we've ever taken the idea that "black lives matter." How closely have we entered any of those black lives to discover how they were lived and/or spent?

Hearing Baldwin's words (via the voice of Samuel L. Jackson) while viewing the visuals makes for a compelling experience on a number of levels, reminding us of events we were part of back in the day, while allowing us to see the way in which these events were consistently refracted through our lens of "whiteness." This is true as much with the lives/deaths of Evers, King and Malcolm X, and the various protest movements -- then and now -- as it was with slavery (and its follow-up experience) and all the rest of American history.

The great strength of the film, and of Baldwin's writing, is the way in which it (together with Peck's visuals) forces us to see and acknowledge all this. Among the many highlights is Baldwin's book-end appearance on the Dick Cavett television show which begins the film and comes again near its end. The second appearance includes a face-off with a white Yale professor who offers up the usual platitudes about black life having improved over time and so please-stop-making-everything-about-being-black-or-white. Baldwin's answer to this is a combination of enormous passion coupled to absolute specifics regarding the black experience in which he decimates those platitudes.

How does one truly put himself in the shoes of another? Well, first off, you have to honestly, genuinely try. Mr. Peck -- together with the inspiration, intelligence and toil of Mr. Baldwin -- has given us one enormous shove in the right direction.

I Am Not Your Negro -- from Magnolia Pictures and Amazon Studios, and running 95 minutes -- opens this Friday, February 3, in New York City at Film Forum, The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the AMC Magic Johnson Harlem 9; in Los Angeles at the Arclight Hollywood and The Landmark; and here in Miami at the O Cinema, Wynwood, and the Regal South Beach 18.

To see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters listed, click here and then keep scrolling down.

Romance and history get a good going-over in Jenni Olson's hour-long doc, THE ROYAL ROAD

A combination of California (and U.S.) history, lesbian confessional, geography lesson and meditation on the human condition -- who we are and what we want -- THE ROYAL ROAD, from documentarian Jenni Olson, offers a good deal of pleasure via its unusual tone: quiet, inquiring and a little sad. The visuals, too, are equally quiet, staid & beautifully composed via a stationary camera before which passes a parade of boats, cars, water, birds, but no people.

Ms Olson, too, goes visually missing from the movie, though it is her voice that narrates the film. I would have liked to have seen what our narrator looks like, but I am sure it was intentional that the director leaves herself, along with all other human beings, out of the visual mix. (That is she, shown left.) You can see and hear more of her by watching the charming and interesting interview with the filmmaker by Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche that appears on the Bonus Features of the new DVD -- which makes its debut this coming Tuesday, Sept. 6, via Wolfe Video.

From its outset, The Royal Road (that would be California's famous El Camino Real that links northern and southern California) tackles Olson's pursuit of unavailable women (we hear about an earlier would-be "love" in Los Angeles and then in Chapter Two, a more current one residing up north). At the same time the filmmaker goes into at length the history of California's famous (or infamous) Father Junípero Serra and his bringing Christianity to the early indigenous population. From there, we jump off into U.S. history, the Mexican-American War, the Louisiana Purchase, and the early colonization of America by the British, Spanish and French.

What do these two themes -- personal love and national conquest -- have in common? Perhaps the kind of hypocrisy that would deliberately choose would-be partners who are by their very nature (maybe straight, certainly married) unavailable, and deliberately refuse to see or understand a history in which a country practices war and genocide in order to expand its borders. (God knows, they never taught us kids any of that in my California elementary school history class. Maybe they do now.)

Whatever, Olson's honesty about both subjects is quietly bracing, and when at last she adds the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie, Vertigo, to the mix, the results are even more invigorating. Her final statement (or one of them) about what both she Hitch managed to reveal via their films is smart, funny and as engaging as all that has gone before.

Although much that we see and hear will probably be obvious to history buffs (and therapists who deal with folk who fail at relationships), I did learn some new things from the film: Did you know that both Abe Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant were opposed to the Mexican-American War? And while I thoroughly love Vertigo, I had never made the connection that Olson makes about how the choice of the name of one of Kim Novak's characters, Madeleine, might be a nod to Proust. I also loved her idea that "the re-romanticizing of California's Missionary Era," occurred just as the state's tourism was burgeoning.

The film is full of just such contemplative and thoughtful asides, and those visuals -- a shot of the side of a Northern California house and driveway as the fog begins to roll in, a bird seen in the middle of an empty alleyway -- are so consistently interesting that you won't want to blink. (The fine cinematography is by Sophia E. Constantinou, while the precision film editing comes via Dawn Logsdon of the wonderful Big Joy.)

There is even a short side trip into the pros and cons of nostalgia, with the help of Tony Kushner. One might have wished for a bit more variation and energy in Ms Olson's narrative voice; on the other hand, it makes the film more personal because it's she who is speaking. All in all, if you're of a mind and in the mood for some quiet movie contemplation, you could do well spending 65 minutes with this lovely film.

From Wolfe Video, the documentary hits the street this coming Tuesday, September 6 -- for purchase and/or rental.

Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman visits TURN: Washington's Spies -- Red colony/Blue colony

This post is written by our correspondent Lee Liberman

A series more likable than not, TURN will nevertheless please American History buffs more than spy thrill-seekers, at least to begin with. It's the story of three real American heroes who grew up together in Setauket, Long Island, NY to become the core of the Culper Spy Ring that helped General Washington outwit the British. A history of the Culper ring was published in 2006 by historian Alexander Rose (below) in his book Washington's Spies, a lively and highly-praised history of their activities.

Turn has a notable cast, film location of Colonial Williamsburg, costumes by HBO's John Adams' award winning designer, Donna Zakowska, and the look and feel of a major undertaking. But showrunner /writer Craig Silverstein offers up too many story threads in Series 1 (now streaming on Netflix) to allow a satisfying dramatic arc in any one. For drama to work and entertain, climax and resolution is needed. Series 1 operates as an endless series of skirmishes that leap around introducing players and context.

The series is provocative anyway. Most striking is the image of our ancestors under occupation by the British. Braveheart and Outlander revealed the horror the Crown imposed on the Scots -- it was equally intolerable in Red-occupied U.S., particularly New York, where British operations and "lobsterback" soldiers were headquartered. Nor do we think of the Revolutionary period as a daily domestic political struggle between Crown-loyal Americans (tories) and American whig patriots who sought independence. Our own Red vs Blue politics can't be more dramatic than Red-Blue political differences during the Revolution that set families and neighbors in anger, if not spy-mode, against each other.

Then we are introduced to the slow burning disagreement in the Patriot army between General Charles Scott, intelligence traditionalist, and the army upstarts who championed guerrilla networking methods of obtaining intelligence. It took the capture and killing of young Nathan Hale and other spies futilely deployed by Scott to bring about his demise and the young bucks getting their way with Washington in the spy business.

It was the Crown Queen's Ranger and rogue Robert Rogers and his hounds of war who captured Hale, friend and Yale classmate of Ben Tallmadge, Culper ringleader. Rogers cut through British army hierarchy as a mercenary for hire, played by Angus MacFadyen (Robert the Bruce in Braveheart), above. MacFadyen is now bulky, boisterous, and as Robert Rogers, a thorn in all sides.

The main protagonists (above) are Patriot army officer, Yale-educated and radicalized (Yale was a hotbed of agitation against mother England) Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich, r); Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall, l), a scrappy bearded adventurer who served on whaling ships before settling into his role as army courier reporting to his friend Tallmadge; and their very reluctant cohort Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell of Billy Elliott, ctr) who became collector of data behind enemy lines, using the nom-de-guerre of Culper. In Setauket, Woodhall represented himself as pro-Crown while continuing to compile information about troop movements, activities, and numbers to pass to Washington through Brewster. A fourth compatriot was Anna Strong (Heather Lind, center right) made out here to be the doomed love interest of Woodhull, but in history years older than him and unlikely to have been his lover. Still, a love story was needed and Strong was party to information gathering. Further family dealings, also likely fictional, include Abe's Setauket magistrate father (Kevin McNally), a Tory, and Abe's mostly annoying pious Tory wife Mary (Meegan Warner), both of whom Abe must deceive.

The first series introduces the main players and story-lines, especially Woodhull's involvement in Patriot politics as he becomes reluctantly entangled in his two friends' intelligence efforts. We meet General Washington (Ian Kahn) and a trio of British officers, above, who figure throughout -- the comparatively humane Major Hewlett (the excellent and familiar Burn Gorman, left, of Torchwood fame); suave Major John Andre (JJ Feild, center, of Not Safe for Work); and our villain-in-chief, sadistic Welsh Captain John Simcoe (Samuel Roukin, at right).

Major Hewlett describes the colonies as in a state of anarchy -- chaos masquerading as freedom, an excuse for criminal activity and every man for himself. Woodhull mutters under his breath: self-rule.

The second series is in progress now on cable channel AMC, Monday's at 9 pm. Abe Woodhull, aka Samuel Culper, is now a crucial participant in intelligence gathering, engaging in a dangerous double spy game, above.

There are efforts made by our side to discover traitors (General Charles Lee) and by the British to recruit as a spy the dissatisfied General Benedict Arnold. Assorted spycraft comes into play such as making good use of Thomas Jefferson's letter "duplicator" (Tallmadge is shown using it, above), messages delivered in newly-invented invisible ink, conveyed on boiled eggs, etc.

The chapter story arcs are better in series 2, but whether the entirety will live up to its potential for drama remains to be seen. Even so, this is an intriguing corner of the American Revolution to find out about, offering much more food for thought than Mel Gibson's trumped up good-vs-evil film, The Patriot.

All photos are from the series itself, courtesy of AMC, 

except for the shot of Mr. Rose, which is by Dave Kotinsky, 

courtesy of Getty Images. 

DVDebut -- Freida Lee Mock's inspiring doc, ANITA: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

For many of us, the 1991 Senate hearings regarding Anita Hill and her accusations of sexual harassment against the then Supreme Court nominee (and now sitting Justice) Clarence Thomas still touch a raw nerve. Although Ms Hill has faded somewhat into history (and into her own quietly successful career and personal life), surfacing now and again -- as when Thomas' wife made the ridiculous phone call (that immediately became public knowledge) asking Hill to recant her original, sworn testimony -- Thomas himself is unfortunately always with us. To my mind, he is the least intelligent and least worthy person to sit on the Supreme Court (in my lifetime, certainly, and maybe ever), and also the most do-nothing justice we've had to put up with.

At the time of her testimony, Ms Hill made it clear that she was not trying to sue or bring charges against this man for sexual harassment but simply wanted to place before the U.S. citizens and elected officials what kind of man had been nominated for this enormously important -- and lifetime -- place on the Supreme Court. Tellingly, Hill was not the only woman who had leveled these charges against Thomas. There were others, yet none of them were allowed to testify along with Hill. This "oversight" from a highly sexist Senate committee made the entire Hill/Thomas charade seem like a mere she-said/he-said contretemps, and Thomas was eventually confirmed as a Justice (though by a very small majority of votes).

The excellent documentary, ANITA: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER, made by Award-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock (shown above), serves two purposes. It takes us (together with younger folk who were unable to appreciate what was going on 23 years ago) back to that time and shows us what happened and why. Ms Hill makes one of the best and most believable witnesses I've ever seen -- thoughtful, intelligent, quiet, kind and brave. (With her testimony backed up, it must be said, by a number of other fine people.) Then the film takes us behind the scenes to give a brief history of Miss Hill, shown above and below at the time of the hearings, her family, and what has happened to her since then.

If you've never seen nor heard any of the hearings, the movie should open your eyes wide and sharp. Either way, it proves the last half of the film, in which we learn more than most of us have know about this unusually courageous and decent woman that makes the movie so genuinely inspirational. A lot has happened since the early 1990s regarding sexual harassment and how it is perceived, and it would seem that Ms Hill's real gift, in addition to speaking truth to power, lies in what she now stands for in the minds and hearts of so many woman (men, too). She is a living symbol of the difference that taking a stand can make.

Leaning about her family (she's one of 13 siblings) and how it lived first in North Carolina until threat of a lynching made the entire group move to Oklahoma, her studies prior to employment (under Mr. Thomas), and especially her career at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she clearly has blossomed once more. She loves teaching and seems to be very good at it, too.

We also learn something of her personal life from the man who has been her significant other for a number of years now. And finally we see the results of what her name, her deed and her continuing work has achieved via the many young women, men and groups across the country dedicated to putting sexual harassment in its place. (We even learn how that blue dress she wore at the hearings became rather iconic.)

All told, this is an inspiring, triumphant documentary that makes a hero out of someone who did not ask for this but has clearly become one worth touting. You can rent or purchase the DVD of Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, running 77 minutes, beginning Tuesday, June 24. And, as is the case with many of the films from First Run Features, you should be able to stream it via Netflix fairly soon.

Griffin Dunne seizes the day (& the film) in Justin Schwarz's dysfunc family pic, THE DISCOVERERS

What a year it's been for Griffin Dunne -- whom those of us of a certain generation probably best remember for An American Werewolf in London and After Hours. This actor has never stopped working in film and TV, though there was a period from around 1995 through 2000 that we saw very little of him. This year, already, he's back in spades, giving two terrific performances in one good film -- THE DISCOVERERS, under consideration here and in which he plays the lead -- and another absolutely splendid one: Rob the Mob, which opened this past March and in which Mr. Dunne, in a choice supporting role, plays one of the most memorable employers in film history to the two leading characters.

Justin Schwarz, the fellow pictured at right who both wrote and directed The Discoverers, had the weirdly amusing idea of conflating a typically broken American family with Americana of another bizarre kind -- the sort that recreates famous events from our country's history as though they were happening right now (you know: Civil War battles and the like). In this case, it's playing out a piece of the famed journey taken by explorers Lewis and Clark, which began outside of Pittsburgh and then continued westward.

Mr. Dunne, above, plays Lewis Birch, a professor, author and historian, working on a mammoth book about the slave who accompanied the Lewis & Clark expedition. Divorced, with two high school/college aged kids -- son (Devon Graye, below, left, of the recent 13 Sins) and daughter (Madeleine Martin, below, right, of the recent Refuge) --  dad and children are about to take a planned vacation when life intrudes -- in the form of an unexpected phone call from a brother informing our hero of major problems with the family's mom and dad. (Yes, this sudden phone call is practically verbatim of what happens in yesterday's film -- A Short History of Decay.)

Mom is gravely ill, while Dad, it seems (grandpa to the kids), has gone a bit 'round the bend. As played by Stuart Margolin, below, right, he's both comic and sad, a figure of fun -- until he finally becomes an angry and very real person (and problem). The theme of "exploration" -- as done by history's famous duo, and now the rather silly re-creators of this event, against that of our Lewis Birch, who must do some real exploration of his own to discover who the hell his children are -- is handled pretty well, if stated a little obviously by the filmmaker. Fortunately, Schwarz is helped enormously by his talented cast.

This would include some smart women, as well as our leading men: Cara Buono (below, left), Becky Ann Baker (second left) and Ann Dowd provide ace support, while the always dependable David Rasche, as the near-lunatic in charge of the re-creation, provides plenty of laughs.

On a journey like this one, the destination is never really in question. Rather it's the events along the way that make or break the movie. These are oddball, interesting and funny enough to carry us along. The daughter's encounter with two younger, over-sexed boys in a pharmacy is simply hilarious (Ms Martin is at her adorable/ironic best here), while the son's rapturous encounter with the pretty young daughter of the Rasche character (Dreama Walker, above, right, and below, left) helps bring things together.

Initially quite low-key, offering more sadness than jollity, the movie takes off into something more comic and strange once the expeditions begin, and there is one scene along the way between Lewis and another character that absolutely nails America's current view of race. While there's much to enjoy in the movie, I'll wager you'll find Mr Dunne's sidelong glances, raised eyebrows and wry humor the biggest reasons to discover The Discoverers.

The film opens tomorrow, Friday, May 16, in New York City at the Village East Cinema and in Los Angeles on May 30 at the Arclight Cinema, Hollywood.  You can see other currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters, by clicking here.