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 

Best of Year (so far): Regina King's superlative could-have-happened ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI

For all the good things you've heard about ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI, the movie turns out to be even better. It starts well, builds consistently into something richer and more meaningful than you could have imagined, even given the subject matter --  the night spent together by four black icons (Cassius Clay Jr., Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Malcolm X), all of whom had at least a nodding acquaintance with each  other and actually attended the world heavyweight boxing match that Clay had won earlier that evening -- and ends reaching the highest level of thought and emotion of which movies may be capable. How? Best I can figure is simply via an extraordinary intelligence and simplicity.

This is thanks to the film's writer Kemp Powers (adapted from his play of the same name), its director, Regina King (shown at right), and its amazing cast, especially the four leading actors. How Mr. Powers manages to encapsulate so much of Black American history, philosophy and ideas in such a natural, off-the-cuff manner is exemplary. His dialog grabs you and holds you, first to last, and best of all, he does right by each of his characters.

As director, Ms King, who has over and over again proven herself a very fine actress, comes at this material in the most naturalistic manner. She, along with her cinematographer (Tami Rekier) and editor (Tariq Anwar) have the knack of understanding where to place the camera and seize the moment without ever appearing to do so. The direction of this movie never calls attention to itself, and that is Ms King's great achievement. 

Unfortunately work like this rarely wins awards. It should, for it is quietly extraordinary. Even when King moves from the movie's main location -- a simple hotel room -- to the outside and even to past events, all this unfolds so gracefully and naturally that no underscoring is ever needed.

As to that cast, these four amazing actors could not be bettered, TrustMovies believes. No one grandstands or is in any way better than his co-stars. Each achieves his character's major and minor qualities in the most natural, direct manner. The performances themselves keep you riveted. As Malcolm X, Kingsley Ben-Adir (three photos up) brings the man's intelligence, passion and paranoia (that last quite justified) to full bloom, while Eli Goree (two photo above) makes Clay's braggadocio, as well as his talent, not merely believable but hugely entertaining.

Leslie Odom, Jr. (two photos up) lets Cooke's layers of intelligence and enormous feeling emerge ever so slowly, and in so doing makes them resonate all the more, while the quiet strength and power in Aldis Hodge's performance as Jim Brown (above) commands both the screen and the movie via its stillness and subtlety. Sure, these guys were all legends. What we have here are the humans behind those legends.

What the movie has to say about the Black experience -- then and now -- is paramount, of course. Powers and King don't preach. They simply show and tell. I can't imagine that audiences who genuinely care about this fractured country of ours, where it has been and where it is going, will not hang on every word and every beautiful, eye-, mind- and heart-opening performance on view. For me, so far, this is the year's best film.

From Amazon Studios and running 114 minutes, the movie is in theaters now, as well as streaming on Prime Video. Miss it and you will not be doing yourself any favor.

Sam Pollard's MLK/FBI further exposes yet another shameful episode in our nation's history of law enforcement

Back in 2017 producer/director/editor Sam Pollard (shown below) co-directed one of the year's best documentaries, Acorn and the Firestorm. He's back this week with the new doc, MLK/FBI, the acronym-titled movie all about the connection between and harassment and illegal surveillance by our Federal Bureau of Investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader at this mid-20th-Century time of America's black population and the chief organizer of the non-violent protests for racial equality going on throughout the USA.

As one of the film's interviewees, James Comey, points out, this lengthy episode is one of the most shameful in the FBI's off-and-on shameful history. And Mr. Comey should know, being himself no stranger to shame,  having later headed the FBI and served briefly under that icon of Presidential shame, Donald Trump. 

Many of us have long heard about this FBI harassment of King, as well as of others such as actress Jean Seberg and just about any black man or woman -- Fred Hampton to Angela Davis -- who rose to prominence in the movement for black equality. What MLK/FBI gives us is a broader, deeper look into the whole sleazy mess of FBI wire tapping and audio taping than has heretofore been seen.

Pollard and his writers (Benjamin Hedin and Laura Tomaselli) bring the history of the tapping and taping of MLK on the phone, in hotel rooms and elsewhere, along with many important details of what went on at this time. In the process it also gives a richer, somewhat clearer portrait of Dr. King, shown above. As one of the several narrators points out early on, "Whatever comes out on these tapes" -- the tapes themselves will not be released until 2027, though official FBI memos exist and are shown here, explaining some of what is heard on those tapes -- "will help us better understand him (MLK) as a human being. And that's our duty: to understand."

To that end, we learn of the FBI memo which says that King must be destroyed because he is the most dangerous Negro in America. Why? Due to his supposed ties to Communism, of course. To that end,  we learn about lawyer Stanley D. Levison, one of King's best friends, and himself a former Communist. Yet, after much investigation, the FBI knew that there was no evidence linking Levison to any Communist  plot. Still the agency proceeded with its sleazy and unnecessary surveillance, taping King's hotel-room sexual trysts.

The documentary makes no excuses for Dr. King's sexual needs nor the way in which he fulfilled them outside of his marriage. It also makes clear that King was dishonest in telling the FBI he no longer had contact with his good friend Levison. To help pictorialize the history, Pollard uses clips from old movies -- The FBI Story, Walk a Crooked Mile, I Was a Communist for the FBI -- but fortunately these are limited in both number and the time spent on each.

Pollard doesn't much explore J. Edgar Hoover's rumored sexual proclivities, either, though he does note how Hoover's FBI seemed to be made of mostly hunky, young white men of the sort that the Director keenly appreciated.

What's best about MLK/FBI is the deeper look it gives us of King himself, via his ideas, speeches, interviews and the like. Details such as the plane flight on which he picked up a number of current magazines to read and was so moved and chastened by the photo essay in Ramparts magazine that showed the results of our military's napalm bombing on Vietnamese children that he immediately went back to heavily criticizing our role in Vietnam. This resulted in the worst press coverage he had yet received, as well as anger from not only his enemies but many of his black friends and supporters.

Watching interviews by the press of some of those folk who hated King and their talk of how the man had "attended Communist Training School" will put you in mind of today's QAnon conspiracy nuts and how so little in some ways -- given even the Internet -- seems to have changed over more than half a century. Learning of black FBI informants among King's closest allies and workers (the fine photographer Ernest Withers was one of these) will also give you proper pause.

From IFC Films and running 105 minutes, MLK/FBI opens in select theaters, digitally and on cable VOD this Friday, January 15. It is definitely worth a watch -- even if it's not quite yet the definitive version of history. Click here for more information on the film and how to view it.

The doc of the year? Very probably. Theo Anthony's RAT FILM is this -- and much more.

As challenging, surprising and satisfying as movies get -- narrative or documentary -- this new one from writer/director Theo Anthony would be a shoo-in for an Oscar except that it will probably be "too much" for our prestigious Academy members: dark, uncompromising and not nearly feel-good enough to take home that coveted and, in this case, much deserved Best Documentary prize.

Its title is RAT FILM, and it's about, yes, the much beloved species we know as rats. However, because the movie deals equally and brilliantly with the subjects of race and redlining in Baltimore, Maryland, it could as easily have been titled Race Film. As for the manner in which it bring us Baltimore, the documentary makes a terrific companion piece to perhaps the best television series ever created, The Wire.

How Mr. Anthony (shown at right) manages to blend rats, race and Baltimore so thoroughly and felicitously seems to TrustMovies little short of miraculous. Using history, statistics, archival photos and newspaper clippings, coupled to a brilliant narration that does no special pleading but simply states some very interesting facts, while lining these up with other facts/statistics from the past and the near-present, he allows us to reach conclusions that should prove awfully hard to shake.

But how do rats fit into all this? They should and they do, but I'll let you discover the answers to that question yourself.

Baby rats don't open their eyes for two weeks, we learn early on the film, "but does a blind rat dream?" Anthony wonders. This is but one of many intriguing questions raised in the film. Another -- Do rats go to heaven? -- is asked by the rat exterminator (Harold Edmond, shown below) we meet and spend a good deal of time with. Edmond doesn't hate rats the way some of the other would-be exterminators (shown further below) do.

Why this awful hatred? The doc doesn't ask this question directly, but we cannot help but feel its presence all along the way. And the occasional introduction of rat lovers/rat keepers and their "pets" simply reinforces the question. There is one shot of a rat licking his owner's bald head (in a similar way to which my cat licks my increasingly balding dome) that should leave you charmed and delighted.

Along the way we learn the importance of the Norway Rat to lab tests and experimentation, via the work of of one, Curt P. Richter, even if we do begin to question some of the ideas of Richter and his disciples. Well before it is finished, in fact, the movie will have you viewing the rat as one of the great anti-heroes, having undergone such hatred and aggression over time that you'll find it difficult not to root for the (relatively) little guy.

So we get rats and the Welfare State, rats and NASCAR, rat-hunting for sport, rat history/statistics and lots more, and we even meet "the Mother of CSI," as one interviewee describes the odd woman who gave over her life to criminal investigation. And though, for an hour or more, we don't see any actual killing of rats (just the threat of this), when, in a sudden burst of violence, we do, via some very smart editing, the effect is both necessary and jolting.

The redlining of entire neighborhoods by Baltimore's banks back in the 1930s, and recent statistics about those same neighborhoods will set your mouth agape (such stunning progress has Baltimore made!), while the film's finale offers a scene of sheer, unadulterated irony, amusement and slow-growing horror.

The music (by Dan Deacon) is sensational, too -- so good, in fact that a soundtrack album is said to be coming soon, while the film's smooth, ever-so-slightly indignant narration is splendidly voiced by Maureen Jones. I came away from this doc feeling quite differently about rats than I did going in, and I suspect you might, too.

You'll get your chance to find out when Rat Film -- running 82 minutes and released by The Cinema Guild and Memory -- opens this Friday, September 15, in New York City at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; in Baltimore at the Parkway Theatre; in Vancouver at the Film Center and in Chicago at Facets Cinémathèque. The film has its Los Angeles premiere on Saturday, October 15 at the Downtown Independent theater, where it will have a two-week run. In the following weeks it will open elsewhere around the country. Click here and scroll down to view all upcoming playdates.

February's Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman -- HIDDEN FIGURES: When computers were black and wore skirts

Producer/writer/director Theodore Melfi's (St. Vincent) film HIDDEN FIGURES, for which he has been rewarded with an Academy Award nomination for best picture, is a perfect Valentine to Black History Month. (See Melfi in 3rd photo from bottom.) Based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly (below), whose father worked at NASA, it tells the story of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson, at center, right), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe, near right), and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, far right), three of many black women instrumental in the space race of the 1960's.

Satiric, educational, and full of feel-good's, it has the makings of a long-running sit-com. It brings together the disparate worlds of early space science and Jim Crow South, beaming bright on the latter with enough good humor to shame those who play dumb to our racist past, and by inference, our intractable racist present.

Jim Crow law legislated segregation from the period of Reconstruction until President Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the passage of the Civil Rights laws of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. (While segregation dominated the South by law, Northern segregation was enforced through practice -- bank lending and job discrimination, and de facto school segregation.) In the South segregation laws were posted in schools, rest rooms, water fountains, restaurants, work lunch rooms, transportation, etc.

When we meet our three protagonist human "computers" (the women who did the mathematical calculations of space flight with pencils, slide-rules, and chalk) in the 1960's, they are subject to embarrassing working conditions but thrived on the opportunity to work at NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915, morphing into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958). Langley, Virginia, where the story is set, is now one of three research facilities among NASA's ten field sites.

Black women with college degrees were likely to teach, but a confluence of events led President John Kennedy to take action that would change the trajectories of some, notes Richard Paul in "Air &Space Magazine" 3/2014. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's earth orbit, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Alan Shepard's suborbital space flight, the Freedom Rides and imposition of martial law, and Kennedy's man-on-the-moon-in-a-decade speech all happened within weeks of each other in 1961. Kennedy used federal employment to speed integration at the same time NASA and its contractors were creating 200,000 jobs. Kennedy assigned Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to head both the National Aeronautics and Space Council and the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. Thereafter and with Johnson's propulsion, NASA joined the front lines of the civil rights revolution.

In 2015, math genius Katherine Johnson received the recognition she deserved when President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, noting her work in calculating the trajectories of our first human space flight and her figuring that got John Glenn to the moon and back. (She is now 99 years old.)

Melfi has a humorous touch and he humorously touches all types of racism -- institutional Jim Crow, polite naive racism (of which whites are all guilty at one time or another), and the insults of the nasty bigot. The film satirizes a catalogue of acts of discrimination, such as a tableful of white male heads swiveling as a black woman takes a seat. In a particularly memorable example, Katherine Johnson gets promoted from the black women computers group to the task force for space flight but finds that there's no segregated bathroom in the building. We see her dashing madly across the sprawling Langley campus to a segregated bathroom where she can relieve herself legally, though toilet paper and paper towels are in pitifully short supply.

Kirsten Dunst plays a chilly white supervisor who has no notion of her own unconscious racism; Jim Parsons (above, center left) is Paul Stafford, Head Engineer of the Space Task Group, a nasty competitive bloke at ease taking credit for work that isn't his. Boss Al Harrison (Kevin Costner, above, right, in another of his bland laconic good guy roles) only has eyes for the collective goal -- surpassing the Soviet launch of Yuri Gagarin into space. Harrison seizes on Johnson's genius at numbers and promotes her to the dismay of good-ole-boy engineers; also he knocks down the 'white women only' sign so his math star doesn't have to go missing running across campus to go to the bathroom. ("Here at NASA we all pee the same color.")

Meanwhile Dorothy Vaughn (Ms Spencer, below, left) is running the group of black women "computers" (in the building across campus with the segregated rest room) without the title and management pay she deserves. The IBM computer arrives and Dorothy can see the day they will all be replaced by machines -- we like how she solves this, and also Mary Jackson's creativity. Jackson (Ms Monáe, below, right) has a math and physics degree and wants to study engineering, but the schools are segregated. She sweet-talks a judge.

The upbeat joy in the stories of the three women's race to the moon is propelled by a lively, happy score guided by hip hop artist Pharrell Williams (below, left, with director Melfi), gaining him two Oscar nominations for songs, "Running" and "I See a Victory". (Williams wore two hats, also serving as a producer on the film.) He contributed 8 original tunes. Says A.D. Amarosi, Philadelphia Inquirer, "...Williams rises high; not just with sweet R&B appropriate to the Motown era and the optimism of the space race but with his usual sunny pop-hop, this time tinged with strains of gentle folk and sacred song."

Yes, "Hidden Figures" rises high as history-telling and message-making. By implication it speaks to Southern activist Dr. William Barber's call for "The Third Reconstruction" -- new advocacy and peaceful disobedience to stop voter suppression, housing, debt, employment, environmental, and sexual minority discrimination, not to mention cabs that drive by and hands that clutch purses in the presence of a black man. After every step forward in the march to equality, elites push back, providing workarounds to existing anti-discrimination laws; thus "Hidden Figures" is a call both for more scientific journeys into space and more genuine racial equality.

In April, Netflix will launch a new series "Dear White People" based on Justin Simien's 2014 movie of the same title about a group of black students dealing with polite racism at a mostly white ivy league college -- another small step in 'the third reconstruction'.

Hidden Figures, from 20th Century Fox and running 127 minutes, is playing nationwide now. To find the theaters nearest you, click here.

The above post was written by 

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman.

Blu-ray/DVD/digital download debut: Nelson George's documentary, A BALLERINA'S TALE

Back in the summer of 2010, TrustMovies reviewed a wonderful documentary about a couple of budding black dancers in Brazil entitled Only When I Dance. One of the points the viewer took away from this fine little film was how very difficult it was for black ballerinas to break into the ranks of the best of the world's ballet companies. Giving us a real Black Swan in one of the world's major dance companies, for instance, has not been an easy task, but the career of black ballerina Misty Copeland finally proved that this could be done.

The documentary about Miss Copeland -- A BALLERINA'S TALE directed by Nelson George, (shown at right) -- arrived theatrically in limited release last fall and is now available via DVD, Blu-ray and digital download. Though it is entirely career-oriented and we get to know almost nothing about Miss Copeland's personal life, it's worth a look, especially for ballet fans and anyone interested in how that color barrier, still standing rather more firmly than many of us might like, can be made to quake a bit, if not yet topple.

In addition to its fairly standard this-happened-and-then-that format, the movie does offer up a bit of history of blacks in dance, with emphasis on the women rather than the men. We also hear from dance aficionados and historians, and from various black women in places of power in the entertainment industries. Mostly though, it's Copeland (above and below) all the time, and this pert energetic performer shows us that a black woman with, yes, breasts, muscles and a strong body can dance the roles we may have thought only belonged to flat-chested, somewhat emaciated, white porcelain doll-like creatures,

This "look," explains one of the experts here, was due as much to the tastes and whims of George Balanchine, as to anything else, because pre-Balanchine this kind of dancer's body barely existed. One of the pleasures of the film comes from viewing Copeland in action, as her muscular but lithe body shows us the kind of ballerina most of us will have not yet seen. (Some of Mr. George's camera angles, however -- under the ballerina's skirt? -- could use some adjustment.)

Nowhere near as interesting and full of life, history and surprise as the outstanding 2013 documentary on Tanaquil Le Clerc, the movie should still take its place in the canon of documentaries about notable dancers. From IFC Films and running 84 minutes, A Ballerina's Tale makes its DVD, Blu-ray and digital download debut tomorrow, February 2 -- for purchase or rental.