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SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES 033: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973)

 

A group of young people arrive in the Holy Land by bus and set about recreating the Bible story of the last days in the life of Jesus Christ in and around an ancient, ruined temple. In the story, Jesus (Ted Neeley) is riding a wave of popularity, yet one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot (Carl Anderson), is unhappy with the attention Jesus is getting and wishes his teacher could be clearer about his purpose, not accepting the line he's taken about being the Son of God. Little does Judas know that he will be playing a bigger part in the story of Christ than he realises. 

Judas is not a happy man. His friend, Jesus, is a gifted preacher who talks of love for your fellow man and peace and good will. This simple message resonates with the people who are tired of the standoffishness of Caiaphas (Bob Bingham) and his priests and the oppressiveness of Pontius Pilate (Barry Dennen) and the Romans. But Jesus' entourage, the apostles, are clamoring for revolution and riot. Jesus tries to calm their fervor but it looks like he's starting to believe his own press about being the Messiah, the Son of God. Having a former prostitute, Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman), close at hand isn't helping matters either. Judas can see Jesus has doubts, but when he tries to discuss what's going on, Jesus becomes combative. Matters are coming to a head and Judas has to do something. His decisions and their results will bring to a climax the legend of Jesus Christ Superstar. 

One of the most powerful stories ever, the life of Jesus has been depicted in art, mystery plays, and film epics. But could it be made into a rock opera? Obviously lyricist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber know how to put together some tunes and the album they produced was successful, as was the Broadway show that followed. Director Jewison had the unenviable task of taking an experience designed to be either purely aural or behind a proscenium, and translating it to the big screen. He decided to take it back to where it began and filmed on location in Israel. This was a risk since he would not have the control of the environment he would have in a studio. But the area presents the viewer with marvelous timeless vistas with mountains, deserts, caves, and ruins for the actors to sing and dance. It releases the action from a bound set to the wide horizons of the Holy Land. Jewison also uses a dramatic device, a troupe of young performers, to explain why there are a bunch of young hippies singing and dancing in some ruins. The opinion of some at the time that Jesus was the first hippie; so, Jewison uses that theme to give youthful energy to his production as well as a theme to some of his symbolism. 

Another interesting aspect of the production is simplifying the costumes and props, making them more symbolic than historically accurate. By giving the audience a beautiful but sparse environment, Jewison is almost forcing us to concentrate on the characters and the music. The characters are shown to be human with doubts and fears, unlike the faultless icons we normally get. Part of this is not showing any of the miracles Jesus performed. Jesus expresses concern with the direction his followers are going and his own path, but reacts badly when Judas calls him on it. It's one thing to doubt oneself; no one likes being doubted by others. Mary Magdalene, in her famous song "I Don't Know How To Love Him," is confused when Jesus obviously cares for her but doesn't take advantage of her. Characters, like Judas and Pontius Pilate, are shown with more sympathy than in traditional works.  

If there's one word that sums up the approach to the characters, it's doubt; every one of the main characters has serious doubts about their position in relation to God, including Jesus who not only is surrounded by the sick begging for help, but gets to do some whinging about his lot in life to the Almighty. Mary trills "I Don't Know How To Love Him" about her relatinship with Jesus, Peter has to deny him three times, but it's Judas who suffers the lion's share of heartache, complaining that God, by putting him in this state, has effectively murdered him. Mind you, he does get the reward that Jesus is supposed to get in Heaven if the ending is to be believed, as he descends on a shiny cross to sing the main theme. And as for Jesus? We never see him resurrected. Everybody just goes home. On its own merits as a musical, this is a well done production with solid acting and performances. But your opinion of the movies is more than likely going to be affected by your own views of religion. 

But before we get to the main feature, let's enjoy... 

The Pre-Show: 

       

Five are the number of documentaries which enhance today's main feature. There's even a special concerning the Spanish version of this rock opera by Camilo Sesto. Don't miss out on authentic behind the scenes footage, where Ted Neeley gives us the insights of the filming! An interesting moment in time captured for us live! And we continue, with our "TV On Deck" section with more hilarious adventures, popping straight at us from the 60s & 70s! 

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The Main Feature: 

Title: Jesus Christ Superstar 

Director: Norman Jewison 

Cast: Ted Neeley / Carl Anderson / Yvonne Elliman / Barry Dennen 

Release Date: 1973 

Country: United States 

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On Your Way Out: 

You all know what to expect when you get to this section of "Saturday Night At The Movies". My only concern is that you've all had a great time watching or re-watching a movie, and hopefully add something extra to the evening with some goodies. So, no time to waste, just grab 'em, use 'em and most importantly, enjoy 'em! 

Cheers, Shade. 

OYWO

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SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES 032: WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE (1998)

  

In the mid-80s, three women, each one claiming that she is Frankie Lymon's widow, are fighting in a trial. One is a music star, former member of the Platters (Zola Taylor), one is a petty thief (Elizabeth Waters) and the other is a school teacher in a small Georgia town (Emira Eagle). They want their part of estate, which was never shared by Lymon's manager, Morris Levy. 

During the trial, flashbacks tell the story of each one's life. Three true stories, three versions of the same man's intense life. On one hand, Frankie Lymon was an extremely talented artist (singer, songwriter and dancer), but on the other hand he was a troubled character and a heroin addict. In his short life (he died at 25), he loved life, fame, women, but most of all music. 

His success begins when he was only 13, with "Why Do Fools Fall In Love". At 15, he met Zola Taylor (19) and he fell in love. Lymon's slowly declining sales fell sharply after his voice changed and he lost his signature soprano voice. 

Lymon began a relationship with Elizabeth Waters, who became his first wife in January 1964. Lymon's marriage to Waters was not legal in the beginning, because she was still married to her first husband. After the marriage  failed, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-60s, where he returned to Zola Taylor. 

In 1965 (aged 22), Lymon was drafted into the United States Army and reported to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for training. There, Lymon met and fell in love with Emira Eagle, a schoolteacher. The two married in June 1967 and Lymon moved into his wife's home, continuing to perform sporadically. But one day he decided to return to New York, where he hoped to regain fame. One week after, he was found dead of a heroin overdose, at age 25. Frankie was a huge talent, whose wings were broken by the use of drugs. 

At its best, this uneven but often entertaining movie, written by Tina Andrews and directed by Gregory Nava, manages to recapture some of the excitement and turmoil of those days, revel in high spirits and lowdown humour and provide a happy sampler of hits like the title song, as well as "Goody Goody," "ABC's of Love," Little Richard's hit "Tutti Frutti" and the Platters' hit "The Great Pretender." 

At its most mediocre, this post-mortem farce, built around a battle for Lymon's estate among three women, each claiming to be his wife and the heir to his royalties, is compounded of courtroom scenes that will leave lawyers gnashing their teeth, shaky acting, ludicrous lines, unconvincing locations and backgrounds and cliched efforts to evoke nostalgia and achieve psychological depth through many grainy montages. 

Musically speaking, Frankie Lymon was pretty much of a one-trick pony who was a 13-year-old soprano from Upper Manhattan at the end of 1955, when his recording of "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" with four neighborhood boys called the Teenagers catapulted them to doo-wop fame. 

By the summer of 1957, after four hits, a cross-country tour, recordings for an Alan Freed film and an appearance at the London Palladium, Lymon had parted company with the rest of the quintet. His solo career was a failure. He drifted into despair and picked up a heroin habit. But he seemed to have overcome it when, just before a scheduled recording date in a comeback effort in 1968, he died of an overdose. 

The film picks up the story in 1985, a few years after the Diana Ross version of "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" made the song a hit all over again. According to the film, this brought the major women in Lymon's life out of the woodwork. Halle Berry as Zola Taylor, the glamourous lead singer of the Platters, the supposed first wife: Vivica A. Fox as Elizabeth Waters, a shoplifter who met Lymon after his heyday and said she turned to prostitution to try to help him overcome his drug habit, and Lela Rochon as Emira Eagle, the reserved Southern schoolteacher who married Lymon while he was in the Army, settled him into a serene domestic life, saw him off on his last fatal trip and buried him. All seem to have a good time with their roles, and Larenz Tate, though far less baby-faced than the original, makes an appealing Lymon. 

The indecorous courtroom contest that makes enemies and friends of the three women as their lives with Lymon are depicted in flashback also brings to the stand Little Richard as an irrepressible witness, situates Pamela Reed on the Surrogate's Court bench as the incredulous and incredibly lenient judge and casts Paul Mazursky as the villain of the piece, Morris Levy, the owner of Roulette Records who collected millions in proceeds from the success of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. 

Lymon's career may have been short and sad, but "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" finds the melodrama of his life in the exciting music of his time and the tumult of his romances. As a coda to the film, we are shown a brief, black-and-white clip of the real Frankie Lymon, singing and dancing with the face, voice and body of an angelic munchkin. It's ironic that the filmmakers have chosen to leave us with the very mystery that the movie purports, but fails, to address: Who was that charismatic man-child? 

But before we get to the main feature, let's enjoy... 

The Pre-Show: 

      

Our "Film Extra" folder hands us a few short documentaries surrounding Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers lives. I would highlight a special interview which involves, Herman Santiago & Jimmy Marchante, the two surviving original members of Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers. Interesting stories and funny to see their reaction concerning Zola Taylor and Frankie's relationship!! That very interview ends with the "new" formation of the Teenagers singing live "Goody Goody" and of course, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love!" Plus, our "TV on Deck" section, where we'll enjoy an extension of last week's adventures of 60s and 70s half hour comic sitcoms. By the way, "Three's Company" opens its second season!! To top it all, The Batman and its white-knuckle thrilling adventures (we have to remember it was waaaay back then!) with his faithful Robin by his side. 

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The Main Feature: 

Title: Why Do Fools Fall In Love 

Director: Gregory Nava 

Cast: Larenz Tate / Little Richard / Halle Berry / Vivica A. Fox / Lela Rochon 

Release Date: August 28, 1998 

Country: United States Of America 

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On Your Way Out: 

Our 32nd edition of Saturday Night at the Movies, where we take the opportunity to watch (or re-watch) films that are related to music. In each and everyone of these editions we've enjoyed stacks of extras, and today won't be any different. All these resources which Shade's Vintage Radio shares with you has the unique purpose of, hopefully, enhancing your experience, through sights and sounds. 

Cheers Shade. 

OYWO001  OYWO002

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SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES 031: COUNTRY MUSIC (Episode 03) (2019)

Tell a lie long enough and it begins to smell like the truth. Tell it even longer and it becomes part of history. Throughout "Country Music," the omnibus genre documentary from Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, there are moments of tension between the stories Nashville likes to tell about itself - some true, some less so - and the way things actually were. 

And while from a distance, this doggedly thorough eight-part, 16-hour series, hews to the genre's party line, viewed up close it reveals the ruptures laid out in plain sight. Anxiety about race has been a country music constant for decades. In positioning country music as, essentially, the music of the white rural working class, Nashville streamlined - make that steamrollered - the genre's roots, and the ways it has always been engaged in wide-ranging cultural dialogue. 

But right at the beginning of "Country Music" is an acknowledgment that slave songs formed part of early country's raw material. And then a reminder that the banjo has its roots in West African stringed gourd instruments. The series covers how A.P. Carter, a founder of the Carter Family, traveled with Lesley Riddle, a black man, to find and write down songs throughout Appalachia. And it explores how Hank Williams's mentor was Rufus Payne, a black blues musician. 

It goes on and on, tracing an inconvenient history for a genre that has generally been inhospitable to black performers, regardless of the successes of Charley Pride, Darius Rucker or DeFord Bailey, the first black performer on the Grand Ole Opry. Over and again, "Country Music" lays bare what is too often overlooked: that country music never evolved in isolation. 

Each episode of this documentary tackles a different time period, from the first Fiddlin' John Carson recordings in the 1920s up through the pop ascent of Garth Brooks in the 1990s. Burns has used this multi-episode approach on other American institutions and turning-point historical events: "The Civil War," "The Vietnam War" and "Jazz." These are subjects that merit rigor and also patience - hence the films' length. But country music, especially, demands an approach that blends reverence and skepticism, because so often its story is one in which those in control try to squelch counternarratives while never breaking a warm smile. 

"Country Music" rolls its eyes at the tension between the genre imagining itself as an unvarnished platform for America's rural storytelling and being an extremely marketable racket where people from all parts of the country, from all class levels, do a bit of cosplay. Minnie Pearl, from "Hee Haw," came from a wealthy family and lived in a stately home next to the governor's mansion. Nudie Cohn, the tailor whose vividly embroidered suits became country superstar must-haves in the 1960s and beyond, was born Nuta Kotlyarenko in Kiev, and worked out of a shop in Hollywood. 

The only constant in this film is Nashville's repeated efforts to fend off new ideas like a body rejecting an organ transplant. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Charley Pride, Hank Williams Jr. - they're all genre icons who first met resistance because of their desire to make music different from the norm of their day, then ended up establishing new norms. 

Those moments pockmark an otherwise straightforward and oft-told story about country music's birth and growth : The 1927 Bristol Sessions, in which Ralph Peer first recorded the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and several others; the rapid climb and accelerated demise of Hank Williams; the feminist potency of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton; the roller coaster life of Johnny Cash; the importance of bluegrass, countrypolitan, outlaw country, Sourthern rock and pop country.

It's a taut narrative, and by design incomplete - 16 hours is enough time to tell a long story, but not always a deep one. But given that this history is being painted with broad strokes, it's especially crucial that attention is drawn to the inventions and elisions that hover over each era of the music. 

Throughout the film are reminders that in Nashville, institutional memory is almost comically short. Concern about the Olivia Newton-John invasion of country music in the mid-1970s discussed in the film felt eerily reminiscent of the anxiety induced by the almost yearlong run at the top of the Billboard hot country songs chart by the pop singer Bebe Rexha, for her collaboration with Florida Georgia Line. The current battle for women performers to be heard and promoted is echoed around once per decade in the documentary. And time and again, those who appear to be rebels - Waylon Jennings, Haggard, Buck Owens - are in fact the ones most interested in the genre's traditions, agitating against a company town that specializes in smoothing out rough edges. 

"Country Music" moves with the signature even-keel tempo of other Burns documentaries, which makes the handful of disruptive moments - some lighthearted, some sad - all the more striking: Mel Tillis describing the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the 1960s by wisecracking, "You could churn butter on that damn thing"; anything that comes out of the mouth of the journalist and gadfly Hazel Smith, who, when she was the office manager for the Hillbilly Central studio where Jennings and others recorded, coined the phrase "outlaw music". 

At one poignant moment, Dwight Yoakam attempts to sing Haggard's "Holding Things Together," about a father raising his children after his wife has left him. Yoakam makes it through the first line, then gathers himself for a full 12 seconds before managing to get out the next one. 

The raw pulse of songs like that - blissfully, there is ample music in this documentary - is grounding, a nod to the triumph of a genre that often steps on its own foot on the path to clarity. But rather than simply celebrate those creative peaks, "Country Music" makes it plain that the story of the genre is merely a pocket version of the story of the American musical experiment writ large: Everyone trying on poses and costumes, borrowing wildly at every turn, pointing fingers at others trying similar things, and, as soon as things become complacent, agitating for something new. 

But before we get to the main feature, let's enjoy... 

The Pre-Show:

    

In our "Film Extra" folder, we have one documentary, but what a one! Practically, a double feature once again! "The Nashville Sound: The Gran Ole Opry" sets us right there with all its high ranking performers, where we can nearly "breathe" the familiarity, closeness and above all the camaraderie amongst each and every one, including the public. Great documentary! Plus, our "TV on Deck" section, where we'll enjoy an extension of last week's adventures of 60s & 70s half hour comic sitcoms plus the thrilling on-going serial "The Batman". 

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The Main Feature: 

Title: Country Music: Episode 03 - The Hillbilly Shakespeare

Director: Ken Burns 

Cast: Documentary 

Release Date: 2019 

Country: United States Of America 

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On Your Way Out: 

Hope you've enjoyed both the Pre-Show and The Main Feature. I suppose we all agree that it's a pleasure when learning and enjoying music is all part of one. Hopefully you'll find enough resources "on your way out" to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the roots of the music we love. 

Cheers Shade.

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