by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Bessie, a biopic of the great 1920’s blues singer Bessie
Smith, which premiered four years ago on Home Box Office (does anyone else but
me remembers that that’s what “HBO” stands for?) and which I had wanted to see
because for once a producer of a biopic cast the person I would have wanted to
see play the role. The star was Queen Latifah, and I’ve wanted to see her do a
Bessie Smith biopic ever since I saw the 2002 film Chicago, in which she utterly obliterated the rest of the
cast in her big number, “When You’re Good to Momma (Momma’s Good to You)” — at
least partly because, in the middle of a cast of actors who don’t usually sing
and did a passable job, Queen Latifah was the only professional singer (and it
showed!). Also, she proved in Chicago that she could not only sing in the powerful, uninhibited style of a
1920’s blues diva, she could look good in the kinds of overstuffed, elaborate
1920’s stage costumes the real Bessie Smith wore. I was annoyed by the film’s
inaccuracies — especially towards the end, where director Dee Rees (who gets
credit not only for directing the film but co-writing the “story” with To
Kill a Mockingbird adapter Horton Foote and
the script with Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois) spins a total fantasy
of Bessie Smith making a triumphant comeback and performing at John Hammond’s
“From Spirituals to Swing” concert before a racially mixed audience in 1938.
That didn’t happen for real because in 1937 Bessie Smith was killed in a car
accident in Mississippi, a sordid tale that’s been the stuff of legend-making
ever since. The legend was that she had been picked up by an ambulance driver
who took her to the emergency room of a whites-only hospital, where she was
turned away and told to go to the Black hospital farther on the outskirts of
town, and while she was on her way to the Black hospital her injuries turned
life-threatening and she died. That was a rumor that swept Mississippi’s Black
community at the time and was reported as fact by John Hammond, whose Down
Beat article “The Death of Bessie Smith”
spawned generations of rumor-mongering (including a 1961 one-act play by Edward
Albee) before the truth emerged. The truth was the ambulance driver had driven
by the white hospital without stopping — he knew the rules — and when she
finally got to the Black hospital the Black doctor who treated her decided her
injuries in the crash had been so extensive she couldn’t have survived them
anyway. I would have liked to see Bessie Smith’s death accurately dramatized in
the film, and instead of the actual final scene (Bessie visiting a cemetery and
laying flowers on the tombstone of her sister) I’d have liked a postlude
showing that Bessie Smith’s grave was left unmarked until 1970, when another doomed blues singer who died too young, Janis
Joplin, paid for a tombstone inscribed, “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World
Will Never Stop Singing,” and made what turned out to be the last public
appearance of her life at its
unveiling. (Charles was just as happy with the film for not including Bessie Smith’s death.)
What I liked about Bessie was mostly the sheer power of Queen Latifah’s performance and the fact
that the film, despite the many wrong or altered details of fact, captured the character of Bessie Smith as it’s been described by people who
knew her: rough and tumble, profane, not taking shit from anybody and fiercely independent. (In that it reminded me of
another musical biopic, Amadeus,
which similarly played fast and loose with the facts of Mozart’s life but was
true to his character as described in his own letters and the reminiscences of
people who knew him.) Despite a bit too much of the past-is-brown convention
for my taste (at times the lighting seemed almost designed to blend the skin tones of the Black cast members
with the overall brown tone of the backgrounds), cinematographer Jeff Jur
created a credible 1920’s look and avoided obvious anachronisms in the visual
portions. (The audio portions weren’t as accurate; at one point in the film we
hear a background cue that sounds more like late-1930’s swing than anything
that would have been heard in the 1920’s.) I also liked the fact that Rees and
his writers were honest about Bessie Smith’s bisexuality — she’s shown in
plenty of sex scenes with both
men and women, and despite the legend that she was “brought out” by fellow
blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey when she was working as part of Rainey’s
“Rabbit Foot Minstrels” show, the film (believably) shows Bessie making out
with women before she and Rainey meet. And the relationship between Ma Rainey
and Bessie Smith is shown as a mentorship that reminded me of the way the
relationship between Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn was shown in the films Coal
Miner’s Daughter and the recent Lifetime
production Patsy & Loretta.
There’s also a more conventional romantic triangle between Bessie, her husband
Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams), whom I’ve read was a former police officer
— I’d like to have seen them go into that background more because I’ve always
been curious about how a Black man got hired to be a police officer then and
how and where he would have worked — and her bootlegger and lover Richard
Morgan (Mike Epps), who seems to have been the most decent guy she was ever
involved with and who was also the uncle of another jazz great, Lionel Hampton. About the only aspect of
the film that rubbed me the wrong way was the fantasy ending, which shows
Bessie Smith doing the last recording session of her life in 1933 with John
Hammond producing (accurate except for the inclusion of a drummer — Hammond had
hired one but Bessie refused to record with a drummer, telling Hammond, “I
don’t need no drums. I set the
tempo”) and then going on to perform at the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts
(she’d been dead over a year when these took place, and Bessie’s friend Ida Cox
performed there instead — there’s a marvelous anecdote from Chris Albertson’s
Bessie Smith biography I wish had been in the film, when Bessie is walking
through the streets of Harlem in 1934 and comes on a marquee advertising “The
Sepia Mae West” — she told her companions, “Who the fuck is this ‘Sepia Mae
West’?,” went into the theatre to find out — and was astonished that it was Ida
Cox, her old friend and colleague from the TOBA Black vaudeville circuit — the
initials officially stood for Theatre Owners’ Booking Association but the
performers themselves, as shown in this movie, nicknamed it “Tough on Black
Asses”).
I was also irritated by Queen Latifah singing Bessie’s first record,
“Downhearted Blues” (a song actually written by Alberta Hunter and her
accompanist, Lovie Austin, and recorded by Hunter in 1921, two years before
Bessie’s version; when Hunter made her late-in-life comeback in the late 1970’s
and early 1980’s she would tell people — accurately — that she’d written Bessie
Smith’s first record, and they wouldn’t believe her!) and singing the line “I
ain’t never loved but three men in my life” as “three mens in my life” — Bessie
sang “men,” not “mens” (she was “country” but she wasn’t that country!) — but it’s a testament to how well Queen
Latifah assumed the mantle of Bessie Smith and how close she came to her style
that the use of a real Bessie
Smith record, “Gimme a Pigfoot” (heard first “as is” and then with a loud,
obnoxious big band dubbed over it that brings it closer to the cover version
Billie Holiday recorded in 1949), over the closing credits doesn’t blow Queen Latifah out of the water; instead it
sounds of a piece with everything we’ve heard before. Though I still think
Clint Eastwood’s Bird is the best
film ever made about a real-life jazz giant, Bessie is quite a good one. Now, how about a biopic of
Sister Rosetta Tharpe with Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes playing her?
