The Blues Brothers

I've mentioned before that there's a "Blind Spot" blogathon somewhere out there in the classic movie blog world where the challenge is to pick 12 movies you haven't seen that are generally considered movies most movie buffs will have seen, and do a post about them, one a month for a year. I don't take part in that, mostly because I don't plan that far in advance what my movie viewing is going to be. But one that would have been a good candidate for such a blogathon is The Blues Brothers. I recorded it during one of the free preview weekends, and it's going to be on Starz Comedy tomorrow at 8:47 AM and 8:00 PM, with a few more airings next week.

John Belushi plays Jake Blues, who at the start of the movie is just getting out of prison in Joliet, IL, having done a three-year stretch. He's picked up by his brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd), who traded in their old, beat-up "Bluesmobile" for a former police car, not repainted yet. They then set out for their home town of Chicago.

On the way, however, they stop at a Catholic orphanage, where they were raised. The last of the nuns they remember is Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman), and they want to see how everybody at the orphanage is doing. Unfortunately, that's not very well. The orphanage apparently has to pay tax, and hasn't paid a good $5,000 of those taxes to Cook County. If they can't pay up, and soon, the county is going to take over the facility and give it to the education department.

Jake and Elwood have to come up with a way to get that $5,000, and fast. Fortunately, they have a bit of a plan. Before Jake went into prison, he and Elwood fronted a band called the Blues Brothers. All (and that word is doing a lot of lifting here) they have to do is find the old band members, convince them to rejoin the band for one night, and have a big show that will net them the $5,000. Needless to say, there are going to be problems.

The first is that most of the old band members don't want to rejoin, having gone on to better jobs that actually pay the bills. But where Jack Carson could be a schmoozer, Jake Elwood one-ups him by being particularly vulgar at it, which really causes difficulty for the band member who is now working as a maitre d', for example. Eventually, Jake and Elwood are able to persuade the other old band members to do the comeback performance.

There are still other problems, which is that Jake and Elwood have a whole bunch of people trying to stop them from getting to that concert. First up is the police. Jake, after all, is still on parole, while Elwood has a host of traffic violations a mile long for which he's never paid the fines. So any time the computer runs their license plate, the police are liable to arrest him, leading to a bunch of chase scenes.

While trying to find all of the band members, Jake and Elwood come across the Illinois Nazis, who are trying to head up a march the way the real-life Nazis tried to march through Skokie, IL a few years earlier. Jake and Elwood drive the Nazis off a bridge, and the Nazis will stop at nothing to get revenge. There's also a mysterious woman (Carrie Fisher) who keeps showing up and seems to know a lot about Jake and Elwood's movements, with a view toward killing Jake.

Eventually, Jake and Elwood get the band together and get a first job, although it's at a country place where a real country band is booked; Jake passing the Blues Brothers off as that country band. So add another set of enemies. That concert doesn't earn enough; they're going to have to perform at a big venue, get there safely, and then get to the assessor's office to pay off the tax bill.

I have a feeling The Blues Brothers was funner back in 1980 when it was released than I found it in 2021. Not that it's not funny, but it would have been fresh in 1980, and some of the jokes have become part of the culture. (We have both kinds of music, country and western.) But that never stopped me from enjoying Airplane. One of the differences is in Belusi's character, whom I found to be quite the jerk. Also, since the Blues Brothers are a band, there are a lot of musical performances, most of them involving real singers much more talented than Belushi and Aykroyd. All of those songs, while good, also bring the movie to a bit of a standstill and bring the running time to 133 minutes.

Still, there are reasons The Blues Brothers remains such a well-remembered movie, and you should probably watch for yourself to see why it was such a big deal back in 1980.