Sparkle (1976)

I've been working my way through the movies that TCM ran during the Black Experience on Film back in September, and this time around, I'm up to Sparkle.

Irene Cara plays Sparkle, a young woman living in Harlem in 1958 with her two sisters Sister (Lonette McKee) and Delores (Dwan Smith), and her mother Effie (Mary Alice), who works as a maid for a rich white family out on Long Island. Sparkle and her sisters sing in the choir at the local church.

They get the chance to perform on a more commercial level when a talent show comes up, and Sparkle's friend Stix (Philip Michael Thomas) puts together a band including the three sisters and a couple of guys. They do OK, but people don't really want yet another mixed group. Stix gets the brilliant idea that an all-girl group would be together, and sets up the three sisters as Sister and the Sisters.

They're a success, but success comes with a price. Sister gets a crappy boyfriend named Satin (Tony King) who beats her and gets her into using cocaine. It more or less splits the band, especially when Stix decides he's going to get a job in construction upstate because it pays better.

But then Sister dies as a result of her cocaine use, and Stix comes home and gets the idea that he could make Sparkle a star. But he's going to need money to cut a record, and the only person he knows who could get that kind of money is Effie's boss, who gets it from some rather unsavory characters....

Sparkle isn't a bad movie, but damn if it isn't formulaic. The performances, especially young Irene Cara, are good, and the music (by Curtis Mayfield) is a big plus, even if most of it sounds like it's firmly in the 1970s instead of late-50s Harlem.

Sparkle had enough cultural resonance that some of the songs would be recorded and become hits in the 90s, while the movie itself was remade in 2012. I haven't seen the later version, so I can't compare the two.