Lady sings something or other

I mentioned yesterday that this final night of TCM's "Wonder Women" spotlight of biopics about women deals with entertainers. Following Incendiary Blonde, at 10:15 PM you can watch Lady Sings the Blues.

At the start of the movie, it's mid-1936, and singer Billie Holiday (Diana Ross) is being brought into what looks like a psych ward of a prison. She's dumped into a padded cell, and when she starts screaming and flailing around, she's strait-jacketed. That's because she's going through heroin withdrawal, as we'll learn later in the movie. However, being along in a padded cell gives Billie the opportunity to reflect on her life and figure how she got here...

Because of course the movie needs to be told in a flashback style (although in this case, the flashback reaches the present with about an hour left in the movie). Teenaged Elinore Harris, not yet Billie, is working as a cleaning girl in a brothel down in Baltimore, living with an aunt and cousins because Mom (Virginia Capers) migrated north to New York to try to make a better life for herself. One of the clients thinks Elinore is one of the prostitutes and wants to sleep with her, something Elinore definitely doesn't want. Except that the client follows her home and rapes her when she's alone.

So Elinore goes to New York, where Mom gets her a job with one of Mom's fellow parishioners, apparently not realizing that the woman is also the manager of a brothel. This time, however, Elinore decides she's going to sleep with men to get the better things in life, at least for a while. Finally, one day she realizes she's had enough, and flees to a Harlem club managed by Jerry (Sid Melton). Elinore can't dance, but she can sing, so she gets a job if she can get tips. She's greatly helped out by the piano player (Richard Pryor).

It's there that she meets Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams), who seems to have done well for himself in the Harlem Renaissance without quite explaining why. He loves Elinore, who by now has taken the stage name Billie Holiday, although she doesn't yet return the favor what with all the trauma she's had in her life to this point. And God knows she's going to have a lot more trouble.

One day, Reg Hanley (James Callahan) comes to the club with an offer. Billie wants to perform downtown, but Reg realizes that you have to pay your dues to do that. He's got a band, and he'd love to have Billie as the band's singer and go on the road so that they'll get the good reviews necessary to get the big-time bookers to notice them. Of course, Reg and his band are white (although surprisingly non-racist for early 1930s New York) and part of the tour is going to go through the south.

Billie does become successful, although she also becomes addicted to heroin along the way. After the War on Drugs (not called such at the time, of course) comes after her, her dreams of performing at Carnegie Hall are in jeopardy, unless she goes back on the road together with Louis and the Piano Man.

That's a brief synopsis of the movie, although it's not necessarily a good synopsis of Holiday's life. That's because the movie, like a lot of Hollywood biopics, takes all sorts of liberties with the subject's life. I don't know as much about Holiday, so I don't know how much the producers mangled the story, although the jazz fan reviewers I've read think there's a lot of mangling going on, and that this is a huge problem. It reminds me of Young Man With a Horn in that regard. That movie stars Kirk Douglas as a jazzman supposedly based on Bix Beiderbecke, but doesn't name him that so that the movie can take more liberties. In fact, it's such a loose retelling of Beiderbecke's life that where Bix died young, Kirk Douglas lives.

I suppose that if Lady Sings the Blues were sort of based on Billie Holiday without actually giving Diana Ross' character that name, it would probably be rembered as a much better movie than the reputation it has. The thing is, Diana Ross actually does fairly well as an actress here and probably did deserve that Oscar nomination. She and Billy Dee Williams are both a fair sight better than they are in Mahogany. Ross is also, unsurprisingly, good as a singer, even if her type of singing isn't really the way the real-life Holiday interpreted the songs. Richard Pryor is excellent in a rare dramatic role.

So I think you should really give Lady Sings the Blues a try. I suppose if you're looking for authenticity, and especially if you're a jazz fan, you might have some problems with it. But if not, it's really a pretty good movie. I watched it off a DVD I bought some years back when I also picked up Mahogany, but I didn't check to see if it's still in print.