I've mentioned before that I was born in 1972, which means there are quite a few movies from the 1980s that I have a good memory of being talked about when they came out, but that I was too young to have seen in the theater on their original release. Another one that TCM showed some months back is one that I remember hearing being savaged by the criticis back in the day: Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. Not having seen it before, I wanted to record it so that I could watch and judge for myself.
Richard Pryor plays Jo Jo Dancer, who as the movie opens is a successful comedian living in Los Angeles. At least, he's successful professionally; he personal life has long been a mess. He's also addicted to cocaine. Having dropped a crack rock in the shag carpeting of his house, Jo Jo crawls on the floor to find it, because he's desperate and that stuff is pricey. He finally finds it and goes to light it... but the next thing we see he's being wheeled into a hospital room with severe burns.
Standing next to the hospital bed is a man who looks surprisingly like Jo Jo, asking Jo Jo how he could do such a thing to himself. Jo Jo flatlines, until the other man's hitting him starts his heart again. This is Jo Jo's guardian angel, and like Henry Travers in It's a Wonderful Life, he's here to go back over Jo Jo's life....
Flash back to small-town Ohio, some time in the 1950s. Jo Jo is just a boy, going home after school to a grandmother who loves him and a mother who is raising him in a brothel, since it's where she works to make ends meet. Jo Jo as a child is able to see the guardian angel, and in one or two other scenes, other people like Mom can too. Fast forward several more years, and Jo Jo is about 20 years old. He has dreams of going into entertainment, and a young wife, but a crummy job because something needs to pay the bills and this is what Dad (Scoey Mitchell) was able to get for his son. Dad kicks Jo Jo out of the house for insubordination, leading Jo Jo to go to the big city.
Jo Jo finds a club where he thinks he can get a job as the talent, but it doesn't quite work that way. After a series of reversals, he runs into a stripper named Satin Doll (Paula Kelly) backstage at another club, and she helps him get a tryout doing comedy. His first attempt goes very badly, but he keeps trying until finally he has a bit of success, except that the club has Mob ties.
More hardship follows, but Jo Jo starts to become more of a professional success. Still, as he keeps climing the ladder of fame professionally, he personal life becomes more of a mess as he's not able to have a stable relationship with a woman. There's a white woman who eventually starts sleeping with other men, and then a second wife Michelle (Debbie Allen) who becomes the mother of Jo Jo's kid, except that she's horrified by his increasing drug use and erratic behavior.
As I said at the beginning, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling was a critical disaster on its release back in 1986. Having seen it, I have to say that's unfair. It's not great, or to put it more accurately, it's uneven. Richard Pryor is clearly drawing from his personal life in this movie, and he was stretching himself by directing as well as writing and starring. I think this is the sort of movie where Pryor clearly needed somebody else to be directing him.
So, even though there's a lot about Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling that's a mess, it's still an interesting mess, an something that I think should be seen if you get the chance.
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