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September’s films examine two different eras in history

Reviews by Leonard Heldreth

The films this month include one adapted play and a look at the creation of one of the classic films of all time.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Ma Rainey was born Gertrude Pridgett in 1882 (or perhaps 1886) in Columbus, Georgia, or maybe Russell County, Alabama — the data is a little contradictory. The young girl began performing in minstrel shows when she was 12-14, and in 1904 she married William “Pa” Rainey, taking her stage name from him. Given the historical time and the racial circumstances, she had a flamboyant and remarkably successful career. At the time of her death from a heart attack in 1939, she was the proprietor of three Georgia theaters — one in Columbus and two in Rome.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom takes its name from one of her most successful songs, which she wrote and which served as her traveling stage show’s dance number. The 1984 stage play by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning African American playwright August Wilson, is part of his Pittsburgh or Century Cycle of 10 plays portraying 100 years of the Black experience. Each work tells a story from a different decade. Denzel Washington, to whom Wilson’s plays have been entrusted, filmed Fences in 2016, and Viola Davis won an Oscar for an entirely different kind of role in that film.

The setting is July 2, 1927, and Ma and her band have traveled north to a sweltering Chicago to record songs for her new record company, Paramount. With her are her band: trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts), pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman), and trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman). The four musicians joke, gossip and verbally spar for the first 20 minutes of the film, letting the three older characters set themselves off from the rebellious Levee, who wants to update Ma’s old fashioned versions of the songs. Ma finally arrives in her new car with her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) and her girlfriend of the moment, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige).

The historical record as well as the lyrics to some of Ma’s songs indicate that she found spending the night with women as attractive as spending it with men, and the film doesn’t shy away from this connection. The other two main characters are her manager, Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), and the recording producer, Mel Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne); both are white men who keep suggesting to Ma that things would go more smoothly if she signed the rights to her songs over to them.

Ma’s late arrival has delayed the session already, but she postpones it further by demanding the ice-cold Coke that is specified in her contract; a further requirement is that the introduction to the Black Bottom song should be done by her nephew, who stutters, making getting a clean recording difficult but guaranteeing the nephew some pay. When her requirements are met, Ma agrees to sing, knowing that with her voice, she holds all the power, and she doesn’t hesitate to exercise it. After the session ends, Ma, Dessie Mae and Sylvester leave in her new car to return to the South, and the band members squabble about various matters as they pack up until violence breaks out and brings the film to a close.

The film is dominated by Viola Davis as Ma and Chadwick Boseman as Levee. Gaining 20 pounds, covering her face with layers of make-up (which Ma apparently did), dressing in expensive dresses and waving huge fans, Davis brings Rainey to life as a dominating diva who is ready to face down anyone who stands in her way. She values her title as “Mother of the Blues” and doesn’t want anyone to forget who she is and how hard she had to fight to get there. In this Jim Crow world, she is looked down upon even by the other patrons in a Black restaurant because she sings for a living. Davis brings Rainey to life in all her flamboyant, force-of-nature glory.

The second force in the film is Chadwick Boseman as the trumpet player Levee. Boseman got rave reviews with Black Panther and Da Five Bloods, and his performance in Ma Rainey more than matches those of these earlier films.

Knowing that he was dying of colon cancer, Boseman pulls out all the stops as he channels the rage and frustration of Levee, who finds himself trapped in Ma’s old-fashioned blues when he wants to take his music into the next level of jazz. In one of the most powerful speeches in the film, Levee relates how he was abused as a child and the fury he still feels against society and God for letting such things happen. Boseman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor but lost out to Anthony Hopkins. He died at the age of 43 shortly after filming was completed.

The rest of the cast is also exemplary (some repeated their roles from the stage play), and the only consistent complaint among reviewers is that the play remains very theatrical, moving only a few times out of the hot, confined recording studio to the surrounding streets. Curiously, the original play was set in the winter, but the Chicago heat seems more appropriate to the simmering tension that threatens to spill over among the band members, and the racial conflict between Ma and the white men who try to exploit her. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom remains as relevant today as it was in 1927.

Mank

Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane has been the subject of controversy and disagreement since its inception. Inevitably cited as one of the top films of all time, at the time of its release in 1941, it won only one Academy Award — “Best Original Screenplay” — and that award was split between Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, a New York screenwriter who had come to Hollywood 10 years before to seek his fortune. The question of who actually wrote what parts of the Citizen Kane screenplay has been extensively argued over the years in articles such as Pauline Kael’s “Raising Kane.”

David Fincher’s Mank (Mankiewicz’s nickname in Hollywood) tells one side of that story, and briefly examines various surrounding characters, such as publisher William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies (Hearst’s mistress), Welles, John Houseman of the Mercury Theater, Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick and Josef von Sternberg.

As the film opens, Mank, with a broken leg, is being deposited at an isolated ranch in the desert where he is to be confined and kept sober for 90 days or until he finishes the screenplay. As Mank works on the script, the story flashes back 10 years to his arrival as a writer for Paramount, and traces his decline and fall as he battles alcoholism, his disdain for Hollywood and the idiots he must deal with.

Much of the fun of Mank is what it adds about the characters that Kane is modeled on. Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) makes a slender but imperial Hearst, vaguely amused by Mank before he decides to destroy him. The scenes at Hearst’s estate, San Simeon, are among the most impressive, with Mank and Marion Davies strolling though the grounds at night while elephants and giraffes can be seen and heard in the background. At a lavish dinner party, Mank gets drunk and insults Hearst, who simply smiles, knowing he is far beyond anything Mank can do.

Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), a young blonde starlet who was Hearst’s mistress for years, has been portrayed as everything from a manipulative gold-digger to someone who just wasn’t too bright but did what she was told to do — she apparently knew how to be believable as the stereotypical dumb blonde. Mank presents her as intelligent, rather happy-go-lucky, and genuinely fond of the much older Hearst. Mankiewicz sees her as one of the few people he doesn’t sneer at.

Cheerful and apparently a good comic actress, she demonstrated her affection for Hearst late in their relationship when Hearst lost much of his fortune. She sold the jewelry he had given her over the years to bail him out financially. Mrs. Hearst never forgave Davies and her husband for their open affair, and she barred her from attending Hearst’s funeral. Hearst’s attempt to turn Davies into a serious Hollywood actress when she wasn’t interested, parallels Kane’s attempt to turn his second wife into an opera star when she simply didn’t have the voice for it.

If there is a problem with Mank, it’s that the Hollywood cynicism that Mankiewicz exhibited seems to have spilled over into the film. With the possible exception of Davies, it’s hard to generate much sympathy for any of the characters. But maybe that’s just an accurate picture of the people of Hollywood. Anyone who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane recently may want to review it before watching Mank.

About the author: Leonard Heldreth became interested in films in high school and worked as a movie projectionist in undergraduate and graduate school. His short “Cinema Comment” aired for some years on WNMU-FM. In 1987 he started writing reviews for the Marquette Monthly. He taught English and film studies at NMU for over 30 years.