The Right Stuff has been a landmark movie in a lot of careers. It announces Kaufman’s arrival in the ranks of major directors. It contains uniformly interesting performances by a whole list of unknown or little-known actors, including Ed Harris (Glenn), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Fred Ward (Grissom), and Dennis Quaid (Cooper). It confirms the strong and sometimes almost mystical screen presence of playwright Sam Shepard, who played Yeager. And it joins a short list of recent American movies that might be called experimental epics: movies that have an ambitious reach through time and subject matter, that spend freely for locations or special effects, but that consider each scene as intently as an art film. The Right Stuff goes on that list with The Godfather, Nashville, Apocalypse Now, and maybe Patton and Close Encounters. It’s a great film.
Say Amen, Somebody
G, 100 m., 1983
Featuring Willie May Ford Smith, Thomas A. Dorsey, Sallie Martin, the Barrett Sisters, Edward and Edgar O’Neal, and Zella Jackson Price. Directed by George Nierenberg and produced by George and Karen Nierenberg.
Say Amen, Somebody is one of the most joyful movies I’ve ever seen. It is also one of the best musicals and one of the most interesting documentaries. And it’s a terrific good time. The movie is about gospel music, and it’s filled with gospel music. It’s sung by some of the pioneers of modern gospel, who are now in their seventies and eighties, and it’s sung by some of the rising younger stars, and it’s sung by choirs of kids. It’s sung in churches and around the dining room table; with orchestras and a capella; by an old man named Thomas A. Dorsey in front of thousands of people; and by Dorsey standing all by himself in his own backyard. The music in Say Amen, Somebody is as exciting and uplifting as any music I’ve ever heard on film.
The people in this movie are something, too. The filmmaker, a young New Yorker named George T. Nierenberg, starts by introducing us to two pioneers of modern gospeclass="underline" Mother Willie May Ford Smith, who is seventy-nine, and Professor Dorsey, who is eighty-three. She was one of the first gospel soloists; he is known as the Father of Gospel Music. The film opens at tributes to the two of them—Mother Smith in a St. Louis church, Dorsey at a Houston convention—and then Nierenberg cuts back and forth between their memories, their families, their music, and the music sung in tribute to them by younger performers.
That keeps the movie from seeming too much like the wrong kind of documentary—the kind that feels like an educational film and is filled with boring lists of dates and places. Say Amen, Somebody never stops moving, and even the dates and places are open to controversy (there’s a hilarious sequence in which Dorsey and Mother Smith disagree very pointedly over exactly which of them convened the first gospel convention).
What’s amazing in all of the musical sequences is the quality of the sound. A lot of documentaries use “available sound,” picked up by microphones more appropriate for the television news. This movie’s concerts are miked by up to eight microphones, and the Dolby system is used to produce full stereo sound that really rocks. Run it through your stereo speakers, and play it loud.
Willie May Ford Smith comes across in this movie as an extraordinary woman, spiritual, filled with love and power. Dorsey and his longtime business manager, Sallie Martin, come across at first as a little crusty, but then there’s a remarkable scene where they sing along, softly, with one of Dorsey’s old records. By the end of the film, when the ailing Dorsey insists on walking under his own steam to the front of the gospel convention in Houston, and leading the delegates in a hymn, we have come to see his strength and humanity. Just in case Smith and Dorsey seem too noble, the film uses a lot of mighty soul music as a counterpoint, particularly in the scenes shot during a tribute to Mother Smith at a St. Louis Baptist church. We see Delois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters, a Chicago-based trio who have enormous musical energy; the O’Neal Twins, Edward and Edgar, whose “Jesus Dropped the Charges” is a showstopper; Zella Jackson Price, a younger singer who turns to Mother Smith for advice; the Interfaith Choir; and lots of other singers.
Say Amen, Somebody is the kind of movie that isn’t made very often, because it takes an unusual combination of skills. The filmmaker has to be able to identify and find his subjects, win their confidence, follow them around, and then also find the technical skill to really capture what makes them special. Nierenberg’s achievement here is a masterpiece of research, diligence, and direction. But his work would be meaningless if the movie didn’t convey the spirit of the people in it, and Say Amen, Somebody does that with great and mighty joy. This is a great experience.
Schindler’s List
R, 195 m., 1993
Liam Neeson (Oskar Schindler), Ben Kingsley (Itzhak Stern), Ralph Fiennes (Amon Goeth). Directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Irving Glovin, Kathleen Kennedy, Branko Lustig, Gerald R. Molen, Robert Raymond, Lew Rywin, and Spielberg. Screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the book by Thomas Keneally.
Schindler’s List is described as a film about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust supplies the field for the story, rather than the subject. The film is really two parallel character studies: one of a con man, the other of a psychopath. Oskar Schindler, who swindles the Third Reich, and Amon Goeth, who represents its pure evil, are men created by the opportunities of war.
Schindler had no success in business before or after the war, but used its cover to run factories that saved the lives of more than one thousand Jews. (Technically the factories were failures, too, but that was his plan: “If this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be very unhappy.”) Goeth was executed after the war, which he used as a cover for his homicidal pathology.
In telling their stories, Steven Spielberg found a way to approach the Holocaust, which is a subject too vast and tragic to be encompassed in any reasonable way by fiction. In the ruins of the saddest story of the century, he found not a happy ending, but at least one affirming that resistance to evil is possible and can succeed. In the face of the Nazi charnel houses, it is a statement that has to be made, or we sink into despair.
The film has been an easy target for those who find Spielberg’s approach too upbeat or “commercial,” or condemn him for converting Holocaust sources into a well-told story. But every artist must work in his medium, and the medium of film does not exist unless there is an audience between the projector and the screen. Claude Lanzmann made a more profound film about the Holocaust in Shoah, but few were willing to sit through its nine hours. Spielberg’s unique ability in his serious films has been to join artistry with popularity—to say what he wants to say in a way that millions of people want to hear.
In Schindler’s List, his brilliant achievement is the character of Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson as a man who never, until almost the end, admits to anyone what he is really doing. Schindler leaves it to “his” Jews, and particularly to his accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), to understand the unsayable: that Schindler is using his factory as a con game to cheat the Nazis of the lives of his workers. Schindler leaves it to Stern, and Spielberg leaves it to us; the movie is a rare case of a man doing the opposite of what he seems to be doing, and a director letting the audience figure it out itself.