Amazing Grace
Concert Film | 87 Minutes | 2018 | United States
(4/4)
Director: Sydney Pollack | Producers: Joe Boyd, Alan Elliott, Chiemi Karasawa, Rob Johnson, Spike Lee, Sabrina V. Owens, Angie Seegers, Tirrell D. Whittley, Joseph Woolf | Starring: Aretha Franklin, James Cleveland, Alexander Hamilton, Southern California Community Choir, C. L. Franklin, Clara Ward, Cornell Dupree, Chuck Rainey, Bernard Purdie, Ken Lupper, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Sydney Pollack | Editor: Jeff Buchanan
At the height of her powers, Aretha Franklin went to church: to the New Temple Missionary Baptist in Los Angeles for two nights in January 1972, where she intended to return to her roots with a live recording of gospel music. The ensuing double album, Amazing Grace, would go double platinum, and it remains the best-selling record of her long and storied career. But the acclaimed film director Sydney Pollack – already an Oscar nominee, who would redouble his commercial success over the next couple of years with the revisionist Western Jeremiah Johnson and the weepy romance The Way We Were – was also present over those two nights in South Central, tasked with filming Franklin’s performance for a feature production, an assignment Pollack gladly accepted upon the mention of Franklin’s name.
Pollack had actually been a late substitute for James Signorelli, a cinematographer who was about to wrap work on Super Fly with its iconic soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield. Pollack shot twenty hours of raw gospel footage, but he neglected to use clapperboards, and in post-production it proved impossible to sync the audio tracks with the print. The film lay dormant for decades in a vault at Warner Bros., before Pollack handed the footage over to the producer Alan Elliott, who began the arduous process of attempting to piece it all together for release. Finally a pared-back version of the film was ready for release in 2011, but Franklin twice sued Elliott for appropriating her likeness, and it was only in 2018 after her death that her estate acquiesced.
The result is a treat. The same roving camerawork – as it delves into the congregation or hovers over the Southern California Community Choir, always teetering in and out – and the same rapid cuts that spurned audio synchronisation make Franklin’s gospel renditions especially dynamic. The film allows us to give credit where credit’s due: to Reverend James Cleveland who features across the album, but as the complete recordings make plain also introduced Franklin and acts as the facilitator between her and the audience, essentially both bandleader and master of ceremonies across the two nights; and to the choir conductor Alexander Hamilton, the epitome of cool and the embodiment of inspiration as he cajoles the choir, physically tracing every beat. With Cleveland on piano and vocals, and Ken Lupper contributing on organ and keys, Franklin brought along the core of her band – Cornell Dupree on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard Purdie on drums – and under the guidance of producer Jerry Wexler, they rehearsed ahead of the performance for a full month.
Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, was a prominent Baptist minister who served as the pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Known as the man with the ‘million-dollar voice’, the home in Detroit where Aretha largely grew up saw a slew of famous visitors including Cleveland, the gospel star Clara Ward, and longtime Caravans members Albertina Walker and Inez Andrews. C. L. Franklin and Clara Ward are in attendance on the second night of proceedings, watching on from the front row, and towards the end of the set C. L. stands to pay tribute to his daughter, noting the influences of Ward and Mahalia Jackson and reminiscing on how Aretha and Cleveland would sing together in her youth, while praising his daughter for her synthesis of the sacred and the secular. His speech offers an historical frame for the night’s performance, and a personal touch while Aretha remains in fixed communion with the songs.
She cuts a demure and determinedly focused figure across much of the two nights, the occasional smile and reciprocation with the choir never masking the fact that she’s here to work. We see her entering the building in furs, and in rehearsal wearing gold chains with a red jacket resting over her shoulders, but on the first night in a loose-fitting, sequinned white gown, she looks positively cherubic. Modulating the line across spirituals, gospel traditionals, and the odd secular song, after the choir kicks things off with a staggered version of ‘On Our Way’, Aretha opens with a restrained and spacious, beatific take on ‘Wholy Holy’, the song released only several months earlier as the penultimate track of What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye.
Picking up the tempo through ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ and ‘How I Got Over’, which cuts rehearsal footage in with the final track, ‘Precious Memories’ comes loose and wet, not least because it’s evidently hot as hell in the church and by this point Reverend Cleveland is dripping with sweat, with Aretha not too far behind: between songs he’s impressed at how quickly they manage to bring her a cup of water. There’s a beautifully-formed, propulsive medley bringing together ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ with the Carole King song ‘You’ve Got a Friend’, before ‘Amazing Grace’ closes the first night in an abundance of rapturous cheers and melisma.
The second night is star-filled and fuelled with more call-and-response between Aretha, Cleveland, and his Southern California Community Choir. Beyond Clara Ward and C. L. Franklin, who get honoured after the first song and come down to take pride of place, Mick Jagger is an attendance loitering towards the back row, with a more subdued Charlie Watts trailing in his wake. Aretha hardly needed the rub by this point, coming off a string of hits including a run of consecutive number ones on the R&B chart, but it’s still nice to see one artist so tangibly inspired by another: Jagger, who always understood and embraced the roots of his own music, at one point leads his own little rhythm section from the rear of the church, and the gospel trills on songs like ‘Loving Cup’ and ‘Shine a Light’ from the impending Exile on Main St. owed directly to this visit.
The setlist over the two nights showed a degree of repetition, so for the second night the film version of Amazing Grace takes greater liberties in revising the order of songs. With Aretha clad in a green-and-white flowing dress, feathered and adorned with a couple of chains, there’s a driving version of ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, and after a technical hitch owing to a cup of water spilled over the electrics, Aretha restarts ‘Climbing Higher Mountains’ which climaxes with a dance-off between members of the congregation and the choir. A barnstorming rendition of ‘Old Landmark’ then precedes ‘Never Grow Old’, a sustained close to the night which Aretha punctuates with breathless, reverberating snatches of the refrain ‘So glad I got religion’.
Beyond the lively camerawork which does so much to make the film compelling, Pollack also captured some fantastic spur-of-the-moment shots, like when Reverend Cleveland takes a seat away from the congregation, evidently moved by Franklin’s rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’, or when he throws his handkerchief towards Aretha and right down the barrel of the camera lens in mock disgust as she nails another high note; when Clara Ward dances with her overly excited mother; when Jagger leads his rhythm section in hand-claps; or when a young woman holds on to the side of Cleveland’s piano, gyrating imbued with at least some of the spirit. Split screens occasionally juxtapose performance and rehearsal, front and backstage, or the Reverend and Aretha in full voice. The music of Amazing Grace is of course impeccable, but this long overdue film fills out the picture with vitality and warmth.
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