A Mission from Gahd
If you were to wake me at 3 am and ask, Who’s the star of the Blues Brothers
movie?, I’d say “It’s the Bluesmobile.” It’s 3 am in the morning now.
Illustrated and with a provocative concluding essay about Stephen Spielberg.
It’s a good book and I recommend it. At about a hundred pages covering 35+ great movies for five bucks, it’s a cost-effective antidote for the dreck that’s being made and shown on the streaming services these days. One problem that’s been bothering me the past few days, though, is that it’s missing one very important milestone in American cinema. One that’s grown steadily in relevance as we have stumbled further down the ladder of culture in terms of shared values and flat-out fun. I’m referring, of course, to The Blues Brothers, the original one and only mini-masterpiece comprising much of what used to be great about us as a people back in 1980. Here’s a trailer to remind those who saw it long ago and any who somehow happened to miss it.
More than 300 cars destroyed in the making of it.
Here’s the descriptive blurb from IMDb.com:
What’s so great about it? Written by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis, directed by Landis, it has an all-star cast unmatched by any other film in its broad representation of the American population, including even some of the good Canadians and one waif-like Brit. Take a gander: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Carrie Fisher, John Candy, Henry Gibson, Twiggy, John Lee Hooker, Paul Reubens, Kathleen Freeman, Steve Lawrence, Frank Oz, Charles Napier, John Landis, and a whole bunch of other musicians and American music. Nobody’s there to fill a diversity quota or to make a social or political point, even though Jake and Elwood are Catholic (lapsed?) orphans, and their friends in the music business are mostly black and far from rich. There’s a Nazi in the plot too, but remembering this was part of why I realized BB was presently relevant in a way you have to see to understand. The Nazis, played by Henry Gibson and uniformed walk-ons, are purely comic figures, reduced as they should be to the flat absurdity of their obsolete symbolism and insane reason for being. They are not killed by the Blues Brothers they so want to kill but by their own mad stupidity. Their eventual death is a joke, and a funny, relevant one at that in light of the angry ones who are so obsessed by Hitler right now as an epithet for their enemies while wholeheartedly embracing his darkest legacy.
Cop acceleration, cop brakes, and cop shock absorbers. Mopar!
The movie is simply about being funny and musically entertaining(!), mildly satirical but not disrespectful in its use of the Brothers’ “Mission from Gahd” as a completely understandable expression of filial piety acquired despite early privation. The Mission carried no baggage of controversy in 1980 and shouldn’t now. In fact, it’s still charming because in the 1980 context it needs no sententious explanations. It just is, like the Brothers and all their friends, good at heart but more than a little clumsy in terms of accomplishing the goal.
A lot of comedies don’t survive time on the shelf. They come to seem forced, too manufactured, dated out of the movie canon. But here everyone seems to be having a good time, and we can still have a good time with them. Notably, Aykroyd and Landis in their filmed recollections about the making of it admit that everyone got so caught up in the project that they sort of lost their heads in the production of the great chase scene that forms the movie’s climax. The budge ballooned as they shut down Chicago streets and filled them with wrecked old cop cars bought at auction. In fact, the only really sad moment in the picture is the death scene of the Brothers’ Dodge 440 Bluesmobile, which falls completely apart on the pavement after the chase has been won. On the tiop floor, we finally meet the government Jake and Elwood have labored so hard to reach. Not there to help unless and until citizens demand it. Then the police arrest our good guys and we can all go to prison for our Christian virtue. Or something like that. (Nah. It’s just a great punchline to have the last musical number behind bars…)
The best way to detect the profound change in cultural context the nation has endured from then to now is to think of all the things that would be done differently now if they could done at all and if they wouldn’t automatically be twisted into some kind of Social Justice ‘point’ with a capital P. You can find your own examples if you watch, which can do at Netflix (for free I think) or at Amazon Prime for less than $4. I’ll give you the one scene that seems funniest in this respect because the mind boggles at what today’s writers and directors would do with the ‘Rawhide’ scene in terms of pillorying the irredeemable MAGA louts who, by sheer coincidence, are happily played here by their real life counterparts.
Can’t you see the MAGA hats and the obligatory scatological name-dropping?
One thing you’ll take away from this movie for sure is a wistful memory of a time when one-liners were witty, funny, and unforgettable. My own favorite is Jake’s response to the hair-raising audition Elwood gave him of the battered old Dodge’s street performance after his ex-con brother dissed it by throwing the lighter out the window. When they came to a screeching halt after the kind of power play I remembered from my own battered 440 V-8, Jake just stared straight ahead and said, “Get the lighter fixed.”
Maybe The Blues Brothers can still do that little chore for all of us.
Just how long has it been since SNL was funny? 1980 was nearly 50 years ago.
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