by Daniel White
Despite what the movie poster proclaims, Diana Ross in Lady Sings The Blues (1972) is definitely NOT Billie Holiday. She doesn't look like her and she certainly doesn't sound like her. More important, most of the events that are portrayed in this mildly engrossing flick didn't even happen to her. Diana Ross turns in a decent performance as a famous drug-addicted jazz singer, but it sure as hell ain't Billie Holiday's life we're seeing unravel.
Directed by Sidney Furie, warning bells went off in my head with the movie's opening. NEW YORK CITY, 1936 is emblazoned across the screen as we watch a semi-conscious Holiday being dragged into a police station. Wait a minute, wasn't the blues singer only 21 in 1936? And didn't her arrest for narcotics occur over a decade later? As music appropriate for a Universal horror flick blares, the credits begin to roll and there it it is: produced by Berry Gordy. Mr. Berry and pals have fashioned a film tailored to the talents of Miss Ross. Disregarding the truth, they have manufactured a tale that has little to do with the genius that was Billie Holiday. In clothes by Bob Mackie, Ross looks fabulous and emotes satisfactorily, but this is not a movie biography; it's a film fantasy.
Concentrating primarily on a romance that never happened (at least not to the extent it's portrayed here) and Holiday's struggle with heroin, Lady Sings The Blues may serve Diana Ross well, but it does a great disservice to Billie Holiday. However, the movie managed to do something that made enduring it's almost 2 1/2 hour running time worthwhile. Immediately after this melodramatic, overwrought fakery ended, I skedaddled over to YouTube to listen to the real thing. Why settle for adequacy when brilliance is at your fingertips?
With Billy Dee Williams playing sympathetic love interest Louis Mckay and Richard Pryor as a character that never even existed, Lady Sings The Blues is currently available on YouTube.
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