SXSW 2008: The Night James Brown Saved BostonBy Michael Lerman
http://blog.spout.com/2008/03/17/sxsw-2 ... ved-boston[thumb300]http://blog.spout.com/wp-content/uploads/jamesbrown.png[/thumb300]
For those of you who don’t know, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a series of race riots broke out in major cities all over America. On one night in April of 1968, James Brown put on a show at the Boston Gardens. The televised broadcast of his performance is said to have kept the streets quiet that evening, giving citizens a distraction from looting and unifying the city in peaceful memorial to one of history’s great professors of peace itself. In his new documentary for VH1, director David Leaf wanders around the happenings of that evening, retelling the story of how Brown became a savior to the people of Beantown.
It’s hard not to think of The Night James Brown Saved Boston as failing on many levels. It’s trite, pandering and not terribly informative. What could be a fascinating account of a legendary concert turns into kind of a mess when Leaf tries to grasp too much extra James Brown history within the 1 hour plus running time. Can you really blame him? He can’t really seem to make one of the most electric stage performances of all time come alive with his bland cinematic rhetoric. The pieces of the concert itself that are in there are overrun by incredibly run of the mill interviews by important figures of the time (Rev. Al Sharpton comes to mind) explaining what’s happening in the footage instead of letting it speak for itself.
Leaf then both front and back loads the film with Brown’s career before and after the event itself, making for a wishy-washy viewing experience in which we are unsure what direction the doc is going in. What little sense it does make as the lead up to the event itself (though it’s hard not to just scream, “Just get on with it”) goes away afterwards with the portrayals of the supposed aftermath that really just wanders off with Brown down another path as that fateful night in Boston fades away in the distance.
The film’s one saving grace is the pseudo-insistence on portraying the reality of Brown’s greed. Many stories surface about how he didn’t specifically want to martyr himself for the sake of keeping riots out of Boston. Turns out, he demanded large amounts of money from the city (which, depending on who’s asked, may or may not have been paid) in compensation for the numbers he was going to lose because of the general public’s fear of traveling the streets at night. He also, apparently, demanded more money when he discovered it was going to be televised, but in retrospect plays it off as him doing a good thing.
All in all, in much the way Scorsese does in Shine a Light, this could have been summed up in a well-played intro and the real power of Brown’s performance could speak for itself. I don’t know Leaf’s distribution plans, but I suspect that this will become a DVD extra on a re-release of the concert, much as it should be.
