The Birth of The Blues Brothers, Blues Brothers (1980). Dan Aykroyd (Elwood) has long been fond of the blues. He sang and played the harmonica. It is difficult to understand from the appearance whether a person is really playing the accordion or pretending. Aykroyd plays himself. Some of his passages sound so venerable. With his “comic” face, it doesn’t seem to add up for me. Everything is fine with his face, I think there is a “frivolous” highlight in his eyes, on occasion hidden by impenetrable glasses. The eyes of a playful kid, discordant with a black and white suit.
The Eyes of John Belushi (Jake) that the eyes of a rabid rabbit on amphetamines (Belushi himself preferred heavier stimulants). This look shines through even through glasses. Despite his build, Belushi was an athletic and agile guy, he led the football team in college. There is something about him that exudes energy and movement, contagiousness, which was transmitted to the film (however, the jumps over his head in the film were performed by understudy Jonathan Yarbrough).
Aykroyd infected him with a love of rhythm and blues. I can be glad that Belushi didn’t infect Aykroyd with a love of cocaine in return. So a scene from “Saturday Night Live” appeared, and by 1978 the band was giving solo concerts and work to retired musicians.
The Hero of Cab Calloway pronounces the now censored five-letter N-word
Aykroyd, Belushi and Landis, the director, were 30 years old at the time of filming. Do they look 30? The costumes made them men of indeterminate age, even depersonalized them a little, turning them into a continuation of the blues. It is noteworthy, and this is the merit of the screenwriter — Aykroyd, that the film is not tied to the story of a real band. You may not be aware of any Saturday night show and a real-life band. The film lives without backstories.
But whose idea introduced Carrie Fisher to John Belushi, who in turn introduced her to Dan Aykroyd? Fisher recalled how she choked once during filming, and Aykroyd saved her. And then he called me to get married. She thought, “what if I choke again?” and she agreed. It never came to the wedding.
What is a cult movie?
There is a concept of a “cult film” among cinema lovers. During the century-long history of the art of cinema, so many cult paintings have appeared that this concept has almost become the definition of the genre. What is a cult movie? First, what is a cult? From the Latin cultus ‘processing, care, culture‘ and the Latin colere ‘to cultivate, decorate‘. Hence the cult one — the one that is looked after, whose life is supported.
We are alive as long as we are remembered. This is how people commemorate the dead so that they “live” in their minds. Remember your grandmother’s stories about the departed great-grandfather. Fragments of phrases that he threw from day to day. The alcohol he consumed. The fights he got into. If you recreate a person based solely on such memories, you will get some kind of comic book villain. That’s the way human memory is —it snatches out what is often repeated, and then presents it to you in the middle of the night.
Cinema remembers everything in detail. As you saw the film forty years ago, so you will see it today. The movie is the same, but you are not. Not the kind of person who skipped physical education to kiss after school with a girl who, as it turned out, had a tight schedule for kissing.
Films are physically more conservative than painting. The paintings fade and crumble, the tape is no longer there. But if a movie is a cast that can become even more interesting with the help of technology, then how can a movie become a cult?
You know, not every elderly gentleman on this planet is stuffed into our grandfathers. The competition among grandfathers is weak. I don’t remember my own alive at all. Filmmakers try to surprise every week. “Look, I have a cooler explosion and more natural blood flow.” This car has no rearview mirrors. What happened yesterday is in the museum. More often — in the trash.
Judging by the photos and the board books, the girl is easy on the upswing.
Now imagine that you have seen a movie that belongs in the Hermitage, and it lies in the same bucket with half-eaten popcorn. Your feelings of the beholder are offended. You decide to prove to the world that this is not junk, you need to see it. That’s how you start your cult dedicated to the movie you fell in love with. Like that girl from the third desk in the first row in the sixth grade. And they were afraid to exhale in her direction so that the object of the cult would not disappear.
It is possible to identify the distinctive features of cult films:
– Cult films failed at the box office. Remember the Six-Stringed Samurai, the “Big Lebowski.”
– Cult films were technically and artistically so bad that they are already beautiful. “Room”, “Plan 9 from outer space”.
Cult films use characters and actions that are perceived as unacceptable due to the unusual or exaggeration. “Freaks”, “Kill Bill”, countless horrors of the 80s, gushing with blood.
Cult films are “heavy” – they are “slow”, complicated or absurd. “The Elephant Man,” “The Shining,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
– In short, these films are not for everyone.
And there is a movie that is so cool that it has become a cult without fitting into this framework. A musical comedy about brothers named Blues.
Main character = Brothers
Two guys, before whom the action is stopped. Even the music doesn’t sound. Only the cough of awakening industrial Chicago. The story will begin only when they are together. The two of them are a single hero. Cinema tells stories in pictures. And what does the hero do? He sacrifices his life for the common good.
So our hero, the brothers, find out that their house is being evicted from their orphanage, along with a hated nun—educator and an adored mentor living in the basement of the orphanage (funny circumstances, he and his blues seem to be closer to the devil). It is necessary to pay debts for the premises. We need to get money. They receive a “task from the Lord” and a hint from him on how to quickly collect the required amount.
This is a speed movie. Even acceleration. It begins with the silence of the industrial zone, ends with an armed chase. In between, accelerating and accelerating, as if spinning a funnel of events, dragging the viewer to death. It’s a comedy. But not clowning. The Blues Brothers are funny guys, but when it comes down to it, jokes are put aside. The heroes save the orphanage as if they were saving the world. They go ahead at any cost. And they do it. And how else with such an employer?
The Universe of Blues
The lack of time turns the handle of “cultishness” to the maximum. The action just happens. Not ten years ago, not in a galaxy far, far away. It’s like it’s happening outside your window. Only car models say that events unfold in the 1970s.
The clothes of the actors are timeless. This is how they dressed in the 1930s, this is how they dress in the 2020s. It is impossible to imagine that the action takes place in the nineteenth century, it takes place somewhere “in our days.” Perhaps it takes place in the “blues era”? Heroes and their world were born with the blues. This is the world they live in.
And in this world everything is in its place. So, in a conversation with their mentor, the characters mention Elmore James, while his “Shake your moneymaker” is playing in the background. In the scenes where the records are shown in close—up, you can see the logos of the labels that made the blues famous – Atlantic and Decca.
Attention to detail — whiskey "Night Express" in an apartment near the railway
Dead music
In the 1980s, blues music was not for sale. The film became a kind of protest against the prevailing disco. Even ray-bens became obsolete by the end of the 1970s. Today it seems to me impossible, like beer obsolescence. Classic glasses could lie on the shelf next to the pince-nez. But here are a couple of hard-boiled guys who part with glasses just to hang noodles on the ears of girlfriends.
The band “Boredom Breakers”, in which I played the double bass, once had success. It happened on the wave of mass enthusiasm from the movie “Dudes”. Then it became “cool” for the party to have a rock and roll from under the grandfather, with a double bass and pomaded hairstyles. And, until grandpa took his last breath, we lived happily ever after by the standards of useless labukhs.
The effect of the “Dudes” thirty years earlier happened to the “Brothers”. “The Blues Brothers” have refreshed the salad of the music industry. People remembered that there is a long-forgotten “musical twist”, they wanted to listen to it. And the bluesmen began to engage.
There was an interesting period in the late 1970s – early 1980s. The deadline for the onset of communism promised to Soviet youth was expiring. There was a rebirth in blues and rockabilly — a couple of generations after the rise and fall of these genres, young people became interested in them.
Was it the merit of the film? Or was the film a consequence of such sentiments? Rather, the second. Because the story of the salvation of the Catholic church orphanage was born when Landis and Aykroyd saw the demand for concerts of the Blues Brothers band, a musical and humorous performance that covered all subspecies of rhythm and blues.They don’t have songs that are similar to each other, this is a “review” (“musical review”) as it is called in the movie.
They recorded a special soundtrack for the film:
Two other lifetime albums of Belushi were live. It turns out that the soundtrack to “Brothers” is the only studio work of the band with John Belushi in the composition. Listening to their recordings separately from the picture, I noticed that the enthusiasm of a “live” performance was not enough for studio work. It seems that the soloists did not have time to get their hands on this business. This makes me a little sad, I want the band to live on, be with us, keep the fire. But they did more. 40 years ago, the band struck a spark. But today, the fire ignited by a spark has not only not gone out, a temple has been erected around the fire.
First impression and Blues affect
What I love professional critics for is their first reviews of new products. They remind me of my grandmother’s reviews. And it’s nice to remember my grandmother. Her crowning assessment: “One wrecking.” Indeed, the film is ruthless to material reserves. 103 cars shattered. For one scene, the car was dropped from a height of two kilometers. Sabotage!
The glass windows of the shopping center, a real one, prepared specifically for filming, are in pieces. This was the basis for negative criticism. Probably because it was difficult to find fault, but I really wanted to. Critics emphasized the inexperience of the young director, his desire to make “faster, bigger, more destructive.” The scale of the destruction snowballs in the course of the play, but this only enhances the comedy.
Critics didn’t like how the cameras were set up: then the angle is from below, then from above, then no matter where. Real professionals don’t do that! Landis did, and it worked! I have not seen the destruction of the screenwriter’s work, despite the fact that it was the first work of Dan Aykroyd. The scenes tell the stories of the characters without words, the highest class. For example, pay attention to the storyline of a mysterious woman. If you look at the details in the frames, say, the photos on the table, by the middle of the film it is clear that (or who?) It drives her.
$27 million was spent on production. The film grossed 57 million at the US box office. A good result in itself and even in comparison with “peers”. If you do not pay attention to the fifth “Star Wars” with its half-billion box office.
I took off my glasses, so things are really bad.
The first time I saw the movie was by accident. While searching for cartoons in the box, I came across The Blues Brothers, a family comedy on the entertainment channel. I watched them burn the elevator control buttons. And seemed to have forgotten. But decades later, seeing these shots, I even remember what I was wearing. What kind of magic is this? The desire to hang out with cool?
One day I heard John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers by sticking magic “B” “L” “U” “E””S” “B” “R” “E” “A” “K” “E” “R” on the neck of my guitar. If only this magic would still help my game. And suddenly, already at uni, I come across The Blues Brothers on cable again. What kind of hypnosis? It seems that after that I wanted to become “Mr. Amazing”, and I decided to learn to play the trumpet. Again, this “do as I do” effect!
I didn’t even think about the plot, and the movie seemed to be pulling along. And it would be fine if I was alone, then it would pass for insanity. But a couple of years later I found an ad on the web that Denis Chuenko, the guy who promoted the blues in Tyumen (Hercules in the Augean stables with ears would get into shit so as not to get involved in this truly disastrous business) decided to assemble a brass section – the last thing left to create a replica of “Blues Brothers”.
Brothers and sisters. Chicago Saints
Let’s imagine that it’s the end of the 1980s. They give me an unexpected gift — a ticket to watch any, but only one, movie of the outgoing year. What should I choose?
“The Seeker” with Al Pacino, “American Gigolo” with Richard Gere, “The Miner’s Daughter” based on Loretta Lynn‘s autobiography, “Little Charmers”, “Razor” with Michael Caine, the fifth episode of “Star Wars”, “The Shining”, “Airplane!”, the second part of “Smokey and the Bandit”, “Ordinary People”, “Elephant Man”, “Private Benjamin”, “Raging Bull”, “Flash Gordon”… Each of them, if not a box office, then a cult picture. And all in one year. Something otherworldly definitely happened around 1980.
What creates a cult? Something inexplicable, but felt? The invisible connection of people, their common cause? What makes you want to wear sunglasses without taking them off and respond with short, biting phrases? What is it? Imitation?
In the Melbourne cinema “Valhalla” in the 80s–90s on Fridays they played “The Blues Brothers”. At the same time, 30 actors played scenes from the film on stage. This was watched by 400 spectators dressed in costumes of the characters of the film. Imitation? Or the desire to be in a better, albeit fabulous, world? To invent such a world is not a matter of talent alone. We need the right moment. And another fulcrum. Then you can turn over the musical Earth.
The movie “The Blues Brothers” gives me self-confidence. Worthless, at first glance, a gift that allows you to move mountains. I’m sure he has a surprise for you, too. Enjoy watching!
