Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady
- Episode aired Jul 31, 2001
- 57m
IMDb RATING
7.8/10
14
YOUR RATING
Photos
Bill Paterson
- Narrator
- (voice)
Billie Holiday
- Self
- (archive footage)
Lester Young
- Self
- (archive footage)
Artie Shaw
- Self
- (archive footage)
Storyline
Featured review
Good film clips and interviews enhance Billie Holiday documentary
Yesterday, April 7, 2015, marked the centennial of jazz singer Billie Holiday, so I went on YouTube to look up film clips and song recordings and immerse myself in her music to celebrate the occasion. In the course of it, I came across this film and watched it. Whether you're new to Holiday or an old fan, it's worth seeing because it compiles a lot of great film clips in one place. She didn't make a lot of film or TV appearances, so it's good to have them together like this and one can consult the complete performances or films elsewhere on YouTube. We get her songs from "Symphony in Black" and "New Orleans," along with several of her later TV appearances in the 1950s. The documentary also offers a concise biographical overview, buttressed by interviews with many people who knew her, lived with her or worked with her. We get pianists Billy Taylor and Bobby Tucker and bass player John Levy, along with other musicians whose names I didn't note. (And I wish IMDb had included a list of the film's interview subjects on this page.) We get jazz critic Nat Hentoff, singer Annie Ross and record producer George Avakian as well as close friends Yolande Bavan, William Dufty and Dufty's son, Bevan Dufty (Holiday's godson), who offer the more intimate insights and reminiscences. Jazz critic Stanley Crouch, who didn't know Holiday, tells some interesting stories nonetheless. Maya Angelou tells a poignant story of touring as a singer and encountering Holiday in the audience at one of her shows and singling her out for applause, a gesture that backfired badly. The one interviewee who has little to contribute is writer Alice Walker. I couldn't tell why she was included.
The downside of all this is how sad and depressing the telling of Holiday's story becomes. She led a hard life from early childhood on and struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction and various self-destructive impulses for most of her performing career. Her humiliating battles with institutionalized racism and ordinary everyday bigotry are painful to hear about. There are upsides to her story but the documentary doesn't go deeply enough into those. For instance, I wanted to know more about Holiday's working relationship with Barney Josephson, whose New York nightclub, Cafe Society, was designed to be the first New York club to be fully integrated, both onstage and off, and where Ms. Holiday first sang her signature song, "Strange Fruit." I wanted to know more about the genesis of that song and Holiday's relationship with its author, Abel Meeropol, but the documentary speeds a little too quickly through her greatest artistic triumphs to get to more stories of bad men, drug dependency, arrests, violent retaliation against hecklers, and other sad tales. Maybe her story simply needed a longer format to tell it. At some point, as I was watching, I realized that the best way to celebrate her life is to just listen to her singing, which I proceeded to do after the documentary was over.
The downside of all this is how sad and depressing the telling of Holiday's story becomes. She led a hard life from early childhood on and struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction and various self-destructive impulses for most of her performing career. Her humiliating battles with institutionalized racism and ordinary everyday bigotry are painful to hear about. There are upsides to her story but the documentary doesn't go deeply enough into those. For instance, I wanted to know more about Holiday's working relationship with Barney Josephson, whose New York nightclub, Cafe Society, was designed to be the first New York club to be fully integrated, both onstage and off, and where Ms. Holiday first sang her signature song, "Strange Fruit." I wanted to know more about the genesis of that song and Holiday's relationship with its author, Abel Meeropol, but the documentary speeds a little too quickly through her greatest artistic triumphs to get to more stories of bad men, drug dependency, arrests, violent retaliation against hecklers, and other sad tales. Maybe her story simply needed a longer format to tell it. At some point, as I was watching, I realized that the best way to celebrate her life is to just listen to her singing, which I proceeded to do after the documentary was over.
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- BrianDanaCamp
- Apr 7, 2015
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