![]() In Cadillac Records, Waters as well as Chess must take responsibility for not being their brother’s keeper – the brother in question being that sometime hit-maker and nonpareil harmonicat Little Walter. In either case, Martin’s approach opens up questions that reverberate through the entire cast of characters. Other sources say that Wolf’s antipathy to Waters (who brought Wolf to Chess) was more a matter of psychotic competition than identity politics. In Martin’s view, Howlin’ Wolf embodies a step forward in black manliness that rejects any dependency on a boss like Chess – and Walker puts that interpretation over with a ferocity that must be called black-comic. Unapologetic in his pursuit of the popular-art division of the American Dream, in all its materialistic splendor, Chess awarded himself and his artists, including the brilliant harpist or harmonica player Little Walter (Columbus Short) and the desperately bluesy and haunting Etta James (Beyonce Knowles), with brand-new Caddies to mark each landmark success.īanning sermons or bogus good taste from her juicy anecdotal history, Martin (whose first film was the engaging I Like It Like That) conveys both the erotic sizzle of hot new music riding up the charts and the overall sensory excitement of minorities making it in America. Thus did Chess, Waters, Berry and Freed invent rock ‘n’ roll. In the 1950s, he put Muddy Waters and then Chuck Berry on the nation’s turntables, and paid Alan Freed and other DJs to put them on the air. Adrien Brody plays Leonard Chess, the Jewish founder of Chess Records who made the Cadillac his label’s car of choice. Writer-director Darnell Martin goes for the throat of this killer subject in the scintillating Cadillac Records. In the 1950s and ’60s, American Jews and blacks had two glorious, complex and sometimes-fractious partnerships: civil rights and recording rights. Baltimore Sun eNewspaper Home Page Close Menu
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