Driving Mr Shirley

Rating: 7/10 (20 May 2019)

For my sins I had never heard of black musician Don Shirley before this film dramatisation of his purposeful 1962 tour of the southern states of America with his two accompanying white musicians. To drive him around the land of Jim Crow, Shirley hires a tough, barely literate but mob-connected Italian bouncer Tony Lip, late of New York's Copacabana Club, who is temporarily out of work when the famous night club closes for repairs and so is looking for work in the run-up to Christmas.
What follows is a combination road-trip, buddy-buddy, civil rights revisionist feature which if it too often falls into cliche and sentimentalism, nonetheless delivers an upbeat, feel-good movie, as these two polar opposites, one impeccably spoken and dressed, the other guttural and slobbish unsurprisingly rub off on each other changing their perceptions of their own places in society and basically confirming the old truism that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
To be fair, I was almost counting off the stock situations Shirley would blithely walk into on the road, such as an encounter where he seems bemused at the sight of poor black sharecroppers working in the field, the inevitable injurious run-ins with racist Southern citizens in a bar, redneck Southern cops keen to put him down for being "uppity" with them and even the in-bred bigoted attitudes at the very night-spot he's been hired to play. Luckily Big Tony is on hand every time to rescue him with a mixture of brawn and bluff so that by the end, the ice-cool Shirley's reserve and distance duly breaks down and the hot-headed Bronx-bruiser has come to admire the bravery and musicianship of his passenger.
Sure some of the situations seemed contrived, like the cultured Shirley letting his hair down with an R 'n' B group at a road-side bar or the Capra-corn-type Christmas scene at the end but there were compensatory scenes elsewhere like when Tony mis-remembers the title of one of his new boss's celebrated. albums or when the erudite Shirley helps Tony to write his letters home.
I very much enjoyed the acting of the two leads and the authentic settings depicted of early 60's America and even if this story based on true events (at least according to the film's introductory titles) was a little too sugar-coated, I must admit I enjoyed the ride with these two larger than life characters.