Product: Cadillac Records [Blu-ray] (2008)
Rating: 3.0
Sex, Guns, Rythmn & Blues, and Payola
Cadillac Records is the story of Chess Records opened by Leonard Chess in Chicago in the late 40's, and which quickly became a successful and influential record label (would Rock `n' Roll have existed without Chess?)The movie is narrated by Willie Dixon (Cedric The Entertainer) and he tells of Chess' (Adrian Brody) beginnings with a bar and a club on the south side of Chicago. The main players in the movies are Muddy Waters (Jeffery Wright) and Little Walter (a standout performance by Columbus Short) who are respectively the best guitar and harp players in Chicago. Chess discovers them when they crash his club and show up the band that is playing. Through the fortuitous burning down of his club Chess opens Chess Records and seeks out Waters, records him, and starts touring him in the south. Chess insures radio airplay with a little payola and Waters career takes off and so does Chess Records. When the money comes rolling in Chess pays Waters with new Cadillac's. New artists join Chess Records, Little Walter, the movie features Columbus Short singing My Babe that is such a standout it would be on MTV as a video if MTV still played videos. Willie Dixon comes on board as a writer/producer for Chess, Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), and Beyonce as Etta James.The movie is shy about the financial liberties Chess took in paying his artists. Earlier in this review I mentioned that Chess bar burned down and their seems to be the inference that Chess could have done it for the insurance money. Chess' habit also of paying his artists in Cadillac's in lieu of cash, unfortunately he never asked his artists if that's how they would like to be paid. He also kept Waters on a short leash parsing out money to him and keeping him coming back to Chess for money. Chess rationalized this convincing himself that he was "taking care" of his artists, this paternal and essentially plantation mentality had to fuel some resentment between Waters, who had come from the cotton fields of the south, and Chess. Howlin' Wolf is one of the few artists at Chess that asked for and received his money. At one point Chess offers Wolf an advance and he refuses because he knows it isn't good to "borrow against the store" a way workers were kept in debt to companies.I read some of the previous reviews which mentioned some inaccuracies and events out of order. You have to remember movies are only the highlights of a life, in two hours you don't have time to show the events without a little license taken, events get compressed, characters combined into one, fictional scenes added to illustrate unknown or disputed periods in a life. One thing I did notice though is the anachronism in the time line in the movie. The Rolling Stones (some actors who look very little like The Stones, you only guess they're The Stones by their haircuts) come to pay homage to their idols, and Chuck Berry hears The Beach Boys on the radio and a couple of scenes later we see on TV a 1950's era Elvis on the TV.All the performances of the movie are good, I just found the presentation a little to typical of the genre. I liked how the ending links the music created at Chess Records with music that has come after Rock `n' Roll and Rap, it's a nice segue from the events in the movie to the present.The bonus features are disappointing, there's some deleted scenes, and two featurettes that I almost missed. The first is the actors talking about their characters and how they fit into the history of Chess Records, and the second is about the production design of the movie.