Screen
O'Brien, Tom
Screen UNCERTAIN VERDICT 'SILKWOOD' S ILKWOOD has fine performances hampered by an uneven screenplay. One key to both is Cher, Meryl Streep's supporting actress in the film, who almost steals...
...This is merely an example...
...two records...
...Frequent car shots, at first irritating, ultimately seem appropriate for a lifestyle of perpetual motion through industrial sunsets from one McDonald's to another, then into plant parking lots where the clank of a steel gate confLrms these workers' economic imprisonment...
...Cher's look may be guilt -- or grief...
...Not since the reissue programs of the early 1940s, when "hot" records unavailable for years found their way into the hands of a new generation of jazz fans, have the masterworks of early jazz been so numerous and so readily accessible...
...One bright spot is the portrayal of Silkwood's co-workers who become frightened that her self-appointed safety mission will force the plant's shutdown...
...The liner notes would have proclaimed that they sure don't make music like this anymore, and as for information about the recordings themselves, well, just give a listen, old timer...
...And never have reissues been compiled and annotated with such completeness and care...
...From that l~oint, together with Chef, Streep's acting unifies the film and smooths over its rough spots...
...Featured are Teddy Wilson, I..ester Young, Count Basle, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges, Buck Clayton, Buster Bailey, and many others...
...Recordings ALL THAT JAZZ SEVEN STEPS TO A LEGACY I F THERE WERE no other reason to continue to invest in LPs, the fact that they preserve a small part of our jazz legacy would be reason enough...
...the just-the-facts-approach makes for an indictment not of one industry but a whole system...
...but then maybe is the main word for this film...
...You can buy good reissues that way, but it's more fun -- and cheaper -- to acquire them piecemeal...
...Twenty years ago, for instance, a fan wishing to collect the recordings of Benny Goodman's fwst orchestra would have found little available on LP...
...one record...
...And so the movie ends, not with a bang but enigma...
...types exploiting their unrest come across as amoral...
...On the sides collected here it is an orchestra in itself...
...The movie's silence in these matters works well...
...If you own no jazz record made before 1950, if you own no jazz record at all, if indeed you have always regarded jazz as an uncongenial or tuneless music, you may wish to sample the records described below...
...It is a powerful document about a broken life and a vivid sociological portrait of lower-middle-class American workers...
...There's a moral imperative here," the D.C...
...Has she learned about morality, we wonder, or just mastered its rhetoric...
...But by 1929, when the first of these sides was recorded, something had happened that would transform jazz: Armstrong's singing caught up with his playing...
...Did Silkwood have documents proving that the Kerr-McGee plant where she worked was manufacturing dangerously unsafe equipment for nuclear reactors...
...Or does she...
...Cher's performance isn't the problem, but what could she do -- what was she supposed to do -- with scenes which hint she informed their employer that Karen Silkwood was about to report safety violations to the New York Times...
...Silkwood's pace is odd...
...To be sure, Karen Silkwood is seen as having a genuine concern for nuclear safety and a deep love of her friends...
...Where to begin...
...Here is a peerless singer's finest work, as well as some of the best small-group jazz of the late 1930s...
...Today, virtually every record Goodman made for RCA between 1935 and 1939 is available on the company's Bluebird label, packaged in eight two-record sets...
...Silkwood attempts to exploit the legend that has grown around her name, but something -- love of fairness, perhaps, or fear of lawsuits -- has led its makers to pussyfoot on all the key issues...
...we see through a glass blankly...
...She fumbles at first, wagging her hips flirtatiously all too much like a Yale Drama Student imitating Okie sass...
...The cornetist Bix Beiderbecke is present in spirit, but the sessions really belong to Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden...
...here he usually fronts an undistinguished orchestra...
...two records...
...Chef's role seems a natural, a new twist on the old clich~ of a naughty girl who has (besides plutonium lungs) a heart of gold...
...One key to both is Cher, Meryl Streep's supporting actress in the film, who almost steals the movie from her as Silkwood's housemate and fellow worker at a nuclear fuel rod assembly plant...
...To the f'dm's credit, their economic anxiety is not dismissed frivolously...
...But the film questions her accuracy and moffvation in her safety crusade, and the coda includes the autopsy report that she was taking heavy drugs -- if, that is, that is believable...
...The best values are to be found in double albums, which normally range between $8 and $11...
...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics currently reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...
...Even the Kerr-McGee plant boss, played by Bruce McGili, is not treated as a villain -- that is, insofar as the f'dm makes any definitive statements...
...The price of most domestic reissues, moreover, is about half that of newly recorded LPs...
...The documentation is accompanied by notes that bring together capsule biographies, informal interviews, and background material...
...Gems include "Handful of Keys," "E Fiat Blues," and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now...
...In the middle, it was terrifying, particularly when Streep snoops around the plant for proof of safety violations -- a new version of the gothic image of the damsel who puts herself in distress by overcuriously casing a joint...
...There's a moral imperative here," she mimics when back home...
...But the movie implies her life was directed by other passions -- almost by a passion to find a passion to unify its broken parts...
...Cher plays Dolly, an earthy, humorous, sometimes bitter-edged lesbian who shares with Silkwood a tender, confused camaraderie, periodically making gentle passes which Streep as gingerly parries...
...Given the richness of their friendship, it would be nice to know if there was a betrayal...
...Record companies, through the efforts of a few dedicated and extremely patient individuals, have for more than a decade been quietly bringing into print, in humble LP form, thousands of invaluable jazz recordings long absent from American catalogs...
...I offer no "program," no "library" of jazz as advertised by various book clubs and subscription services...
...I've selected seven reissues, all from roughly the same period, that reflect the exuberance and variety characteristic of jazz as a whole...
...But somewhere in the middle of the film Streep drawls out "for-mal-de-hyde" with genuine, down-home intonation, and seems finally to become Karen Silkwood...
...Indispensable -- as are Volumes 2 and 3 of the series (PG-32124 and PG-32127...
...Although redemption is no matter for earthly judgment, this seemed too easy, too saccharine an insinuation...
...But the film never delivers the punch it periodically promises...
...it's a quasi-documentary that winks so often a viewer doesn't know what to believe...
...The master recordings, interspersed with a few alternate takes, are presented in chronological order;, the final volume serves up a good helping of unissued sides...
...Yet the quality and scope of current reissues on LP should leave no jazz fan complaining...
...Was Silkwood murdered...
...The script, in short, hides truth behind windows...
...Nevertheless, Karen Silkwood is likable, and genuinely well portrayed by Meryl Streep, who here at least lives up to her reputation...
...But the net result is that it's aesthetically Commonweal: 146 frustrating...
...Goodman's playing, less honeyed than it would become in his trio and quartet recordings a few years later, is alive with inventiveness on tunes like "Someday Sweetheart" and "After You've Gone...
...Th~ film is a-clutter with reminders of just who these people are and how they live...
...These may be clues -- or may not be...
...two records...
...Silkwood is thus faithful to any point of view and to none...
...The courts still can't decide what happened...
...Silkwood hints as much, with looming headlights in her rearview mirror, but we get no image of the final impact, if there was any...
...Here they are...
...Who was Karen Silkwood...
...The Billie Holiday Story, Volume 1 (Columbia PG-32121...
...Maybe...
...But we can't tell...
...The original monophonic sound has been retained...
...No one is going to sink his savings into a noiseless playback system for the privilege of listening to transfers of old 78s...
...Walk into any reasonably large record store these days and you will find the jazz bins stuffed with inexpensive, superbly produced reissues covering approximately half a century...
...The first three volumes in this series (CL-851, 852, 853) team Armstrong with several important musicians, notably Earl Hines...
...lawyer tells her about safety violations -- immediately before bedding her...
...It just raises too many questions it either can't or won't answer about its heroine's activities or her enemies...
...We get no follow-ups to these hints, only Cher's somber face reflected in windows before and after the "accident" which killed her friend...
...Louis Armstrong Favorites (The Louis Armstrong Story, Volume 4) (Columbia CL-854...
...It is an excellent time to begin building a jazz collection, not the poorest reason for which is that few of the recordings I'm referring to will ever be issued on Compact Disc -- at least not while the promise of superfidelity is the primary marketing strategy...
...Indeed, Silkwood's ~ most convincing political note is not judgment of the nuclear safety issue (it evades one), but judgment of a class structure that makes industrial workers pay by their sweat for new power sources, safe or not...
...Teagarden takes the vocal on the latter and on several other tunes, singing with the same feeling for the blues that permeates his trombone playing, which can be heard to advantage on over half the cuts on the album...
...The film is thus historically cautious, or, if you will, legally safe...
...A Jazz Holiday (MCA 2-4018...
...A final word about cost is pertinent here: Volume 1 of The Billie Holiday Story is a moder9 March 1984:147...
...indeed, the lawyer and other D.C...
...During one bar of the hymn, headlights loom behind her, the f'dm cuts away, and that's that...
...But after a huge buildup of tension (especially in scenes where Streep and a friend are scrubbed down in severe, hot showers for possible contamination), the end was strangely deflating...
...This is a collection of sides made between 1928 and 1934 by groups whose personnel shifted somewhat less noticeably than the names under which they recorded: Benny Goodman & His Boys, Adrian RoUini & His Orchestra, Joe Venuti-Eddie Lung All-Star Orchestra, Red Nichols and His Five Pennies...
...Streep hints as much in a phone call before the "accident," but we never see them, and a postscript coda notes the Highway Patrol found nothing -- that is, /f we can believe them...
...Director Mike Nichols and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Alice Arien seem content to suggest that their heroine was our first environmental martyr...
...As a result, Silkwood is both moving and confusing...
...Fats Waller Piano Solos, 1929-1941 (Bluebird AXM25518...
...Was she "saved...
...Streep drives off to the Times meeting in silence, accompanied only by the bars of Amazing Grace...
...Maybe there was no other choice...
...I say quietly because virtually none of these releases is given even minimal promotion...
...The two takes of "Stardust" presented here are masterpieces of spontaneous lyricism...
...What existed would in some cases have been electronically "enhanced" for stereo by means of a technique that suggested an orchestra in a fishbowl...
...Each set's discography meticulously identifies which musicians were playing which instruments on which date...
...Was she murdered in the so-called "accident...
...On other Bluebird sets Waller's Harlem Stride piano is abetted variously by trumpet, clarinet, sax, and other instruments, and by the inimitable Waller vocals...
...The part that they do preserve is vast...
...So Karen Silkwood, who may have been "saved," may have been murdered...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
