Diana Sings the Blues

PROSTITUTION, HEROIN, imprisonment, rape, unhappy love affairs: the elements of Billie Holiday's life sound like a soap-opera maker's dream and any serious film based on it would have to be handled carefully so as not to result in a tear-jerker. However, while the Berry Gordy production avoids melodrama and the extravaganza often used in filming the life of a legend, some inconsistencies exist that are so extreme as to be incongruous.

Diana Ross is the greatest incongruity of all since she, the slick singer, superstar, and immediate singing success is such a questionable choice for the leading role. In several recent interviews, she said that for a year she read about Holiday and listened only to her recordings. The product supports Ross, who offers a sensitive interpretation of Holliday which shows that she went beyond a superficial investigation of Lady Day's personality. For instance, Holliday was well know for being languid, but Ross plays her as a normally vivacious woman whose lethargy is a byproduct of an addiction to heroin. Unfortunately, while her acting should draw no complaints, the fact that she is Diana Ross intrudes into the story. This is not due to her singing (she altered her style to sound remarkably similar to Lady Day) but nonetheless, she remains Diana Ross playing a role that she never quite becomes. This is partially because she was famous before she undertook the role, unlike Barbara Streissand, (Funny Girl), who, in the beginning of her career, was considered synonymous with her part. Also, while Diana Ross changed her singing style, her physical delivery is pure Supremes. She surmounts these problems only in the early scenes where she depicts the young Holliday. In other parts of the movie, the contrast between her and Lady Day is so extreme that it is laughable. The difference between the two women is especially evident in the opening scenes where Ross portrays Holliday undergoing heroin withdrawal. The vision of the usually stylish ex-Supreme being strait-jacketed as she has hysterics is so unexpected that the audience mickers instead of sympathizing.

Sidney Furie's directing compensates somewhat for this casting problem, especially when he uses black and white photographic montage: The images tone down Ross's star quality and, without the glitter, she makes a much more realistic Holliday. They serve another purpose by presenting the valleys of the singer's career in an effective, but not banal manner. Her rigorous prison sentence is portrayed by a few still photographs accompanied by a voice-over of Ross singing "Lady Sings the Blues." No acting could have been as moving.

IN SEVERAL PLACES, the movie script borrows from fantasy and often only the excellent acting prevents the film from plummeting into absurdity: "Have you looked into the mirror lately," a whorehouse madam mockingly asks an adolescent Billie who has misinterpreted a job offer. But, in only a few short scenes, the skinny pig-tailed scrub-girl makes an unexplained Cinderella transformation into the most glamorous lady of the night on the block.

Later in the film, Billie's lover, Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams), a suave Harlem numbers-runner promises her that he will always stay with her. And he does: throughout her long concert tours, imprisonment and addiction, he remains loyal. His constancy is ironic when compared to Holliday's actual experiences. Most of his maudlin lines are delivered to a slushy background of Michel LeGrand music. This combination of irony and inappropriateness is believable only because of Williams's acting; he somehow manages to deliver his lines so that his character seems strong. This strength, however, makes Billie by contrast much weaker because the audience finds it difficult to comprehend why she repeatedly turns to drugs when she has such support.

Billie Holliday was not noted for the excellence of her voice but instead for the particular poignancy of her delivery and Lady Sings the Blues is most successful at exposing the roots of her style. "I'm not trying to get to the top. I'm just trying to get to a club downtown." Billie lightly says at the start of her career. But going to a club downtown involved more than a subway ride. She would have to be famous before she could perform in the best New York clubs and making a same for herself required extensive tours all over the country--including the South. The sequences depicting the one night stands, and encounters with racims give the movie its depth. A scene in which Ku Klux Kinsmen attack Holliday's touring bus is the most memorable. As they swirled outside the vehicle, she is reduced to importent rage. There is nothing that she, a lone black woman, can do against that son of whiteness, except to distill her anger into songs. And that is the message of the movie; it is why Billie Holliday, a black lady, has to sing the black.