DVDSome Came Running by Glenn Kenny

Godfather and company

By November 24, 2009January 12th, 20264 Comments

SP SCR

Twelve years after his ground­break­ing Apollo per­form­ance, 10 years after the TAMI Show, the Godfather of Soul con­tin­ues to do it to death in 1974, head­lining the Zaïre ’74 Music Festival, con­ceived as an adjunct to the “Rumble In The Jungle” Ali-Foreman rematch in that coun­try. The fight had to wait sev­er­al weeks because Foreman got a cut above his eye while spar­ring, but the con­cert could­n’t wait. Its story is told in a very cool doc­u­ment­ary, Soul Power, out now on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema. The excel­lent disc rep­res­ents, among oth­er things, a broad­en­ing of the MOC mis­sion, and is the sub­ject of today’s Foreign DVD Report, at The Auteurs’.

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4 Comments

  • Bob Turnbull says:
    November 24, 2009 at 9:58 pm

    I saw this as my first film at TIFF Last year and I lit­er­ally bounced out of the theatre to James Brown say­ing “When you’re walk­ing down the street then you can say ‘Damn right I’m some­body!’ ”. Man, I can only ima­gine how empower­ing it must’ve been for black youth in the mid-70s to hear Ali and Brown at their razor sharp best.
    The music is freak­ing amaz­ing. Who knew The Crusaders could burn the place down? And Miriam Makeba – not only does this woman exude class (when she quietly talks about not mak­ing a big deal of some lineup shuff­ling as long as it’s in the best interests of the crowd) and con­fid­ence, but my God can she sing…Her rendi­tion of “The Click Song” is a truly uplift­ing moment.
    And James bookends it with awe-inspiring stuff. I can­’t wait to see this again and I may actu­ally seek out that Masters Of Cinema release.
    Any spe­cial fea­tures? Any addi­tion­al music­al per­form­ances? ‘Cause that would seal the deal…

  • Glenn Kenny says:
    November 24, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    There’s a EPK-ish inter­view with the dir­ect­or, and about 30 minutes worth of addi­tion­al perfs.

  • Rob says:
    November 25, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    This sounds truly excel­lent. And this seals the deal: “[Hinte] was­n’t going to seek out any of the par­ti­cipants for con­tem­por­ary ret­ro­spect­ive inter­views.” I’ve almost star­ted avoid­ing all music doc­u­ment­ar­ies, because so many of them will show you 15 seconds of amaz­ing vin­tage foot­age and then cut to a bland sound bite from the per­former or a friend, asso­ci­ate, or hanger-on (I think of this as the PBS style, but see it everywhere).

  • ed says:
    November 25, 2009 at 1:10 pm

    con­ceived as an adjunct to the “Rumble In The Jungle” Ali-Foreman rematch in that country.
    This was the only Ali-Foreman fight. Not a rematch and a rematch was nev­er held.