The Blues Brothers at 40: a manic musical romp that still sings today
One of the longstanding hallmarks of a John Landis production are cameos from other film directors, which explains the fun incongruity of Jonathan Demme and David Cronenberg passing through Into the Night or the highbrow/ lowbrow cognitive dissonance of Atom Egoyan, Gillo Pontecorvo, and CostaGavras appearing in The Stupids. But when Steven Spielberg turns up as the Cook county tax accessor near the end of Landis’ blowout comedy The Blues Brothers, it feels less like a hat-tip than a statement.
Running hot off the success of his 1978 frathouse romp Animal House,
Landis was handed the keys to the studio kingdom and seized the opportunity to make the biggest, loudest commercial juggernaut that Hollywood had seen since It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The one serious wrinkle is that his star, John Belushi, had already attempted a big, loud commercial juggernaut the year before in Spielberg’s 1941 and it was widely perceived as a disappointment. Spielberg’s cameo in The Blues Brothers may be a friendly passing-of-the-torch, but Landis was also trying to raise the bar. By the time his heroes reach Spielberg in the Daley Center in Chicago, over 100 cars have been totaled, and the entire Chicago police force, the Illinois national guard, a uniformed phalanx of Nazis, and a country and western outfit are in hot pursuit. Landis was determined not to be out-indulged.
As Landis and company decamped
for Chicago and its suburbs, and proceeded to set fire to Universal Pictures’ money – on top of everything else, cocaine practically had its own trailer – The Blues Brothers looked like Heaven’s Gate for the new blockbuster era, leaving the 70s auteur renaissance choking on great plumes of car exhaust. Landis was more a showman than an artist, but the maximalist zeal of the film is still hard to resist 40 years later, even as an exhausting bigness has long since become the norm in studio summer comedies. The Blues Brothers is a Saturday Night Live sketch, a Looney Tunes cartoon, a demolition derby and an R&B musical revue all rolled into one, and it works you over by force.
Already familiar to Americans from SNL and their double-platinum debut record Briefcase Full of Blues, which consisted entirely of blues and soul covers, “Joliet” Jake (Belushi) and his brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) are not like the popular sketch characters who would litter so many thinly conceived screen comedies years later. They had a backstory and a get-up – black suit jackets and pants, thin black neck ties over white shirts, black Fedoras and sunglasses – but other than some silly dance choreography and a little attitude, they weren’t turning out jokes or laboring to be funny all the time. In The Blues Brothers, they’re more like the eye of the hurricane, the deadpan center of an unholy maelstrom of activity that swirls around them. There’s never a point where they’re panicked about the overwhelming forces aligned against them: Elwood says they’re on “a mission from God”, but in this world, they’re Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner, almost serenely untouchable.
Working from an Aykroyd script that he winnowed down from a novelistic 300-plus page original draft, Landis follows the Blues brothers on a simple quest to save the Catholic orphanage where they were raised. All they have to do is raise the $5,000 owed in property taxes, but the head nun forbids the newly sprung Jake from risking another armed robbery rap, so their only other option is to reunite the members of their R&B outfit and play one big show. From the skeletal bones of that plot, The Blues Brothers can accumulate musical numbers and outsized action sequences like pit stops in a road movie. Between the orphanage on one end of the film and the Palace Hotel show at the other, the film can take all the detours it pleases.
As a band, The Blues Brothers were a mediocre act of cultural appropriation, but as a film, The Blues Brothers has the humility to defer to a who’s-who of black musical superstars: James Brown as the baptist preacher whose performance inspires Jake’s religious epiphany; Ray Charles as a music-store owner playing Shake a Tail Feather; Cab Calloway, as an old friend and father-figure to the Blues, warming up the crowd with Minnie the Moocher, and Aretha Franklin lighting up a soul food diner with a performance of Think. There’s a reason why Landis was chosen to direct Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. He showed a great facility for doing song-and-dance choreography on a large stage while handling other genre elements at the same time.
Outside of the performance sequences, The Blues Brothers is about choreographed destruction, a ballet of tumbling cop cars and huge explosions and a rampaging of Chicago landmarks that the city wouldn’t see again until Transformers: Dark of the Moon. In a running bit, Carrie Fisher does her best Wile E Coyote, assaulting the boys with a rocket launcher, a remote-controlled bomb, a flame-thrower and finally a machine gun – a whole feckless arsenal of Acme products. (Jake has it coming, frankly.) When it comes time for the head Nazi (Henry Gibson) to meet his maker, his car doesn’t merely flop over the end of half-constructed overpass, but gets dropped from the heavens. (A helicopter reportedly dropped a Ford Pinto from 1,200ft just to achieve the intended effect.) Here’s a film that stages a chase sequence in an actual shopping mall in the first act because it intends to top itself with the finale of even more consequential wreckage.
There’s nothing subtle about any of this. The Blues Brothers isn’t a film of hidden layers or grace notes, but a nitrous-charged streamroller blasting a La Cucaracha car horn as it barrels down the road. As it happens, it’s rare that the bigger-is-better model works for comedies – it didn’t work for 1941 and it didn’t even work for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, though both of those films are fitfully inspired. But Landis, Belushi, Aykroyd, and their murderer’s row of musicians, stuntpersons, and supporting players have made a film about putting on a big show by staging one themselves. Resistance is futile.