MIFF 2008 (The Night James Brown Saved Boston)

THE NIGHT JAMES BROWN SAVED BOSTON, David Leaf, 2008

This film made me remember how much I like documentaries, but also remember how often and easily they lose their mark.

The film centers around the incidents of rioting and dissent that occurred across the nation after the assignation of Martin Luther King in 1968. With a James Brown concert scheduled the following evening in a white populated area of Boston, the film explores the machinations around the event that transformed a possible crisis into a unifying experience for the citizens of Boston. Fearing that the city would be threatened by the influx of thousands of black citizens into the city, given the riots already occurring across the nation, Boston’s mayor decides to broadcast the concert on television – an unprecedented concept that eliminates traffic not only in the district but across the entire city. While James Brown was seen to be largely marginalized in this scheme, placated by a paycheck from the mayor (which it turns out was never paid), his performance nonetheless became a chronicle of a performer at the height of his career as well as a performance rendered in tribute to the late Dr. King. Through deploying concert footage and more general archival footage of the time the film attempts to depict the centrality of James Brown as an American cultural figure in the 1960’s, as a man mediating between the races as one of the first black performers to be accepted on their own terms as both a performer and an equally vocal political advocate.

Much of the film was taken up by talking-head segments of contemporary African American political leaders and the now aged concert attendees, which were often obnoxious, and would have been better if heavily edited. Further, while I am a huge fan of archival images and the historical placement of a documentary feature in a wider milieu, the net in this film seemed cast a little wide, the associations made flipped from self evident or over-emphasized to the tenuously linked. The star attraction of the film - James Brown and the telecast of the remarkable live concert – suffered from too little screen time and would have made an interesting feature release in and of itself. An amazing documentary, I believe, is always distinguished by intuitive editing. Something tells me this feature should have left at least 30 minutes in the recycle bin.

I feel good...