Leadbelly (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Gordon ParksRelease Date(s)
1976 (June 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Imprint Films/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region-Free Australian Blu-ray import.]
Gordon Parks’s last feature film was Leadbelly (1976), an intriguing but mostly conventional and in many respects historically dubious biographical drama about the life of Huddie Ledbetter (1888-1949), the blues/folk singer known as Leadbelly (or, more commonly, Lead Belly). Roger E. Mosley, best remembered as T.C. Calvin on Magnum, P.I., stars.
The story opens in 1933, at Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as “Angola,” where folklorists John Lomax (James Broadhead) and his teenaged son, Alan, hope to record Leadbelly’s (Mosley) music for the Library of Congress. In the process (and in the form of flashbacks), they record and the movie audience sees Leadbelly’s life story unfold.
As a young adult, Leadbelly leaves his sharecropper parents’ farm to sing and play guitar at a brothel run by Miss Eula (Madge Sinclair) on Fannin Street in Shreveport. Following a police raid, he rides the rails and learns to play a 12-string guitar and eventually encounters Blind Lemon Jefferson (Art Evans) and the two play shows together. At one all-white party Leadbelly is threatened by the organizer and thrown into prison, but he escapes and begins a new life under an assumed name, until he’s arrested again for murdering a distant relative—in self-defense, according to the film—and sentenced to 30 years on a chain gang. His sickly father (Paul Benjamin) arranges to buy Leadbelly a new guitar to play while Leadbelly serves out his time, but will he ever be a free man again?
Parks’s first three features—The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), and Shaft’s Big Score (1972)—were singularly profitable, Shaft particularly. It only cost $500,000 to make yet earned around $13 million; more than 20 times what it cost. That’s likely why Leadbelly looks a little more expensive than those films, and how Parks was able to enlist top people like producer David Frost, composer Fred Karlin, and cinematographer Bruce Surtees (Clint Eastwood’s longtime DP). The movie itself seems to have been made on a modest budget neither cheap nor expensive—probably in the $1.5-$2 million range.
The music, well-integrated into the narrative, is great; Hitide Harris dubs Leadbelly’s singing voice well, and the soundtrack includes many Leadbelly standards, including Goodnight Irene, Rock Island Line, Midnight Special, etc. However, the screenplay by Ernest Kilroy is standard biopic material, and never succeeds in getting inside Leadbelly’s head, particularly in terms of his songwriting. The movie suggests music is merely the means for his whoring and having fun and, later, as a potential ticket out of the slammer. The film also suggests, accurately or inaccurately, that Leadbelly was a victim of circumstance and racism in every one of his criminal convictions and its story ends around 1935, prior to his international fame as a songwriter-performer.
Strapping and muscular, Roger E. Mosley could just have easily have played John Henry as Leadbelly. He gives an impressively varied, expressive, and physical performance and it was reportedly was his favorite role; it’s too bad the script lets him down a little. The film’s best scenes by far are Mosley’s with Art Evans as real-life musician Blind Lemon Jefferson. Those too few moments of them together hint at a more musically probing picture that might have been.
The film improves in its second-half, with Leadbelly spending most of that screentime in a chain gang. While reminiscent of I Was a Fugitive of a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke, among others, the systematic, cruel racism is harrowing at times; 60 years after the freeing of the slaves the Deep South really hadn’t changed much at all, and the film documents that accurately, especially in a sequence where Leadbelly encounters racist Texas Governor Pat Neff (John Henry Faulk).
Even working at a slightly higher budget level, Parks may have been rushed as the film is a little sloppy technically; a handful of shots are noticeably out-of-focus, for instance. And, despite Surtees’s involvement, visually, Leadbelly is uninteresting most of the time, with a look barely above the level of a TV-movie from that same period.
Imprint’s Region-Free Blu-ray, apparently a worldwide premiere, is a good presentation of the 1.85:1 widescreen (not ‘scope, as reported elsewhere) film. The 1080p video transfer has good color and no signs of damage or wear. I found myself fiddling with the focus here and there before determining a number of shots were simply photographed out-of-focus, as previously mentioned possibly due to a possibly rushed production, but maybe also DP Surtees was going after a gauzy look, rendering some material slightly soft-focus deliberately. The LPCM 2.0 mono is strong and supported by optional English subtitles.
There are two extra features, both featurettes running about 18 minutes apiece: Leadbelly: Reclaiming Fact from Fiction, an interview with author/filmmaker Sheila Curran Bernard; and All the Decisive Moments: Folk Heroes in the Cinema of Gordon Parks, a video essay by Daniel Kremer. As I noted in a review of an earlier black cinema title from Imprint, while these are both quite informative and interesting, the complete absence of African-American scholars draws attention to itself.
Gordon Parks’s film of Leadbelly has many interesting qualities—some excellent performances, great music, compelling history—but its rather ordinary approach to the material and visual blahness is a bit disappointing. Still, not bad.
- Stuart Galbraith IV