Five nominations including Best Original Screenplay. Much stronger than today's "America v. Billie Hallday."
What's more, "Hard to Make Up for It" is based on the biography of Billie Halledet and is more faithful to history. At that time, there was no "black life", that is, it was very pure storytelling, telling the process of Fame of Halle dai, so that people had a more intuitive understanding of the singer. Starring Diana Rose, also a singer, this film is her first film starring, but also the debut of the film, the film has not received any decent nominations, but the Grammys have received a lot.
Andra Day, the female lead of "America v. Billy Hallday", is also a singer who sings better than acting.
If you are interested in the life of the legendary singer Billy Halledai, it is recommended to watch "Difficult to Hate", and you can ignore "America v. Billy Hallday". Of course, the film made in 1972, with the current eyes to see, also has a bland feeling.
Let's talk a little bit about what kind of character Billie Halledai really is.
Billie Halledet was born in Baltimore, USA, in 1915 to an Irish-American mother who was an adult when she was born, and was confused by the confusion of her relationship who was her father. In her autobiography, she believed that her father was trumpeter Clarence Hallday, so after her debut, she used the surname "Halledai".
After Billie Halleday's mother gave birth to her, she continued to mess around, and soon became pregnant again, and has since been kicked out of the house. As a young girl, Billie lives a miserable life in the slums with her mother, who is also a child. Her mother didn't have time to take care of her, allowing her to skip class frequently. As a result, before the age of 10, he was raped and became a prostitute, charging $5 for a client. Later, with the brothel closed, she was thrown into prison with her mother.
(Billy Halledet as a young man)
After being released from prison at the age of 15, Billie Halledet tried to make a living by singing at nightclubs in Harlem, New York. She had no formal vocal training, but with a unique voice gifted by Heaven, she finally found the direction of life, and was discovered by professional music producer John Hardmond in 1933, and since then she has embarked on a formal stage and quickly became famous.
Individual efforts also need the cooperation of the big times. At this time, the United States was experiencing the impact of the economic crisis that began in 1929. The Great Recession severely impacted the development of the music market and forced a large number of popular music practitioners to lose their jobs.
People's tastes in jazz have also changed, the original carefree, heat-filled music sounds particularly noisy in the recession, and people in despair prefer to listen to soothing, dream-like music. A new jazz style known as "swing" became popular in the major nightclubs of Harlem, New York. As the name suggests, the swing music is lively and rhythmic, suitable for the listener to dance with the twisting body, just suitable for dispelling the pain and sorrow in people's hearts. (Excerpt from Zhao Laoshi's article "The Strange Fruit of God's Care")
The appearance of Billie Halledai is timely, because she has no professional training, her singing skills are insufficient, but she is better than emotion, she can integrate the feelings she has experienced into the song, and the songs she interprets are rich in narrative, very infectious, and can quickly capture the hearts of listeners.
In 1935, Billie was 20 years old. With Hammond's arrangement, she signed with Brunswick Records to record swing-style jazz. Her single "What Little Moonlight Can Do" was a blockbuster.
Since then, Billie has embarked on the fast track of development and entered the peak state in 1939-1949, becoming the premier popular singer in the United States and even the world. The first half of this phase coincided with the peak of World War II, when the war made swing jazz the most popular music of the time, and Billie gained worldwide admiration. At that time, the U.S. military played her song on the front line. Japan and Germany were originally unable to play jazz, but then they could not stop it at all, and simply banned it. The Japanese set up The Tokyo Rose Radio station to play swing music; in Germany, in 1942, swing bands were even set up in concentration camps to create a relaxed and pleasant "death environment" ("God bless the child" was specifically selected as a movie song in Schindler's List).
Of course, there were still two or three decades before Martin Luther King Jr. published I Have a Dream, and the black affirmative action movement didn't really take off until the postwar 1960s. Billie Hallede, who was black at this time, was always discriminated against because of her skin color, no matter what she achieved.
Especially in the American South, there is serious discrimination against black people. This is also evident in the Green Book. Billie Halleday, who was black and went to the South with a white band, was discriminated against and often insulted unreasonably by the audience. Meals could only be eaten in black restaurants, elevators could only be used by waiters, and other singers could sit and sing but she could only stand. In Louisiana, an audience member walked straight up to her, pointed at her nose and scolded female and ordered her to change songs. Billie is not a sage, nor a representative of civil rights, just a simple singer, in the face of this situation, she is too frightened to find the tone, can only let people help to leave the stage.
The only thing Billie could do was to fight back from the song. The most typical of these is that she sang the song "Strange Fruit". It is also one of her most iconic works. It was 1938, when the owner of a café society bar (who was a representative of the Comintern) recommended the song to her and asked her to try it out. The lyrics read:
southern trees bear strange fruit,
blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The song's lyrics criticize the problem of lynching in the United States at the time, about two black youths (actually three, the youngest surviving) in 1930 who robbed a pair of white young men who were in love and killed the boys. It was originally an ordinary criminal case, and two adult blacks were also put in jail after being arrested. But the case began to rumor that white girls had also been raped, which triggered public outrage and then riots. Eventually, two young black men were dragged out of prison and hanged in full view of the public and hung from a tree for public display. This was a typical racial discrimination issue that was put on the line, so it was composed into a song by the musician and given to Billie Halledai.
The songwriter, in "KiwiFruit", ostensibly depicts black people hanging from a tree, but alludes to the fact that the United States at that time looked like a big tree hanging black people, nourishing the country with their blood.
Billy Halledet didn't want to sing the song at first, but then she thought about her family history and decided to sing it. As a result, it exploded, becoming a hit in 1939 and fueling Billie's career climax.
Billie Halleday died in 1959 at the age of 44. Moreover, she did not have a good life in her later years, once again falling into a state of poverty, and at the time of her death, her bank deposits were only $0.7.
As mentioned above, Billie's peak period was 1939-1949. After entering 1950, her musical status quickly declined. On the one hand, it was due to the rapid rise of rock music, which replaced the original popular jazz, and on the other hand, Billie herself was addicted to drugs and spoiled herself.
At her peak, in 1947, she was imprisoned for carrying drugs. In 1949, she was imprisoned again for drug abuse, and her second imprisonment completely ruined her musical career.
"The United States v. Billy Halledai Case" is this time, about the U.S. Federal Narcotics Control Board's surveillance and pursuit of Billy's drug use.
It is said that this is a normal law enforcement incident of the US Federal Narcotics Control Bureau, and does not constitute discrimination and suppression against black people. However, "America v. Billy Hallday" is completely out of the way.
America v. Billie Halledai is based on sections about Billie Halledai in her 2014 book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by white British investigative journalist Johann Hari. The problem is that the author, John Harley, was exposed to a plagiarism scandal in 2011 and was forced to resign from his inaugural unit at the time, that is, the person has a black history of integrity. The credibility of his work is therefore greatly compromised. The authenticity of this film is therefore questionable.
In "America v. Billie Halloday", it is described that the Federal Narcotics Control Board of the United States tried to prevent Billie Halledai from singing the civil rights song "Kiwi". To this end, a black detective was sent undercover to follow Billie Halledet all the way to stop her from singing the song.
In this case, harry anslinger (Garnett Hedland), the director of the U.S. Federal Narcotics Control Board, naturally becomes a major villain, a sinister villain and a white supremacist. The director of the film believes that black music is the source of social chaos, the source of drug proliferation, and must be severely punished, and Billie Halledai is a thorn in the eye.
But in fact, in a normal society, fighting drugs is not a bad thing, but a proper meaning. In reality, Harry Anslinger took office and took charge of the government, actively enterprising, launched a huge anti-drug war, increased the punishment of drug-related acts in society, because of his effective work during his tenure, he was awarded the Kennedy President Award (shown at the end of the film), which can be said to be a good servant of the people. Moreover, Harry Anslinger had been the director of the Federal Narcotics Control Bureau since 1930, and it was his job to fight drugs, not specifically to fight Billie Hallerday.
In addition, in order to create the image of Billie Halledet's civil rights representative, the film not only blackened the U.S. Federal Narcotics Control Board and the director, but also blackened Billie's husband, Louis McKay. In the film, McKay is portrayed as a murderous man who abuses Billie from time to time, and betrays Billie for personal gain, which is a complete scumbag.
In fact, the real-life Louis McKay did not leave Billy for a long time, never left Billy in the 1950s, when her life was dismal, and officially married Billie before her death, in 1957. Being able to marry Billie in her worst years is already a very rare and valuable quality, how can it be the scumbag in the film.
Another crucial logic is that "KiwiFruit" became popular in 1939. The United States v. Billy Halledet took place between 1947 and 1949. If Harry Anslinger had deliberately cracked down on Billie to keep the song out of her in order to maintain white domination, he would have done so in 1939, and there was no need to wait until 1947 to start the case. In 1930, the director was already in power, and in 1939, Billie had just entered her peak, and it was not too late to hit her at this time. The logic in the film is really unexplainable.
In order to pursue the "black life", in order to make politically correct and award-winning films, American artists also do everything to the extreme. It's ridiculous!
Far away from the United States, and then looking at the United States, those bizarre things that are happening can only be laughed at by the distant observer. The so-called artists, their utilitarianism, their view of profit, their means, compared with the domestic box office as a means of choreography, is no different.
Art, to transcend the times, is still quite difficult.
Go for it.
In the end, it is worth praising Andra Day. There are very few merits in this film, but Andra Day's performance is remarkable, the only highlight, getting an Oscar nomination, not a hit, really won the award is not surprising. After all, this kind of biographical deduction is easy to win after all.
The good acting skills in the bad movie are like this.
(Image from the Internet, copyright belongs to the original author)