Cadillac Records (DVD, 2009)

Features Acotrs:Cedric The Entertainer,Jeffrey Wright,Eamonn Walker, Columbus Short,Beyonce Knowles,Adrien Brody.
Running Time:108 Min.
Rating:R

Cadillac Records chronicles the birth of Chicago blues and the subsequent impetus to the breakout popular recorded music in the 1950s. And, a concurrent racial and musical cross-pollination that was rock 'n roll.
Darnell gets the sounds just right, miraculously from actors making their own music. But the storytelling is another matter, a distracting weakness not helped by doing on screen explanatory damage control via voiceovers by Cedric The Entertainer, as barely realized blues musician and songwriter Willie Dixon. And as key dramatic sequences are more often than not described rather than enacted, or conveyed as over the top whining rather than emotionally compelling, the weaker, shrill narrative rhythms of the story fail to harmonize and pale in comparison to the music.

Adrien Brody is Leonard Chess in Cadillac Records, a Jewish immigrant and Chicago nightclub owner turned music promoter who was a key figure in integrating what was once known shamefully as 'race music.' A shrewd wheeler dealer businessman, Chess is unaware when he recruits struggling, uprooted Mississippi sharecropper street musician Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), that his proposed financial arrangement with this genius guitarist would be historic.
As the Chess music business expands from recording to radio and the experimental explosive sounds evolve with the addition of Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Little Walter (Columbus Short) and Etta James (Beyonce Knowles), the nation is taken by musical storm. And racial barriers seem to come tumbling down with segregated mental mindsets and government decrees lagging far behind, though not without terror and tragedy in its wake.

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