LEADBELLY

Directed by GORDON PARKS

Screenplay by ERNEST KNOY

One mean mountain of a man, Huddie Ledbetter, usually known as Leadbelly, lived rough and hard. You could hear it all in his voice and in the wonderful, raw blues that he played on his twelve-string. It is good to remember the facts seeing Leadbelly, because in the movie Huddie has been considerably sanitized.

Thanks in large part to some good period detail by Director Gordon Parks and a fine performance by Roger E. Mosley in the title role, Leadbelly at least maintains a degree of dignity and professionalism that sets it apart from such charades as Lady Sings the Blues. Parks shows a careful eye for small evocative details on ragged stretches of back-country roads in Texas and Louisiana and for the full-dress promenade on Fannin Street, the wickedest thoroughfare in Shreveport and surely the sprightliest.

The movie is based on biographical material compiled by John and Alan Lomax, who were doing folk-music research for the Library of Congress in the 1930s. Leadbelly is at some considerable pains to get its protagonist off the hook. Imprisoned twice on separate murder charges, Ledbetter sang and reminisced for the Lomaxes. Later he had little good to say about the way John Lomax set his story down. "He did not write nothing like I told him," the subject complained--although there remains a better than fair chance that these were the second thoughts of an ex-con embarrassed by his own candor. Leadbelly might have found this movie more to his liking, which is part of the problem. The screenplay puts Huddie into situations where he seems to have no choice but to kill. He emerges as a man innocent, put-upon and perennially puzzled by the cruel vicissitudes of life, who would just like to get on with his singin' and his ramblin'.

The Lomax version shows Leadbelly as both a genius and a dangerously wild creature. The violence, the bitterness and the reckless sensuality that make Leadbelly's music great can hardly be seen here for all the laundering. The music is not, as one might reasonably expect, taken from the acoustically imperfect recordings of Leadbelly himself but is performed anew by a Berkeley blues singer named HiTide Harris, accompanied by white folk-guitarist Dick Rosmini. The songs sound the way the whole movie feels: smooth, eager to please, defused.

J.C.

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