The Blues Brothers

The Blues Brothers (1980) is about a man out of prison reassembling his old band with his brother, and they do it to save an orphanage. The orphanage where Jake and Elwood grew up owes tax. They need five thousand dollars. They decide to get the band back together and play. Along the way they collect the police, the Illinois Nazis, a country band and an armed woman. It is as much a music documentary as a comedy. Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and John Lee Hooker perform their own numbers. Most of those names were sliding out of view at the time and the film revived their careers. The chases set a record; the number of vehicles destroyed had not been seen before. One sequence was shot inside an actual closed shopping mall. The budget kept overrunning and the production was chaotic; the life John Belushi led through the shoot became legend and disrupted the schedule repeatedly. It grew out of a sketch character from Saturday Night Live. John Landis directed. The humour is built largely on excess; the film has no interest in realism. It runs 133 minutes. Good for: musical comedy, blues and soul, and the eighties. Less good for: it is long, sprawling, and the plot is only a pretext.