"Shit. They still owe you money, fool."
Here's something to notice when watching The Blues Brothers for the, I dunno, tenth, fifteenth time: this has the structure of a heist movie, but instead of a heist it's a musical performance... And then a car chase... And instead of a steal it's all to keep the church open and for the orphans to be a-ok..
The opening of the movie even has one of those old heist movie tropes (or newer, e.g. Ocean's Eleven and noe Ocean's I), then the criminals get their plot in order (to get the Penguin and Curtis to not be put out on the street/missions, their *MISSION FROM GOD* will keep them on good footing). So, like in any good heist movie worth its salt, they have to assemble the crew (musicians), and then try to plot how to so what they gotta do (as sometimes happens in heist flicks, something goes wrong and it gets the spidey-senses tingling, and here it's going to Bob's Country Bunker).
What all of this is I'm trying to say is that The Blues Brothers has this structure so that it doesnt have to be exactly *about* that. Saving the orphanage? Thats the plot of the Three Stooges *video game* for Nintendo!
No. The reason to keep coming back to this movie - which I was extremely fortunate to not only see on 35mm at the Drafthiuse but on a print that hadn't aged a day - is because of three reasons: Belushi and Aykroyd are loaded with attitude and could ve like weird superheroes from some forgotten underground comic book, just perfect off each other and their personalities are defined just enough that the actors sink their teeth in (but in their way, sometimes, subtly); the musical scenes - and make no mistake, this IS a full-bodied, unadulterated classic musical first, comedy, action, crime thriller all absolutely spectacular; and the car chases are only one-upped by the insane finale with the cops and army and nearly everyone (all missing are the ninjas).
Landis, working with Aykroyd from their script, has such a propulsive narrative but everything works because of the joy anf exuberance in his direction. This should be too nutty to work: James Brown is the Reverend who leads his choir and church (including, wait, a young Chaka Khan?!) and gets Joliet Jake to see the light; to avoid capture, the brothers on their first absconding from the cops go through a mall...
All of it, and we are still on their side despite being total criminals here; the Illinois Nazis coming into the mix which, what else can you say except Henry Gibson; Carrie Fisher taking the ex girlfriend route to Wile E Coyote lengths (though of course since it's Fisher we arent laughing at her expense for a single second). All of this is successgul because Landis has a great grasp of making this world off kilter and kind if deranged.
Would ALL of these cops be after these two guys over some, you know, random mall car hijinks? Why carp? Landis has the best attitude for this, which is to push everything so far that the joke really becomes about how far the excess is going. In that sense Landis is channeling the same anarchic comic action spirit as another Belushi/Aykroyd film (among the smaller reasons Belushis death was so sad was denying the world this pairing over the decades) - Spielberg's 1941.
Only here I think that Landis got to have his cake and eat it; Spielberg lamented that he should have or could have made 1941 as a musical and it would have been better off. Though the songs only sometimes have to do with the plot, everything in the story gets so heightened that people cant help but sing. Seeing it again I can say that Aretha Franklin's "Think" will always stand the test of time, and while I'll always lovd Cab Valloways "Minnie the Moocher," his pertormance in the theatrical cut is a little too brief (a longer directors cut, which is mostly how I've seen the film, includes more of that among other good lines cut and whole scene excised).
This is mayhem and chaos, but the kind that is anchored by the (good) self consciously styled leads and the multitudes of set pieces and memorable lines. There are just too many great musical legends but balanced by character actors like Gibson and Charles Napier and of course John Candy in one of his first roles.
By the time the credits roll you nay feel full, too full, but I dont mind that; this is for me what a lot of moviegoers get out of Michael Bay, only done right. It's spectacle, it's rude and clever comedy (not really too crude though; if it weren't for the curse words im sure this would be a family movie classic) and a gigantic vision of a Chicago that opens on the dawn time factories and mills and ends on Belushi belting out "Jailhouse Rock."
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