Just watched this musical biography directed by Gordon Parks on Netflix Streaming. Having read the bio on Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter on Wikipedia, I knew some characters and events were made up or exaggerated for dramatic proposes but knowing that, I highly enjoyed this movie and Roger E. Mosley's performance as the title character even though someone else did the singing. Great period atmosphere throughout. Oh, and I also recognized some songs like "Rock Island Line" and "Cotton Fields at Home" as those taught to me when I was in elementary school. Also wanted to cite fine supporting turns by Madge Sinclair as the brothel madam Miss Eula and Art Evans as fellow musician Blind Lemon Jefferson. So on that note, I highly recommend Leadbelly.
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balformatted17 September 2003Leadbelly isn't a great movie, but it does a good job of conveying a sense of the man, and the lead performance is very strong.
Director Parks doesn't quite carry off the sense of how alien a world the old segregated South was, and the movie has a bit too much of a this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened quality to it, rather than shaping Leadbelly's story to make a great movie.
But overall the movie is engaging, entertaining, and educational, and you get a sense of why he was such an influence on today's music. It's an enormous shame that the Weavers never credited him in "Wasn't that a time." -
As a music video this film works well with generous amounts of the title character's songs and a guitar picking contest that is the equal of "Deliverance", in my humble. However as a serious biopic of a musician of genius it falls considerably short mostly due to Ernest Kinoy's rather superficial script, which is long on knife fighting and tomcatting around in bordellos and "Cool Hand Luke" wannabe chain gang stuff but alarmingly thin on why Leadbelly became a blues singer instead of, say, a farmer or a pimp or why many of his most famous songs, like 'Goodnight Irene" and "Midnight Special", seem to have as much folk influence as blues. So enjoy the concert but if you want to know more about this important figure in American culture you'll have to do some reading. C plus.
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dfloro24 November 2021If all you knew of Roger E. Mosley was as Tom Selleck's chopper pilot sidekick, T. C., on '80s TV's "Magnum, P. I.," then it may come as a surprise how good he is playing the title role in this fictionalized story of the legendary bluesman Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Leadbelly, directed by Gordon Parks. Covering a span of more than 20 years, from his 20s to 40s, the master songwriter and guitarist hones his craft while serving prison sentences slaving away on Southern chain gangs. He's even pardoned by an outgoing Governor, largely because of his popular musicianship, but as he tries to make his way back to his ancestral home, he is still not able to be completely free of the painful chains that have bound him. Some fine acting by several of the leads, and Mosley adds much of his own vocals (with the only slightly less legendary Brownie McGhee, who had played with Leadbelly in the 1940s, adding guitar), but it's equally worth noting that most Southern whites are depicted as racist, one-dimensional morons (not that that's unfair, necessarily; it's not *their* story, and therefore they are only notable for their incessant and relentless cruelty). I couldn't decide between 7 or 8 stars out of 10, and the lower number reflects the failings of the studio more than the film. (Hollywood still could barely conceive of a serious dramatic movie cast populated predominantly with people of color, but equally appealing to mostly a Caucasian moviegoing audience, despite it having witnessed the success of "Sounder" just 2-3 years earlier.) Oh well; at least, in a post Marvel's "Black Panther" world, that thinking no longer predominates.
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aahalai23 February 2000Not only was this one of the most insightful biographical films I have ever seen, it was also a most poignant and revealing documentation of turn of the century social attitudes. This is truly a great film that I especially recommend to blues and rock and roll afficiandoes. Leadbelly in my opinion played a major part in the history of music and this movie plays a significant part towards documenting his story.
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For it's two hour run time, the film is an insightful if somewhat one-dimensional look at blues musician Huddie Leadbetter, nicely portrayed by Roger E. Mosley. I can't imagine what type of reception the picture would have attracted back in 1976, I was around back then and have never heard of the film until running across it on one of the cable channels recently. I would have been interested in seeing how Leadbelly's career progressed following the events portrayed in the picture since most of the story had to do with him getting in and out of prison for serious crimes, and there certainly had to be more to the man than what was revealed here. Aside from that, a nice draw for the movie is the music, a series of blues numbers interspersed throughout that add poignancy to the singer's troubled life. A few you'll recognize, like 'Cotton Fields Back Home', 'Rock Island Line' and 'Midnight Special', though the story doesn't reveal if Leadbelly originated any of the songs or merely sang them. Stuff like that I'd like to know.
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angelynx-21 July 2000Marvellously atmospheric piece, loaded with great music, full of the air and vibe of blues legend Leadbelly's life and times. Color, energy, wonderful cinematography with washed-out colors suggesting heat and years of sun; truly great soundtrack. Every blues and rock fan should see it.
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It's a biopic of the blues and folk musician Lead Belly. It alternates between Texas and Louisiana and covers Lead Belly's life from about 1910 to 1933.
The film opens with Lead Belly (Roger E. Mosley) in prison in 1933, where John (James Brodhead) and Alan Lomax visit him. They are recording African American folk music, including early blues, for the Library of Congress. The film then flashes back to Lead Belly's early 20s when he still lived at home with his father, Wes (Paul Benjamin), and mother, Sally (Lynn Hamilton), and his wife, Lethe (Rhetta Greene).
Lead Belly then moves to the redlight district of Shreveport, Louisiana, where he plays at whorehouses and encounters Miss Eula (Madge Sinclair) and singer Blind Lemon (Art Evans). "Leadbelly" follows his life, including two murders--one of a friend in the early 1910s and a later one around 1925, soon after his release from a Texas prison. There is much time given to his prison experiences. The movie concludes with his 1933 encounter with Thomas Lomax.
The movie is straightforward, but Lead Belly's music, dubbed by Hi Tide Harris, holds it together. Harris does an excellent job. The "Leadbelly" dialogue is blunt, reflecting the racial understandings of the day. The cinematography struck me as only OK, and some of the acting, particularly by secondary characters, seemed stiff. -
iguanagal11 June 2006Truly outstanding performance by Roger Mosely as Leadbelly. A must-see for any music or blues fan. The film takes you back in time, shows the pain, suffering and hardship of the American Black experience, and the music that evolved from that suffering. Most interesting is the explanation for how Leadbelly got his nickname. The film is true to life and captures your attention right from the start - taking you right into Leadbelly's world - one not only filled with very hard times, but the best of American blues roots music. An outstanding biography with excellent acting, GREAT music - an all-in-all unforgettable biography.
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In this biodrama, director Gordon Parks certainly evokes where Lead Belly came from, and the difficult life that fueled his folk/blues music. The poverty, whorehouses, brawls that would lead to murder, and multiple prison sentences are all shown, and this is not a glamorized account by any means. While there are some moments that were fictionalized, most of what's shown is accurate to his life, at least up until 1934. The performances are sometimes uneven but the feeling of the rural south comes through, with occasionally very nice cinematography.
However, there were a few things that held me back from loving this film, much as I wanted to. For one thing, I wish the songs in the film were Lead Belly's own recordings, no offense to Hitide Harris, and that there had been more of them. Secondly, despite a runtime of over two hours, it feels oddly truncated at the end. I wish it had focused less on the prison time ala Cool Hand Luke and given us more of his touring and how his career evolved. Lastly, I'm not sure this film truly transported me to the 1930's as between uneven performances and the way the various characters talk and dress didn't seem quite right to me.
Lead Belly was highly influential to such a wide range of artists, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, of course, but also Johnny Cash, Van Morrison, Nirvana, etc etc so it's great to see that this film exists, and I was happy to learn about his life. The music incorporated into the soundtrack fit the events well, adding meaning to lyrics I've long been familiar with, and so seeing the film had me appreciating Lead Belly's music in new ways, which was pretty cool. -
This dramatization of the life of Leadbelly is greatly helped by having a SECOND great dalesman in the story, as his road buddy for a time, the historic recording artist BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON, played here by a sighted actor-musician, ART EVANS, in his first major role. Art has gone on to appear in a total of 85 roles in TV and the movies, according to his listing on IMDb (q.v.). Art, why don't you give IMDb a photo? Blind Lemon was a star in his day, recording "Please See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and "Matchbox Blues" among others in the late Nineteen Twenties, but died, homeless, in Chicago, one winter in the early Thirties. This movie is televised occasionally -- watch for it -- HINT: try Black History Month, February!
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cyndi_fan24730 December 2021I can't in good conscience give this a higher rating. This film was very emotional, and a journey in multiple senses. It is framed as a story within a story, with Leadbelly recounting his life through his songs and stories to renowned anthropologist and musicologist Alan Lomax, who visits him in prison to record his music.
In the movie the songs have mostly quite literal ties to what is happening on screen. A lot of the story seems to be somewhat fictionalized and is not a strictly factual account of Huddie Ledbetter's life. And though I'm unsure of how much was embellished for storytelling purposes, this doesn't bother me, and ultimately it feels like it was done effectively. There are a few particular scenes that were especially heart-wrenching, some scenes that were funny, and some were about showcasing music, and that was all extremely well done.
Where the movie really really lost me is in the last 10 minutes of the movie, when completely out of left field, the writers decide to viciously attack music historian Alan Lomax as a monstrous art thief who is completely uncaring about Leadbelly or his talent, and sees songs as "dead butterflies to be stabbed with a pin and put in a museum" (to paraphrase). Leadbelly protests his songs being inducted into the Library of Congress and says he won't let Alan Lomax "kill" his songs, which he repeats several times. And then the writers have Leadbelly climb on a figurative soap box and rant and rave against Lomax about how his songs will live and he won't let him kill them. And then it ends.
I have a serious problem with this. Why did they feel the need to portray Alan Lomax as such a bad person? He was probably the single biggest champion of Leadbelly's music and countless other folk and blues musicians who otherwise would have been swept under the rug of history. That's why he was THERE. He never had a lucrative career, and he often traveled and worked on his own dime- not for money or fame, but because he thought it was important for humanity.
He saw the brilliance in music that was often overlooked and understood why it was so important to preserve it, which is why he meticulously went around recording people like Leadbelly, so that we can still be talking about him today.
So this ending left a bitter taste in my mouth and absolutely ruined an otherwise fine film. -
riverrat-g-r6 December 2005I've seen this movie 3 times and would like to know where I can buy a copy of it, either DVD or VHS. The movie itself is great, excellent acting and script ! A job well done Hollywood ! The movie shows the highlight and lowlights of Leadbelly's life and career with pretty decent accuracy . It came across very good on the screen. See if it you ever get a chance especially if you are a fan of southern blues music.
Roger Moseby carried this entire movie by himself aided by a pretty notable staff of other actors and actresses. He makes you feel like he actually was Huddie Ledbetter and that you are right there witnessing the events that unfold.
Again I ask, please let me know where and if I can buy either a VHS or DVD of Leadbelly and many thanks ! -
rflack18 November 2001I chanced seeing this documentary about a year or so ago purely by accident and found it to be an extraordinary piece of biographical work on the life of Huddie Ledbetter. The music was really well done and Roger Mosby did a superb job of playing the key role of Ledbetter. I was aware that Huddie Ledbetter had spent quite a bit of time in various jails or prisons and that experience had contributed to his music, but until I saw this movie I never really had a true appreciation of all he had gone through. I highly recommend this to anybody who wants to know what really happened to Huddie Ledbetter and his contributions to the development of Blues music in the United States.
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mckaymalcolm23 January 2022I love Leadbelly's music; however, this movie not only tries to portray his life but also gives us a glimpse into life for the black community in early 1900,s Deep South I don't think I've seen a movie that captures or evokes so much of the feeling of this particular time. It's breathtaking at times.
Also, if you like movies like Oh Brother and Cool Hand Luke - you're in for a treat. This is the best portrayal of chain gang life I've seen on any film. It's extremely authentic.
Overall the music is superb and the performances are good, maybe sometimes a bit frigid - but that adds to the authenticity somehow.
Highly recommended. -
I have been a fan of Rodger E Mosley after spending many years with him on Magnum PI, but generally I have been disappointed that in the movies, his true charismatic personality does not show up, such as Unlawful Entry. But in Leadbelly Roger is beautiful. I have been trying to find this movie for over one year, and was tired of being burned and disappointed, but yesterday I did find it on a free on demand channel, not on a premium channel. I did find it one eBay for about $20 which I will pay for blue rays, and $10 to $15 for standard DVD, but for a ten star..... I asked for a $16 dollar offer. All of Rock n Roll or dance music came from African Americans like Leadbelly.. The Beatles and many UK acts of The British Invasion were also interested in this older style of music, as well as our Rock N Roll White performers that developed into Rock Pop, and later Progressive Rock.
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chungjose28 January 2023So we saw the first half of his life? The hard part? The suffering? The injustices?
But we didn't get to see the second half of his life? The successes? The acclaim?
A simple musical montage (which I usually hate) would have gone a long way.
They could have even run actual footage of Leadbelly over the closing credits.
Instead all we got was a short title card.
If one had no knowledge of. Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter going into this movie, one would leave with far, far from a complete picture.
Also, at least a line or two on a title card about Blind Lemon Jefferson seems appropriate.
One would be better off getting a CD from the library, reading the liner notes, and listening to the actual Ledbelly's music. -
This is an important movie for a number of reasons. It is a must-see for every guitarist and blues fan. It is a movie for anyone who cares about the roots of rock music. Finally, it is a reminder of just how horrific racism and bigotry were in the south in those days. Also, every 'son of the south' (and daughter) should be encouraged to watch this film, because these attitudes, in the north but especially in the south still persist, sadly.
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johniacobucci26 April 2021Not only have I never seen this movie, I never knew this film even existed. This movie deserves better than a forgotten title in a pile of celluloid. It is an important movie and should be seen.
Roger Moseby gives a great performance. Gordon Park's direction is flawless, weaving the music of Leadbelly to introduce and exit scenes. The pictures Parks created are stunning. I cannot believe it took me 45 years to discover this film. . -
mark.waltz6 February 2022Nothing stops Lead Belly from singing his songs, not even the sad sad situation see faces in his travels through life. Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, as played by Roger E. Mosely, has to deal with lots of obstacles as he travels the country, from his time working in a brothel to jail time to relationships with various women, all along trying to maintain his dignity and integrity. Mosely creates a very complex character, and he is surrounded by a cast of popular black character actors including such familiar faces as Madge Sinclair, Lynn Hamilton and Paul Benjamin. Of course, along the way he has to deal with excessive racism, but eventually find success, putting his songs down on record and creating unforgettable legend.
With his songs both in the background and song as part of life entertainment, Leadbelly's story is a very interesting one, a sad account of times gone by, called mostly As anecdotes rather than a full linear story, but here it works. This is one of the few mostly all black movies that is more mainstream and not part of the blaxploitation genre of the 70's, beautiful and sad, often funny, and dealing with very well-developed characters as opposed to cliches. It's a shame that this film is not better known, and it's a great part for Mosely to sink his talented acting bones into. I was surprised by how many of these songs I had actually heard before not having known much about him. -
SnoopyStyle27 November 2021This is a biopic of Huddie Ledbetter (Roger E. Mosley) or better known as legendary folk singer Leadbelly. It jumps around in his troubled life as he deals with easy racism, racism racism, and constant run-ins with the law. It's a life of self-destruction and destruction by the system. It's also a story of perseverance and hope.
Gordon Parks already has quite a filmography by this point and he puts all his skills to work. Mosley is still an unknown before Magnum. Leadbelly is a legend but I actually know very little about his troubled life. It is very fascinating. This has great music. My only issue with this is that they seem to have not used Leadbelly's actual recordings. This movie needs his actual voice even if the recordings are old and scratchy. -
he8829 December 2020Prior to the movie I think I probably heard his music as played by others, but never him himself. The music in the movie is very good. My one concern is that it has a studio sound. As a period piece it should have had more of a live sound to it...otherwise I did learn a lot about him in this movie. My one complaint was there was no Epilogue at the end to let you know how some things turned out