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‘SUMMER OF SOUL’ OFFERS MORE THAN JUST GREAT MUSIC

There are concert films, and then there is Summer of Soul (…or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), a knockout of a movie featuring precious performance footage that hasn’t been seen since it was shot in 1969. Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, has taken great raw material and shaped it into a memorable documentary that offers entertainment and food for thought at the same time.

We see Stevie Wonder at his best on stage, but we also hear him look back at this time as a crossroads in his career. His record label didn’t want him to tackle controversial subject matter, but current events weighed heavily on his mind. Ultimately he chose not to play it safe.

Reporter Charlayne Hunter Gault recalls that 1969 marked the death of the word “Negro,” at least in The New York Times, where she wrote an angry memo to her boss about adopting the word “black.” Editor Abe Rosenthal agreed with her and it marked a transition: people adopted the phrase “Black pride,” let their hair go natural and wore dashikis. 

Seen from this vantage point, when the air is filled with talk of inclusion and representation, Summer of Soul captures a moment in time when a Harlem concert series welcomed the white, liberal mayor of New York City, John V. Lindsay and programmed a wide variety of performers like Mongo Santamaria, Ray Baretto, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone—even Moms Mabley and ventriloquist Willie Tyler and Lester. It’s equally valuable to hear from folks who attended this outdoor concert series, and others who have their own perspective on what it signified, like Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father Luis.

The summer of 1969 represented different things to different folks, as this film reminds us. Black people had no emotional stake in the moon landing; they were more concerned about issues they faced every day, including drugs, crime, and the abandonment of once-thriving neighborhoods like Harlem.


It’s touching to watch Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. watch footage of themselves as part of The 5th Dimension, more than fifty years ago, and explain what it meant for them to be cheered by a crowd in Harlem, because they were often criticized for not being “black enough.”

First-time filmmaker Thompson has a refreshingly light touch; he never uses a sledgehammer to get his points across. As someone who lived through that summer I found Summer of Soul both nostalgic and relevant…certainly one of the best films to be released this summer.

Summer of Soul is now playing in theaters and on Hulu.

Leonard Maltin is one of the world’s most respected film critics and historians. He is best known for his widely-used reference work Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and its companion volume Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, now in its third edition, as well as his thirty-year run on television’s Entertainment Tonight. He teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and appears regularly on Reelz Channel and Turner Classic Movies. His books include The 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, The Great Movie Comedians, The Disney Films, The Art of the Cinematographer, Movie Comedy Teams, The Great American Broadcast, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia. He served two terms as President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, is a voting member of the National Film Registry, and was appointed by the Librarian of Congress to sit on the Board of Directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation. He hosted and co-produced the popular Walt Disney Treasures DVD series and has appeared on innumerable television programs and documentaries. He has been the recipient of awards from the American Society of Cinematographers, the Telluride Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and San Diego’s Comic-Con International. Perhaps the pinnacle of his career was his appearance in a now-classic episode of South Park. (Or was it Carmela consulting his Movie Guide on an episode of The Sopranos?) He holds court at leonardmaltin.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook; you can also listen to him on his weekly podcast: Maltin on Movies. — [Artwork by Drew Friedman]

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