The Blues Brothers Finds Rapturous Joy in the Infectious Despair of Blues and Soul Music

There are movies that you dig and then there are movies that you love so much that you devote hundreds of dollars and an entire weekend of your life to celebrating them with like-minded cultists. 

The Blues Brothers is the first kind of movie for me but it’s the second kind as well. Last year I happily ventured to Old Joliet Prison in Joliet, Illinois so that I could cover the first, and perhaps last, Blues Brothers convention for my website Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and the extended version of my book The Joy of Trash. 

I would not have gone to a Blues Brothers convention unless I was a big fan of the movie but the strange truth of the matter is that I am such a fanboy that there are a whole lot of movies I consider worthy of their own convention. 

Wayne’s World? Sign me up! I would love to spend a weekend celebrating that wonderful piece of Americana, and, to a lesser extent, its sequel. The same is true of Groundhog Day. And UHF. 

If there were a Freddy Got Fingered festival you would need to physically restrain me to keep me from attending. I wouldn’t just attend a Nothing But Trouble festival, I would host it as well, which shouldn’t be a problem, as I can’t imagine that there are more than a handful of people in this crazy world who share my utterly non-ironic love of that movie. 

The question, consequently, is not why someone would build a convention or festival around a single movie but rather why we don’t have MORE conventions dedicated to the movies we grew up loving and that will always have a special place in our hearts. 

I had an intense emotional connection to The Blues Brothers before I went to the Blues Brothers convention. That connection is even stronger now even if rain robbed me of what was to be the convention’s glorious climax: actually watching The Blues Brothers in Old Joliet Prison with hundreds of deeply dorky Midwesterners. 

The Blues Brothers opens with shots of Joliet that make it look like something out of The Lord of the Rings or David Lynch’s nightmares, a desolate Midwestern hellhole that’s Gothic as fuck and defined by the spooky prison that is both its enduring shame and its primary claim to fame. 

We open on a note as dry as the toast Elwood Blues (Dan Akroyd) loves so much, with the release of “Joliet” Jake Blues (John Belushi) from prison following a three year stint in the big house. 

In their shades, suits and hats, Jake and Elwood are deadpan in a way that makes Buster Keaton seem wildly expressive by comparison. Like Keaton, the Blues Brothers are the eery calm in the middle of life’s raging storm. 

They’re strangely impervious disaster magnets forever walking away unscathed and oblivious from explosions and car crashes. 

Alternately, Jake and Elwood are suit-clad Road Runners one step ahead of perpetually frustrated human Wile E. Coyotes in the form of cops, country musicians and Illinois Nazis. 

The Blues Brothers was at once painfully hip and contemporary and deeply rooted in the comedy of the distant past. 

Making Jake and Elwood orphans feels like a move out of a 1930s Warner Brothers melodrama with James Cagney as a sneering hood and Spenser Tracy as an understanding priest. 

Sister Mary Stigmata, AKA "The Penguin” (Kathleen Freeman), the nun who ran the orphanage where the brothers grew up, meanwhile, would not seem out of place in a Marx brothers movie. 

The Penguin is a holy terror but she also seems to be the only family the boys have other than their band. So when she tells them that they need five thousand dollars in order to save the orphanage they take it upon themselves to raise the funds. 

By the end of the movie the Blues Brothers have caused a minor apocalypse. They’re responsible for millions upon millions of dollars in damages to police vehicles alone. They basically break the city of Chicago and much of the state of Illinois and one of the iron-clad rules of capitalism is that if you break it then you have to buy it. 

Elwood and Jake immediately revert back to being misbehaving orphans in front of their old nemesis/protector. There’s a great gag where the boys swear accidentally, which causes the Penguin to hit them with great force and fury, which in turn causes them to swear even louder, which just makes her angrier and more violent. 

It’s a simple, straightforward, old-fashioned gag but it works spectacularly well because Freeman is such a pickle-faced scold/perfect comic foil and because Aykroyd and Belushi have such explosive chemistry that they sometimes seem to be one spirit in two bodies. 

Aykroyd and Belushi needed and completed each other. Belushi’s wild charisma and front-man magnetism took the pressure off Aykroyd, who seemed supremely comfortable lounging in his partner’s outsized shadow. 

Landis and Belushi’s populist instincts, meanwhile, served as an essential balance to Aykroyd’s more conceptual, writerly and unabashedly geeky style of humor. 

The original screenplay for The Blues Brothers was massive and had to be cut considerably just to get it down to 148 minutes for a Director’s Cut. Apparently much of what was cut involved the backstories of the members of the band. 

Aykroyd’s gloriously obsessive brain insisted that audiences would benefit from knowing the intertwined histories of the members of the Blues Brothers band but Landis understood that from a comedy and storytelling perspective he had to get the show on the road as quickly as possible, literally and figuratively. 

Here’s the thing: we don’t need ANY of that shit. The film works spectacularly without it. Having seen both the Director’s Cut and the original theatrical version I can confidently assert that the shorter version is superior. 

I love The Blues Brothers but it does need to be two and a half hours long. Besides, in its theatrical form, the iconic blockbuster benefits from a pleasing simplicity. 

In a church where Reverend Cleophus James (James Brown) is delivering the gospel with style and swagger, Jake has a religious epiphany. They must get the band back together so that they can play a gig to raise the money in what is quite honestly an unreasonably small time frame. 

The sequence where Joliet Jake catches the holy spirit and realizes what he MUST do epitomizes the film’s disarming sweetness. Jake may be an outlaw, a criminal and an ex-con played by an actor on Charlie Sheen levels of cocaine during shooting but he also has a moral code and a holy mission to save the children from evil bureaucrats. 

There’s a moment late in the film when Belushi finally takes off his sunglasses in a successful attempt to charm an ex-fiance played by Carrie Fisher who has spent the film trying to murder him and he isn’t just handsome: he’s fucking beautiful. Belushi was a beautiful man with deeply soulful eyes it seems perverse to hide behind sunglasses for anywhere from 132 to 148 minutes.

The Blues Brothers finds light in swampy darkness and infectious, palpable joy in despair. That’s the essence of blues and soul as well as dark comedy and The Blues Brothers is dark yet filled with levity and light. 

The scenes of Jake and Elwood getting the band back together are an excuse for the splashy musical set-pieces, automotive armageddon and mindless destruction that are the film’s raison d’etre. 

Like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, Jake and Elwood piss off cops, country musicians led by Charles Napier and those blasted Illinois Nazis in their quest to do the right thing. They’re underdogs and outlaws in service of conventional morality and the Catholic Church, that bastion of sin as well as salvation.

Aykroyd and Belushi had no delusions about their musical talent, particularly when compared to some of the greatest black artists of all time, legends like the aforementioned James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway and John Lee Hooker. 

The Saturday Night Live veterans spend much of the film dancing exuberantly in the background while its galaxy of all-time greats command a massive and long-overdue spotlight. 

The Blues Brothers’ plot doesn’t make a goddamn lick of sense when you really think about it. It turns on the Blues Brothers becoming popular enough to fill what looks like a pretty big venue in a mere day. 

But the movie ultimately doesn’t have to make sense because its heroes are less flesh and blood human beings with souls and weaknesses and desires than human cartoon characters who can seemingly cannot be killed, or even injured, no matter how aggressively the establishment tries to stop them. 

That was Belushi’s whole deal at one point. He was indestructible, a human wrecking ball before he was destroyed by his darkness and vices that fueled his manic energy here and contribute to the film’s dark aura. 

The Blues Brothers set the bar impossibly high for Saturday Night Live movies in terms of budget, production values, star-power, freshness and quality. 

Over the decades Saturday Night Live films would become a joke despite zeitgeist-capturing successes like this and Wayne’s World. It would become common for critics to pan feeble comedies as feeling like feature-length Saturday Night Live sketches. 

But at the beginning, at least, there was something special and pure about this particular combination. In a perfect world, Belushi and Akroyd would have re-teamed for Ghostbusters and Belushi would be back on top again. 

In this ragingly imperfect world Belushi would die before Ghostbusters began production, leaving The Blues Brothers as the unmistakable apex of Akroyd and Belushi’s cinematic collaborations. 

If they do indeed decide to have a second Blues Brothers Convention I tentatively plan to cover it for this newsletter because it’s a bad idea in some ways but also because it feels like a perfect companion piece/climax/post-script for both my James Belushi and Saturday Night Live movie projects. 

UP Next: Gilda Live (1980)