Did Belushi/Ackroyd give Chicago history lesson w/ The Blues Brothers?

I’m honest enough to realize that “The Blues Brothers” isn’t classic cinema.

It came out the summer following by first year of high school – a time in life when I had the time to watch the many movies that were made. The film based off the Belushi/Ackroyd “Saturday Night Live” characters was long (and would have been longer if director John Landis had had his original vision approved), over-convoluted and in some points nonsensical.

BUT THERE IS one reason why I will never tune away from a showing of the film if I happen to stumble across it – the film depicts a segment of Chicago that just doesn’t exist any longer and never got much attention paid to it when it was around (unlike “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” which shows us the official take on touristy Chicago).

As someone who was born in the South Chicago neighborhood and who was raised in suburban Calumet City, The Blues Brothers was the film that was made in my home neighborhoods (although to be honest, there never was a Our Lady of the Blessed Shroud orphanage in Cal City that needed saving).

In fact, the closest to Calumet City that the film came was when they used the remains of the old Dixie Square shopping mall in Harvey (two towns to the west) for the chase scenes involving the Illinois State Police.

But the 95^th Street bridge, the Baptist church that served as the “Triple Rock Church” and home of the Rev. Cleophus James (a.k.a., singer James Brown) and the “Curl Up and Dye” hair salon where the late Carrie Fisher’s vengeful hair stylist plotted the Belushi character’s death.

ALL ARE PLACES I could take you to in the old neighborhood and show you where movies were made nearly four decades ago.

Even outside of the city’s 10^th Ward, the film gives us the sight of what was once the old Maxwell Street market where one could easily repurchase any item that might have been ripped off from you.

Or that flophouse of a residency where Ackroyd’s character lived (and which Fisher’s character took a bazooka to)? It was under the “el” tracks down on Van Buren Street in the South Loop (back when the area was decrepit), and I still remember one of my first assignments for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago was to report on the fire that destroyed the building for real.

So what brings all of this to mind? The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events likes to show movies on a giant screen in Millennium Park. Tuesday night will be a showing of The Blues Brothers. Admission is free and you can sit outside and get a laugh (unless you’re so politically uptight that you can’t bear the thought of watching a film in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn).

MEANING BELUSHI (the native of suburban Wheaton) AND Ackroyd will live on, as will the music of the late Brown and Cab Calloway (“Minnie the Moocher” will never die because of this film).

And even that moment when we learn that Bob’s Country Bunker features both kinds of music – country AND western. Where we’re also subjected to a ludicrous Belushi/Ackroyd take on the Tammy Wynette classic “Stand By Your Man.”

The combination of elements of current Chicago and bits that are long past are something that always amuse me and make the film (along with “Medium Cool” from 1969).

The latter film showed us the Grant Park of the past that became the site of anti-war protests back in the Vietnam era, the Uptown neighborhood of old, and the lengthy shot early in the film of a man on motorcycle rushing videotape from an auto accident scene back to the TV studios downtown (riding along the length of Lake Shore Drive into the Loop) is one that captivates me because of the number of times I’ve made a similar drive during my life.

THERE'S ALSO THE Chicago of "Call Northside 777," but much of it is before my time, and was long ago subjected to the bulldozer. What a shame.

Yet those don't compare to the compare to the bit in The Blues Brothers when Illinois Nazis (yes, we all “hate” Illinois Nazis) wishing to kill the musical duo drive off the end of an incomplete bridge, and wind up soaring thousands of feet into the air before crashing down into a car-sized Chicago street pothole.

Which the Blues Brothers conveniently happen to drive right over in their one-time Mount Prospect police squad car. Silly? Ridiculous? Totally absurd? Of course.

But didn’t I warn you the film was nonsensical!?!

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EXTRA: Illinois Comptroller forum to be held in ‘Blues Brothers’ church

It’s a shame that Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger isn’t expected to show up Tuesday night at a candidate forum in which all three of her likely Election Day opponents will partake.

That forum will be held at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in the South Chicago neighborhood, which has a personal tie in that it is down the block from the church (Our Lady of Guadalupe) in which I was baptized as a baby.

BUT I’M SURE for the masses out there who are old enough to have seen “The Blues Brothers” when it was in the movie theaters or have since seen it rerun on television throughout the decades, the church will stand out as the one that became the "Triple Rock Church" that turned a Baptist church service into a rockin’ musical revival.

As in James Brown singing “The Old Landmark” while parishioners danced about and went soaring through the air. A little bit over the top, I’m sure!

But that scene was shot at the Pilgrim Baptist Church, just a few blocks from the 95^th Street bridge that the Blues Brothers drove their hand-me-down police car over while it was fully erect (another scene over the top, I’m sure).

Tuesday night, it will be the place where Democratic comptroller candidate Susana Mendoza (currently the Chicago city clerk) will try to explain why she ought to get the state political post.

AND NOT JUST because we ought to want to dump someone who is a political appointee of Gov. Bruce Rauner. She has to offer up reasons why we should want her in the office instead.

 

MUNGER: A no-show?!?

Otherwise, we might as well contemplate Libertarian Claire Ball or Green Tim Curtin for the post. Both of them also are expected to attend the event, and both could definitely use the jolt of publicity.

Particularly in the case of Green, who when you do an Internet search for his name, the top result that comes up is a biography for the leader of the band “Pig Vomit.”

Perhaps her absence means that Munger thinks she also can’t use a publicity injection. I think she should, mainly because it could be a chance for the little-known Munger to set herself apart from the other candidates. Show that she’s really the best qualified.

 

MENDOZA: Can she beat incumbent?

SHE ALREADY HAS the endorsements of the two major metro daily newspapers (both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times), although those seemed based on the idea that Mendoza is aligned with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, and perhaps ought to be better off if she just stayed within Chicago city government.

There’s also the fact that Republican Party officials in Illinois are going all out to ensure Munger has adequate funding to operate a credible campaign. They want to be able to ensure they keep the state post that was filled by gubernatorial appointment when Judy Baar Topinka died just under two years ago.

After all, how lonely would Rauner be if he were the only Republican state constitutional officer in Illinois government, along with a General Assembly dominated by Democrats and a national Republican Party that has been devastated by the existence of Donald Trump.

BALL: Also in the running

Which is the exact kind of loneliness Democrats would like to create for him the next two years as he prepares for a re-election bid -- one in which they hope they can find a gubernatorial candidate who can take him down politically.

PARTICULARLY AT THIS forum, which claims to be bipartisan but is being sponsored by various groups with urban-interest, non-Anglo ethnic, Democratic Party leanings.

Which most likely is the reason why Munger isn’t likely to show up. Either that, or she thinks the South Chicago neighborhood is somewhere on the other side of the planet and that she’d be contaminated by the residue of the steel mills that used to exist throughout the area.

CURTIN: Not the guy from 'Pig Vomit'

Heck, there are long-time local residents who have that very same fear, breathing in the air that has the stink of decades of industrial waste built up.

Either that, or she's afraid the ghost of James Brown will drown her out with his powerful voice.

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Here I thought I was watching a Chicago-themed mediocre movie, not Holy scripture

It has become something of a running gag throughout the years between my brother, Chris, and I.

We’ll pass by a church, or by anybody or anything, that is a combination of religious and either flamboyant or garish.

TO WHICH I will tell my brother, “you could use a little churching up.”

To which he will (without a doubt) respond, “I don’t want to listen to no jive-ass preacher talking to me about Heaven and Hell.”

No, we’re not really talking about the merits of theology (if anything, it would be somebody telling me I need some “churching up”). Nor are we in any serious philosophical engagement.

We’re just doing a riff off of a 30-year-old film that people of a certain mental composition want to elevate into a cinematic classic, while others will view it is as overbloated mess.

WE’RE TALKING, OF course, about “The Blues Brothers,” which took the musical characters created by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live and used them as the basis of a two hour-plus film that told the story of how Jake and Elwood Blues went to wild, wacky and crazed extremes to raise the $5,000 needed to pay that year’s property tax assessment on the orphanage where they had been raised.

That particular scene my brother and I do comes just after Jake and Elwood are chased down the stairs by a yardstick-wielding nun who is disgusted at what religious reprobates her two former charges have become.

Cab Calloway’s “Curtis” character was the one telling Belushi’s “Jake” to “get to church.” When he finally does show up, he gets to hear James Brown’s “Rev. Cleophus James” character sing and dance and we learn that, “Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ. I have seen the light!”

Somehow, when I first saw this film, I never thought I was seeing anything significant. I thought I was seeing a film with an overbloated storyline (although a wonderful R ‘n’ B soundtrack album that I still own, both in LP and compact disc form) that ran too long (although I understand what I saw in the theaters was a version edited from the Belushi/Aykroyd version that would have required an intermission midway through).

BUT NOW, THE Catholic Church seems to think we’re seeing something significant. The Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano (the so-called employer of another Saturday Night Live character, Father Guido Sarducci, who supposedly was the paper’s gossip columnist), published a series recently about Catholic references within pop culture.

The newspaper included “The Blues Brothers” as a film with a Catholic message.

I never realized that naming the yardstick-wielding nun Sister Mary Stigmata or that constantly having the lead characters declare themselves to be “on a mission from God” was enough to get the blessing of the sort-of official newspaper of Pope Benedict XVI.

Perhaps it was the pictures in the background of then-new Pope John Paul II that did the trick. I doubt it was the sound of legendary bass player Donald “Duck” Dunn uttering two of the crudest, yet most memorable, lines in cinematic history.

NOT THAT I think many of the film’s fans were all that interested in what the Pope or his advisors thought about the film. Probably no more so than all those Beatles fans who learned months ago through the newspaper that the Catholic Church has “forgiven” them for leading many of our society into that counter-cultural mass that many of us associate with the 1960s.

But now we have church approval to be able to watch the film that showed us “Illinois Nazis” suffering a deadly fate when their car drove off a highway ramp under construction – then suddenly managed to soar through the air high over the Hancock Building (all 1,127 feet of it) before crashing through the pavement of the street below.

Personally, what I find memorable about “The Blues Brothers” (and the reason why I occasionally dig out the DVD I own of the film) is the fact that Belushi used his sense of Chicago (he was a Wheaton native) to include scenes shot in neighborhoods that film crews usually wouldn’t venture into – and some of which no longer exist.

The old skid row on Van Buren Street in the south Loop, and the decrepit Trailways bus station that used to be in the north Loop. The Dixie Square shopping center in suburban Harvey (which never looked that good when it was really open for retail). The Chez Paul restaurant (“Mayor Daley no longer dines here. He’s dead, sir”) and the Joliet Correctional Center in the same film.

IT ALSO GAVE the 95th Street Bridge over the Calumet River that separates the South Chicago and East Side neighborhoods its moment of cinematic glory. Nobody who passes over that bridge today can help but wonder how it was physically possible for a broken-down former Mount Prospect police car to jump the width of the bridge while its trusses were opening.

Perhaps it was a religious miracle – one that would make “The Blues Brothers” worthy of its religious recognition now being received.

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This may be an older version of the 95th Street Bridge (the current one dates to 1958), but it isn't too hard to envision a battered old automobile trying to make the leap.