The Blues Brothers opens with a man walking out of Joliet Prison into the flat gray light of a Chicago morning. He has served three years of a five-year sentence for armed robbery. His brother is waiting in a battered former police car. Within twenty minutes they have jumped an open drawbridge, learned their childhood orphanage owes $5,000 in property taxes, and decided that God wants them to put their band back together.
That is the whole engine of the film. It is a musical, a comedy and a crime picture at once, and it runs for 133 minutes. John Landis directed it and wrote the screenplay with Dan Aykroyd. It is 1980, and it is still the best argument anyone has made that a movie can be a concert and a car wreck at the same time.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Jake Blues Leaves Joliet Prison
The plot is thin on purpose. Jake, played by John Belushi, and his brother Elwood, played by Aykroyd, were raised in a Roman Catholic orphanage. Sister Mary Stigmata tells them it will close unless it pays the tax bill. Their friend Curtis, played by Cab Calloway, points them toward the Reverend Cleophus James, played by James Brown, and a sermon at the Triple Rock Baptist Church. Jake has an epiphany there. The band, which broke up while he was inside, can be reformed. The money can be raised.
What follows is a chase. State troopers want Elwood for driving with a suspended license and dozens of parking tickets and moving violations. The brothers escape through the Dixie Square Mall. A mysterious woman fires a rocket launcher at them and misses. The next morning she detonates a bomb that levels the flophouse where Elwood lives, leaving the brothers unharmed and, conveniently, unarrested. Then they go looking for their band.
The tagline says it plainly: “They’ll never get caught. They’re on a mission from God.”
Aretha Franklin and James Brown Take Speaking Parts
Aykroyd demanded that soul and R&B stars be cast in speaking roles to support musical numbers built around them. James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin all took parts. This caused friction between Landis and Universal, because the cost ran well past the original budget. None of them except Charles had had recent hits, and the studio wanted younger acts, including Rose Royce, whose “Car Wash” had made them disco stars after the 1976 film of that name.
Landis did not replace them. That decision is why the film holds up. The musical numbers are not cameos. They are the spine.
The band itself was stacked. Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn are architects of the Stax Records sound and were half of Booker T. & the M.G.’s. Cropper plays guitar at the start of Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man.” Horn players Lou Marini, Tom Malone and Alan Rubin had all played in Blood, Sweat & Tears and in the Saturday Night Live house band. Drummer Willie Hall had played in the Bar-Kays and backed Isaac Hayes. Matt “Guitar” Murphy was a veteran blues guitarist who played with Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf. Big Walter Horton, Pinetop Perkins and John Lee Hooker also appear; Hooker performs “Boom Boom” during the Maxwell Street scene.
The cast around them is just as specific. Carrie Fisher and Henry Gibson take non-musical supporting roles. Cab Calloway’s character is named Curtis as an homage to Curtis Salgado, an Oregon blues musician who inspired Belushi while Belushi was in that area filming Animal House.
A Retired Police Car Jumps a Drawbridge
The Blues Brothers is a film about vehicles as much as it is about music. Elwood’s car is a retired police cruiser, and he defends it by demonstrating what it can do. The drawbridge jump is the first proof. The Dixie Square Mall chase is the second. By the end, the pile of wrecked cars is the joke and the point.
The action is played straight, which is what makes it funny. Landis does not wink. The neo-Nazis on the bridge, the country and western band, the mystery woman with the rocket launcher — all of them are treated as real obstacles in a real pursuit. The absurdity comes from the sincerity.
The film was shot in and around Chicago, Illinois, and the script is set there. That matters more than it sounds. The city is not a backdrop. It is the reason the film has a texture that studio-bound musicals of the era did not.
Production was not smooth. Filming was delayed when Aykroyd, new to screenwriting, took six months to finish the script. Universal had won the bidding war for the film and hoped to cash in on Belushi’s popularity after Saturday Night Live, Animal House and the Blues Brothers’ musical success. It soon found it could not control costs.
Paul Shaffer Dropped Out, Murphy Dunne Stepped In
One casting detail tells you how much of this film came out of Saturday Night Live and how much came out of luck. As the band developed on SNL, pianist Paul Shaffer was part of the act and was cast in the film. Contractual obligations with SNL kept him out. Actor-musician Murphy Dunne was hired to take the role. Dunne’s father, George Dunne, was president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners.
Over 500 extras were used. That number is worth holding next to the budget fights. Universal worried about paying for Cab Calloway. Landis filled a bridge with neo-Nazis and a mall with police cars.
Where the Middle Drags
The Blues Brothers earns its runtime because it never stops moving and never apologizes. The mission is ridiculous. The brothers treat it as scripture. Belushi plays Jake as a man who has decided that the only thing left to do is the one thing he is good at. Aykroyd plays Elwood as a man who has already decided, long ago, and will not be talked out of it.
The musical numbers work because the film lets them run. James Brown in the pulpit, Aretha Franklin behind a counter, Cab Calloway in a suit — these are not nostalgia acts trotted out for a gag. They are the reason the film exists, and the film knows it.
Where it sags is in the middle. The search for band members is a series of sketches, and some land harder than others. Mr. Fabulous, the maître d’ at an expensive restaurant, turns the brothers down until they dine with poor manners and threaten to become regular patrons. It is a good bit. It is also a bit.
Why the Score Is 7.2 of 10
This is a 7.2 out of 10, and that number deserves an explanation. The Blues Brothers is not a perfect film. It is overlong, its plot is a clothesline for set pieces, and its middle stretch coasts on charm. But its highs are enormous, and they are not accidents. The casting of Brown, Calloway, Charles and Franklin was a fight Landis won against his own studio, and it is the reason the film is still watched. The car chases are practical, the music is live, and the whole thing has the nerve to treat a $5,000 tax bill as a holy war.
The detail that matters most is not the drawbridge or the mall. It is that Universal wanted to swap out the R&B legends for younger acts and Landis refused. That refusal is the film. Everything else — the explosions, the police cars, the “mission from God” — is decoration on top of it.
The Blues Brothers is a comedy that takes its music seriously and a musical that takes its jokes seriously. That combination is rarer than it should be. It does not always hold. It holds often enough.
KEY FACTS
– Release year: 1980
– Director: John Landis
– Screenplay: Dan Aykroyd and John Landis
– Runtime: 133 minutes
– Genres: Music, Comedy, Crime
– Orphanage tax bill: $5,000
– Jake’s sentence: three years served of five, for armed robbery
– Rotten Tomatoes: 72%
– Score: 7.2 of 10
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
