Hoilday On Ice

By J.C.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES Directed by SIDNEY J. FURIE Screenplay by TERENCE McCLOY, CHRIS CLARK and SUZANNE de PASSE

For reasons that have rather more to do with coincidence than Zeitgeist, there is currently a theatrical flurry of interest in the rugged life of Billie Holiday, the supreme jazz singer who died of the cumulative effects of dope and despair in 1959. Brooklyn's Chelsea Theater last week presented a jazz musical called Lady Day that uses Holiday (sung by Cecelia Norfleet) as a symbol of the ravages that racial repression can work. "Seething with anger, this Lady Day misses all that was funny and spunky in the real woman," said TIME'S Drama Critic T.E. Kalem.

The Hollywood version of the Holiday story is no better. A spindly, cliche-ravaged tale of the sorrows of show biz, Lady Sings the Blues stars Diana Ross, former lead singer of the Supremes. That is a casting coup about as appropriate as signing up Sammy Davis Jr. to play Charlie Parker. It is eerie to watch and listen to Miss Ross, the princess of plastic soul, work her way through such songs as Strange Fruit and God Bless the Child. She has the phrasing, and the Holiday intonation. What she doesn't have is the passion. Her Billie Holiday is like one of those Audio-Animatronic robots at Disneyland--a perfect facsimile of life until you get close and hear the gears whirling.

Lady Sings the Blues has obviously been made to measure as Miss Ross's film debut, sort of an uptown, downbeat Funny Girl. Besides dispensing her styrene vocals, Miss Ross is also called upon to do a great deal of acting. In every reel, there is at least one sequence of turbulent anguish: Billie battling with her pusher; Billie in a padded cell; Billie watching her piano player (Richard Pryor) get beaten to death; Billie pleading for understanding and indulgence from her lover (Billy Dee Williams). Actress Ross attacks each of these crises in the same way--by raising her voice and gesticulating wildly, occasionally clutching at her hair. No one can fault her vigor and volume, but she never manages to be moving.

Although it uses the same title, Lady Sings the Blues has practically no other resemblance to the gusty Holiday autobiography published in 1956, three years before she died. The life and the lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial. qedJ.C.

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