Aretha Franklin’s Performance in ‘Amazing Grace’ Is Transcendent (Review)

Courtesy of Neon – Aretha Franklin
“Amazing Grace” captures Aretha Franklin’s 1972 performance at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church.

Seven months ago, Aretha Franklin’s passing prompted an outpouring of poignant remembrances and tributes. Yet for all of the emotional and insightful expressions, no greater in memoriam to Aretha’s genius exists than the just-released film “Amazing Grace.” It’s an unvarnished document of one of Aretha’s most revelatory performances recorded Jan. 13-14, 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles when a 29-year-old Franklin was in her prime.

The resutong live album, Amazing Grace, produced by Jerry Wexler, Arif Martin and Franklin for Atlantic Records, is exultant and the best-selling gospel record of all-time, as well as Franklin’s top-seller, going double-platinum. Meanwhile, the film, bankrolled by Warner Bros., languished for 47 years due to Byzantine litigation and technical issues, which thankfully have been rectified – praise be Alan Elliott and Franklin’s estate – with the film’s initial release in Los Angeles and New York City this past weekend and a wide release set for Easter weekend.

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In 1972, Aretha had 11 No. 1 singles and had just won her fourth of eight straight Grammys for Best Female R&B Performance. The Amazing Grace concert was presented as a “return” to her gospel roots from secular pop but, as her father, the eminent Rev. C. L. Franklin, noted from the pulpit, she had never left the church – it was too deeply ingrained and it informed everything she did.

The director, the late great Sydney Pollack (“Out of Africa,” “The Firm” and Dustin Hoffman’s unforgettable agent in “Tootsie,” among his many other films), did the universe a solid by embracing vérité and getting the heck out of the way of Franklin’s sublime voice. We see the Queen of Soul dripping in beatific perspiration; miscues, inexplicable camera choices in full ’70s technicolor splendor and awkwardness between songs; and there are the incredible and distracting cameos by Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts. But it’s all additive when astride the greatest voice of the last century if not the millennia or beyond.

The songs in the film are sequenced differently than the original album, but who cares? To see the Southern California Community Choir march in to the song “We Are On Our Way” is glorious. As is Aretha opening with Marvin Gaye’s “Wholly Holy” (which appeared on What’s Going On, released eight months earlier), a gorgeous ballad, which like most of the film’s tracks, Franklin turns ecstatic with her masterful and improvised soul remonstrations to a higher power.  There are equally rhapsodic moments in every song, be it the expansive “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the foot-stomping “How I Got Over” and the epic “Never Get Old,” which reaches such spiritual heights that an elderly parishioner becomes overcome with emotion prompting one of Aretha’s gospel mentors Clara Ward to tend to her.  

Early in the film, the Reverend James Cleveland, the performances’ master of ceremonies, preacher and music director, introduces a two-song medley of a gospel and pop song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” Aretha handles these songs, as well as anything else she touches, by turning them into soul epiphanies transcending notions of genre.

Aretha is backed by session pros, though the film rarely if ever shows them. This includes guitarist Cornell Dupree (Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, King Curtis), organist Ken Lupper (Billy Preston, Mighty Clouds of Joy among others),  bassist Chuck Rainey (Louis Armstrong to Duane Allman to far beyond), Bernard Purdie (the “world’s most recorded drummer” from Miles Davis to Steely Dan to many others) and conga player Pancho Morales with similar bona fides. Cleveland is an adept keyboardist and singer and a magnanimous presence who holds his own considering he has the unenviable task of sharing the stage with Aretha.

One of the film’s more moving spoken moments is when Aretha’s father, the esteemed Reverend C.L. Franklin, takes the stage to pay tribute to his daughter. He references her “uncanny ear” for music and says she created a musical “synthesis” from influences Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and Clara Ward, which helps to explain the gospel supernova she became.

The title, “Amazing Grace,” references the 1779 hymnal written by John Newton, a track Franklin makes entirely her own as she turns each languorous syllable into a revelation. But the film’s title takes on another dimension in the context of seeing Franklin’s poise and elegance throughout as she bares her heart, soul and tears from atop the pulpit and behind a Steinway. She barely utters a word throughout and rarely engages the audience, who are seen crying and overwrought with emotion. She keeps her stage presence understated even with a film crew trained squarely on her saving every ounce of energy for her performances that seem to touch the sacred and profane.

“This will be the album I suspect that will do down in history as both Aretha’s most shining hour….” John Hammond, the great music producer, wrote in the album’s original liner notes. His observations prove prescient a half century later as Franklin’s dazzling performance moves today’s audiences to states of rapture with audible gasps, hollers and applause heard throughout the film’s screening.