WATTSTAX
Directed by MEL STUART
Last summer in Watts, the Stax records organization sponsored a free concert for 100,000 black citizens, who came to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a day of soul and solidarity. The performers were under contract to Stax, so their appearances were in the nature of command performances. They all showed substantial enthusiasm, however, and judging from this film, the crowd responded with easy joy—and with pride in being there and being black.
Wattstax, a record of the event, is as casually diverting as most rock-concert documentaries, but it is a little something more besides, a tentative attempt to gauge the feeling of a ghetto. Director Stuart uses the music as an expression of common feeling, and he intercuts concert footage with interview material shot on the streets of Watts. The result is necessarily superficial, but it does give the people a voice, and the tone is insistent and important.
Some six years after Watts went up in flames, the racial wounds still ache. "I been down so long," one black man says, "the thought of getting up never even entered my mind." Stuart links Wattstax together with some hilarious monologues by Comic Richard Pryor, who wrings laughs from such shared frustration and humiliation. His stories of everyday hassling, of being regularly rousted by the cops, are spun out in street jargon with a kind of furious cool. What makes the jokes sting is not punch lines but lethal accuracy.
The music is mostly mediocre. Some of it, like that of Isaac Hayes, who breathes out his lyrics like Holy Writ, is clumsy and pretentious. Rufus Thomas is the only one who really makes things work. He performs Funky Chicken, strutting smartly about the stage splendidly attired in shocking-pink cape with matching shirt and Bermuda shorts and white vinyl boots as if he will never come home to roost. It is a performance of ebullient self-parody, one that the kids in the stadium seem to enjoy.
It is unfortunate that the Code and Rating Administration will not let kids see it in theaters unless their parents (or "an adult guardian") can get them past Wattstax's R classification. Such a harsh rating was assigned presumably because of the scruffy slang in the film, the sort of language street kids hear and use every day. It is a part of life that they all share, but one that the censors, by some convoluted hypocrisy, would forbid them onscreen. ∙J.C.