I’ve never really be an huge fan of Diana Ross’s voice, but there’s no getting away from her personable and visceral performance here as the flawed jazz musician Billie Holliday. With Motown’s Berry Gordy at the helm it was always going to lead on the music and it does that effectively too for the most part whilst giving us the basic bones of her turbulent battle with narcotics. We start in that position so often inhabited by aspirational young black Americans, a poverty stricken environment where sex was all too often the way young women made a living, before she gets that lucky break in a Harlem nightclub. That introduces her to Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams) who takes up the management of her career. Unlike with many of her contemporaries, though, he is genuinely interested in his protégée and tries to keep her on the rails as her success exposes her to bigotry and heroin. Gradually the headlines begin to turn against her, the pressures increase and her talent alone can no longer save her from this very sad, but predicable, path of self-destruction. Ross, helped often by some quite powerful make-up effects, is entirely convincing right through the stages of Holliday’s rise and fall, and Williams as well as an authentic looking production design also manages to evoke some of the trials and tribulations faced by an African American woman in a very much white man’s world. As you’d expect, the soundtrack reminds us of some of the gorgeous songs like “God Bless the Child” and the title song that made her famous. It’s a bit speculative when it comes to the private life of this woman, and can be a bit heavy weather towards the disappointingly rushed conclusion, but it’s still a classy production that largely steers clear of being adulatory.
