Review: Been Rich All My Life

Ballot Measure 9, Heather Lyn MacDonald's last feature-length documentary, was a "political thriller" dedicated to examining the battle over an anti-gay initiative that nearly won voter approval in Oregon in 1992. The film was lauded at festivals around the world and took home prizes from many of them, including Sundance and Berlin. Been Rich All My Life, MacDonald's follow-up to that success, is unlikely to win any awards. It is almost entirely lacking in structure, and is damaged by low-budget, unnecessary effects that one would expect to see in Unsolved Mysteries recreations, not the work of a respected documentarian. Lucky for MacDonald, however, the subjects of her film are so appealing they easily rise above its surprising weaknesses, and leave all but the most cynical of viewers charmed and moved.

Been Rich All My Life focuses on The Silver Belles, a dance troupe made up of five former Harlem showgirls, the oldest of whom is 96-years-old, the youngest a spry 84. The women, all of whom danced at The Apollo or The Cotton Club during the 1930s, met during those years, when they were the hard-working stars of Harlem's thriving nightclub scene. Between them, the five worked with every major star of the pre-war era, from Louis Armstrong to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Cab Calloway.
After the popularity of showgirls waned -- theaters, smelling easy profits, turned into exhibition houses, in lieu of staging and funding their own shows -- the five went in different directions. Some performed in wartime Europe as part of the first black USO show, while another worked in a factory welding warships. Yet another toured South America, where she was "treated like [a] queen," while others found jobs tending bar, and teaching dance. After years far apart, the women were reunited in the mid-1980's, when a woman named Geraldine Kennedy began to think about all that had been lost with the disappearance of Harlem's showgirls, and decided to bring some of them together to dance again. She contact former dancer Bertye Lou Wood who, in turn, began calling her friends and former coworkers -- and the Silver Belles were born.

Been Rich All My Life is made up of a combination of performance, rehearsal and historical footage, the most engaging of which is easily the raw, fly-on-the-wall tape of the Belles rehearsing. In these sequences, it doesn't matter that MacDonald's film has no clear structure or focus. It's a privilege just to be around these women -- the previously mentioned Bertye, who is 96, Cleo Hayes (89), Marion Coles (88), Fay Ray (84) and Elaine Ellis (86) -- and to watch them interact. Their talent and historical significance notwithstanding, the most important thing we learn from the Belles is that aging doesn't mean dying, or disappearing. The woman are smarter, tougher, and quicker than people decades younger, and they treat one another with the same irreverence they clearly shared as teens. Even if there was nothing else to the film, watching the elderly take on the world with such pleasure, determination and verve serves as a welcome reminder to the rest of us about what life is really like for an oft-overlooked population.

Though it takes a while for them to become fully defined (another weakness of MacDonald's film is that she offers no assistance whatsoever in identifying the Belles -- if you don't put the right name with the right face the first time each woman is shown, you're out of luck), each of the five Belles develops a distinct, forceful personality. Most of them had periods in their youth in which they struggled mightily: Fay, born in Georgia, picked cotton as a child before jumping at train at the age of 11 and eventually joining a traveling show; Cleo fled the racism of her Mississippi home for the bright lights of Chicago, where she talked her way into night club jobs and learned to dance on the fly. Marion was taught to dance by her war-widow mother, who would take her to the ballrooms, and teach her steps when they got home; Bertye started her career after raising three kids and leaving her husband, and eventually helped lead the first-ever strike by black performers.

All the women are fascinating, sometimes heroic (though of course they'd find that notion absurd) figures, but the star of the film is undeniably Bertye Lou Wood. Described by her cohorts as "the queen" of the 1930s Apollo chorus line, Bertye helped teach each of the other Belles the ropes when they first arrived at the theater. Her professionalism, skill and generosity are remembered to this day by her friends, as is her cheeky attitude. When the movie begins, the bright-eyed, impish Bertye is already too frail to dance, but that doesn't stop her from attending each and every rehearsal -- sometimes with her teeth, sometimes without -- and giving hell to everyone in the room. As the film winds down and Bertye's health problems begin to break her, it's not seeing her in a hospital bed that worries her friends most. Instead, it's her sad, quip-less reappearance at rehearsal, an afternoon that ends with the other Belles literally begging the tired, dazed-looking Bertye to swear at them. Though she musters up a weak smile and a few insults, it's clear that the end is near.

Largely because of the sudden ill-health of Bertye, Cleo and Marion, the last section of Been Rich All My Life is wrenching drama. Thanks to tragic real-life events, MacDonald's lack of direction with her film no long matters: All she has to do is turn the camera on and left life unfold before it. What the camera catches is the emotions people feel when their bodies will no longer allow them to do the one thing that's been natural virtually from birth, and how they react when life-long friends are slipping away. As with the wonderful rehearsal sequences, what's important here are the lives, and the love between the people we've come to know. Despite its bittersweet ending, the ultimate impact of Been Rich All My Life (or, more accurately, that of the Silver Belles) is to leave audiences of all ages appreciating and even looking forward to the opportunities that await us as we move up in years.