Honeydripper

It is Alabama, 1950, and the season of the cotton harvest. Tyrone ‘Pine Top’ Purvis (Danny Glover) runs and plays piano at the Honeydripper Lounge, a shack bar in the little crossroads town of Harmony that has seen better days. The time of the Blues is passing, and singer Bertha Mae (Dr. Mable John) is no longer a draw for the young cotton pickers and local Army base recruits who are filling Touissant’s, the rival juke joint across the way. Pine Top hires the popular electric guitar player, Guitar Sam, hoping for a big payday that will ensure the bar has a future. However, things don’t go to plan, and Pine Top is forced into drastic action, making a desperate deal with redneck Sheriff Pugh (Stacey Keach).

With wonderful, warm performances and a terrific script, Honeydripper is a deceptively simple, delightful drama with depth, where the politics of race and class (and of the past and present) are always bubbling away beneath its stylish surface. The period detail is brilliantly done and evocative, while the music throughout is irresistible, and positively euphoric at the film’s climax.

Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

*Director John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi will participate in a post screening discussion with screenwriter Mark O’Halloran.