The Blues Brothers on Iris tonight: story of a masterpiece that is much more political than it seems

In 1978, the year of Animal House, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd created the characters of Jake “Joliet” and Elwood Blues, renamed by composer Howard Shore The Blues Brothers “(broadcast tonight on Iris) for the hugely popular Saturday Night Live TV show. at 9pm): two brothers who grew up in an orphanage in Illinois and initiated into the blues in its many forms thanks to an attendant of the institute, characterized by their black suits and the ubiquitous Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, also with frames Black. With the former also at the top of the film box office charts, the two finish first in the Billboard charts thanks to the cover album Briefcase Full of Blues; and immediately begin to put on the plate the idea that their characters can become the protagonists of a film. After a bitter struggle between Paramount and Universal to win production and distribution, the latter prevails, which hires John Landis to direct and also instructs him to transform into something truly filmable the 400-page script that the first-time screenwriter Aykroyd had written about I throw on the wave of enthusiasm. Two years later, on June 20, 1980, for the modest sum of nearly thirty million dollars in budget against the estimated twelve (as well as at the cost of a long series of working traps, including Belushi’s increasingly vertical descent into drug addiction. ), the film (a brilliant, unrepeatable and catastrophic mix of musicals, comedy and satire) debuted in American theaters without fanfare and mocked by most of the critics (the Los Angeles Times spoke bluntly of “disaster”, comparing it to the flop of Spielberg 1941 – Alarm in Hollywood; the Variety entertainment bible associates him for humor and expressive force with the films of Gianni and Pinotto) ending up in an honorable but disappointing tenth place in the overall box office of the US season. Much better received by European critics, who already saw in Landis the standard-bearer of a demented but also profoundly political cinema, surprisingly becomes the first American film to gross more abroad than at home. And today, on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary (but the same thing could have already been written ten, twenty or even thirty years ago …) universally considered a masterpiece.

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