Remembering Steve Cropper / Playwright Tom Stoppard

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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Biancoole.

Steve Cropper, the guitarist whose influential work for Stacks Records in Memphis helped define soul music in the 1960s and 70s, died Wednesday in Nashville. He was 84 years old.

Today, we listen back to an archive interview with Cropper.

As a member of Booker T and the MGs, the in-house rhythm section at Stacks, Cropper played guitar on some of the greatest soul hits of the 60s.

Records by Carla and Rufus Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding. I've been loving you

too long

to stop now

You are tired

And you want to be free

My love is going stronger

as you become a habit to me

Ooh and am loving you

too long.

I don't want to stop now.

Otis Redding, recorded in 1965.

Steve Cropper wasn't just a guitarist at Stacks Records. He also was a producer and a songwriter.

The number one R ⁇ B hits he helped write included Otis Redding's Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, Eddie Floyd's Knock on Wood, and Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour.

Steve Cropper was 14 when he bought his first guitar and developed his style by listening to both country and rhythm and blues guitarists.

In 1962, when Cropper was doing an instrumental jam at Stacks Records with organist Booker T. Jones and his band, the engineer hit record.
The resulting record, Green Onions, was a major hit.

Steve Cropper appeared in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, playing guitar and playing himself as Steve the Colonel Cropper.

In 1992, Booker T and the MGs were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Two years before that, Steve Cropper spoke with Terry Gross.

She asked him if the music in Memphis played a big part in his life when he was growing up there.

I grew up kind of on the grand old Opry and the

kind of Louisiana Hayride kind of stuff. Well, you know what's really interesting about that is that you ended up playing mostly with black singers and playing in integrated bands.

How did you get exposed to black music after being used to Grand Ol Opry stuff? Well, that was really the thing.

When I got a chance to have my own radio and start turning the knobs, I found one night

on WDIA black spiritual music. I'd never heard it before, and it just blew me away, the feeling, the excitement of it, and that sort of thing.

I grew up in the Church of Christ, which is

in those days basically a cappella singing.

And I was very used to religious music and I liked it, but here was a new twist on it. It had a beat, and it was what we call funky now.

And that was really, I think, the turning point in my interest in music. There was a music there that I really couldn't get enough of, and I just loved it.

When you started playing guitar, did you have a sense of where you could fit in musically into the kind of music that you liked most?

Well, I think so.

Definitely was spiritual because it was a rhythm thing. It wasn't so much lead and all of that.

I really wasn't all that interested in intricate kind of music from a classical standpoint or from a country fiddle and that sort of thing.

I liked listening to it, but I didn't have any desire to get an instrument and try to copy that. I never really was a lead player.
I never tried to be a lead player.

been lucky enough to have played a few solos on some great artist records.

But really I'm a rhythm man and my

best forte I think is capturing the feel of a song during its inception in the studio. I think that's where I'm best.

Even though people fly me in all over to play on their records and overdub, I think they would be better using me on the ground floor, you know, as a building block rather than as the cherry on the cake.

You had your first hit.

with a band called the Marquise.

And

it wasn't long after that that you became affiliated with Stacks Records. You became the guitarist in the house rhythm section.
You became a producer. You became a songwriter with

Stacks. Yeah.

Tape copier and editor. How did you get affiliated with Stacks?

Well, it started, Charles Axton, the tenor player, and the funny story about Charles Axton. He was the tenor player with the Marquise? He was the tenor player with the Marquise.

He was on the record last night and everything.

He came to me and he said, I hear you guys got a pretty good band. He said, you know, I play saxophone.
I'd like to be in your band. And I said, Well, I'm not really interested.

I don't think we're interested in adding horns to the group. And I said, How long have you been playing? You know, and he said, Oh,

I've been taking lessons for three months. I'm going, oh, yeah, great.
You know.

And somewhere in the conversation, he goes, Oh, by the way, my mother owns a recording studio. And I said, Can you show up for rehearsal on Saturday?

And that is a true story. Now, I may stretch it a little bit, but that's the actual truth.
And we went out, his uncle, Jim Stewart, the owner of Stax Records,

had a little studio in his garage in Memphis. And we went out there and jammed around.

And then they moved from his garage to a little place out in Brunswick, Tennessee, where they had the satellite label. And we would go out there every weekend and play and all that.

And of course, Jim Stewart said we never had a chance, we'd never make it. But I think he just was being devil's advocate to just see if he could push us into something.

And we kept trying. We cut a bunch of instrumentals, some crazy little things that never saw the light of day.
And until until the time that we came up

with

last night. But what happened was Estelle, I don't know Estelle Axton, I don't know if she saw any talent there or what she saw, but she liked me enough to keep me around.

And she put me to work in her record shop. And I sold records.
That's what I did. And

I kept working on

the weekends I would kind of do a little ANRing because people were always coming in. And on Saturdays, I would hold auditions because people were always bringing in songs and all that.

And that's sort of how I got started

in the AR thing. And finally

Jim said, wait a minute. He said, you know, Steve's spending more time in the studio and he is in a record shop and whatever.
And so they got together and decided that I would

start getting my salary from the record company rather than the record shop. And I started working, I guess, AR full-time at that point.

Well, you with the group Booker T and the MGs had the hit of Green Onions, and I think this was

a big hit, and it helped out Stacks Records a lot.

How did the four of you,

Booker T, Al Jackson, Donald Duck Dunn, and yourself, get to play together and become the house rhythm section?

Well,

what it all stemmed from basically was there we were with all this great success doing the Dick Clark show and everything as the Marquis and we had this big hit record last night and it was a lot of fun.

And then all of a sudden it wasn't fun anymore.

It became work and what you call road burdened and that sort of thing and seven of us or eight of us traveling in one car and trying to make all these shows.

And I found out that I wasn't too happy with the road. And so what I really wanted to do was get back in the studio.
I mean that I already knew that that's what I wanted to do.

Anyway, that's what I did. I came back to Memphis.
I went to work in the studio again. I helped put together the rhythm section.

I found out I'd been playing with another band called the Club Handy Band and we had done some sessions for Don Robey.

I think I don't even remember which songs, but I played on the Five Blind Boys albums. I played on L TNT Braggs.
I think there was some Bobby Blue Bland stuff that I played on.

But I played with a lot of those musicians, and we were asking around to find out who was a real good keyboard player.

We had used several, and they said there's this kid, he's still in school, named Booker T. Jones, and he's incredible.
And they had worked with him on a lot of other stuff and on stage as well.

And so we got Booker Booker over on a session, and

everybody just fell in love with him.

Let me play some of Green Onions. And because we're only going to play an excerpt, I'm going to start this a little in because I want to get to your guitar solo in it.

So this is Green Onions, Booker T, and the MGs.

You co-wrote Doc of the Day with Otis Redding, and you produced the record as well,

right? Right. Correct.

What was your collaboration with him like when it to writing songs?

Well, of course, we wrote a lot of songs together.

The inception of Dock at the Bay was really no different than any other one.

Otis was one of those kind of guys who had 100 ideas, and he always had with him, anytime he came in to record, 10 or 15 different pretty good ideas, either intros or titles or whatever.

And he had been in San Francisco doing the Fillmore.

And the story that I got, he had rented a boathouse or stayed out at a boathouse or something. That's when he got the idea of watching the ships come in the bay there.
And that's about all he had.

I watched the ships come in, watch them roll away again, and I'm sitting on the Dock of the Bay. And I just took that.

We just sat down and I just kind of learned the changes that he was kind of running over. And I finished the lyrics.

And if you listen to songs that I collaborated with with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. Well, he never really

He might say the big O in a song or something like that, but Otis didn't really write about himself, but I did. Songs like Mr.
Pitiful, Sad Song, Fa-Fa, they were all about Otis and Otis' life. And

Dock of the Bay is exactly that.

I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay. It was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.

And that's kind of the way I wrote with Otis. I wrote The Bridge and stuff like that.
And that's the way we collaborated. He trusted me.

I always seemed to do the things that he liked.

Worked on songs that came out the way he wanted them. And I also worked on a lot of songs with Otis arrangement-wise, and helped him put them together and all that.

Where I didn't, you know, claim any writers or anything because it wasn't necessary. Otis had most of it finished to begin with, and I just helped him do it.

But a lot of these things, where he had just bits and pieces,

I would actually put them together and we'd make whole songs out of them and go in the next day and record them. So we had a lot of fun together.

Otis was a great guy to work with, and he was a great friend. Well, let's listen to the record.
This is Doc of the Bay.

Sitting in the morning sun.

I'll be sitting in the evening come

watching the ships roll in.

And then I'll watch them roll away again.

Yeah.

I'm sitting on the dark of the bay,

watching the tide

roll away.

Sitting on the dark of the bay,

wasting time

I left my home in Georgia

headed for the Frisco Bay

I've had nothing to live for

and look like nothing's gonna come my way

So I'm just gonna sit on the dark of the bay

Watching the tide

roll away.

I'm sitting on a darker bay,

wasting time.

Look like nothing's gonna change.

Everything

still remains the same.

I can't do what ten people tell me to do.

So I guess I'll remain the same.

Listen, sitting here resting my bones.

And this loneliness won't leave me alone.

Listen, two thousand miles I roam

just to make this dock my home.

Now I'm just gonna sit at the dock of a bay

watching the tide

roll away.

Ooh,

I'm sitting on a darker grave,

wasting

time.

I want to ask you about another record.

And this is also a song you co-wrote. You co-wrote this one with Wilson Pickett, and it's Midnight Hour.

This was, I think, for the first session that you played with Wilson Pickett. Right, it was.
Tell me about writing the song with him. Well, it's real simple.

We knew that he was coming down, and of course, my connection with the record shop. And I went and found some stuff that he had sung on.

Of course, he sang, you know, with the Falcons, and he had sang some spiritual things.

And it seemed like every time that he sang the lead on something, when he got down to the fade-out, he would go, oh, wait till the midnight hour.

Whoa, see my jesus in the midnight hour and all that i said that's the guy's idea so uh i i just took that right there and i presented it to him with a little idea he had a couple ideas and uh what happened was that we picked him up at the airport they dropped us off at the hotel and uh jerry wexler and jim stewart went out to get something to eat and just talk business And when they came back, I don't know, it was a couple hours later, we had In the Midnight Hour written, and Don't Fight It.

They said, we're going to get out of here. Let you guys keep going.
And they left, and we wrote a thing called I'm Not Tired.

And we went in the studio the next day, recorded all three songs, and all three songs were hits. Very lucky me, yeah.

Well, let's hear In the Midnight Hour.

I'm going to wait till the midnight hour.

That's when my love comes tumbling down.

I'm gonna wait till the midnight hour.

When there's no one else around,

I'm gonna take you, girl, and hold you

and do all the things I told you in the midnight hour.

Yes, I am. Oh, yes, I am.

One thing I just wanna say, Ready.

I'm gonna wait

This is Wilson Pickett in The Midnight Hour, co-written by my guest Steve Cropper, who's featured on guitar.

You also did a lot of work playing behind Sam and Dave, and Sam and Dave were the inspiration for the Ackroyd and Belushi group, The Blues Brothers, and you played with them as well.

What did you think of the Blues Brothers when they got started? Or when you got started, or whatever.

What did you think of.

Did you think that it was

a parody that was in bad taste at all? You know, like two white guys doing their parody of black singers, two white guys who probably fantasize about themselves sometimes of

being black singers.

What was your take on it?

Well, you know, they got a lot of bad rap on that, I think, initially. And a lot of people, for some reason, thought that John and Danny were kind of scoffing black musicians for some reason.

That's not the case at all. And what I found out was really the contrary to all of that.
They had such a love for that kind of music, for rhythm and blues and so forth. And I couldn't believe it.

I went to John's house one day and he showed me a collection of blues stuff that just blew me away. I'd never seen that big of a collection of blues music.

Of course, being in Chicago, he had a lot of access to a lot of stuff that, of course, we never heard in Memphis and so forth.

It never really, most of it didn't reach the record shop that I worked in.

You mentioned about Sam and Dave being their influence. That is something that really came about whenever they decided to put a band together and got Duck Dunn and myself involved in the group.

Because they were from the show, you know, from the routine they did on the show, their concept of an album at that point was strictly doing nothing but blues kind of songs.

And, you know, things with the Downchild Blues Band and, you know, Double McClinton stuff and all those kind of things. And I felt...

You know, I'd been in the business a long time, and I felt if they wanted me

to contribute anything to this, I thought they should go a little bit more commercial. And so it was my suggestion, along with Duck Dunn and all, that we do something like Soul Man.

And we later did Who's Making Love as well. But we talked them into doing that, and then they started asking about, well, how did Sam and Dave do?

You know, and so we kind of started showing them some of the routines, like some of the dance things that Sam and Dave would do on stage. And they go, yeah, man, this can be fun.

So that's something that was sort of a new ingredient put in the Blues Brothers act as we started making preparation to do a show.

Steve Cropper spoke with Terry Gross in 1990. He died Wednesday at age 84.

After a break, Kevin Whitehead will celebrate the 100th birthday of jazz organist Jimmy Smith, even though the celebration may be a few years early.

Also, we note the passing of playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last week at age 88.

And critic-at-large John Powers reviews the new Brazilian film, The Secret Agent. I'm David Biancoule, and this is Fresh Air.

Be only

and time for bad.

When the day comes and you are down,

and I'll give them trouble,

and I'm about to drown.

Just hold on,

I'm coming.

Hold on,

I'm coming.

I'm on my way.

Joy and cover.

If you get for me,

I will be your lover.

Don't have to worry,

cause I'm here.

Don't need to stumble, baby.

Cause I'm here.

I'm coming

hold on

I'm coming

hold on

I'm coming

hold on

I'm coming for you

Reach out to me

for that

shit

Look at you, Dave That's all she gotta do

on my name here

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Reference books give the birth date of the great jazz organist Jimmy Smith as December 8th, 1925, 100 years ago. More recent sources cite 1928 as Smith's birth year.

Our jazz historian Kevin Whitehead says at this point, the latter date looks more plausible. That'd make Monday Jimmy Smith's 97th birthday, not his 100th.

But just to be on the safe side, Kevin Whitehead offers this tribute.

Organist Jimmy Smith in crisp, bluesy cooking default mode on 1964's The Cat.

In the 60s, Smith and big bands often squared off as evenly matched sparring partners. In the 1950s, Smith had reinvented jazz organ, becoming the most imitated organist since Bach.

An early inspiration was Wild Bill Davis, who played a blurrier version of the big band-style shout choruses Smith would later tighten up.

Here's Wild Bill in 1950.

Wild Bill Davis

Jimmy Smith could sound much like that early on when he first switched over to organ from piano. But from his first sessions as leader in 1956, his mature concept was there.

The three-piece band with guitar, the deep bluesiness and swing feel, the earthy licks and heavy complications, and the clean and dirty colors he draw from the Hammond B3 organ's tone controls.

And while his hands kept busy with all that, his left foot tapped out bass lines on a pedalboard as his right foot controlled the volume.

Jimmy Smith on You Getcha.

His 1956 Blue Note sides were an instant sensation. In no time, his bass camp Philadelphia was rife with new style organ players like Shirley Scott, Charles Erland, Groove Holmes, and Jimmy McGriff.

Smith taught a few of them, including Joey DiFrancesco, later. Soon there were organ rooms everywhere.

Setting the style one more way, Jimmy Smith manipulated the foot pedals and tone controls to give each note a percussive attack, in effect making organ a percussion instrument.

He'd drum on a single key or two to make the point.

An electric organ keyboard has easier action than piano, so Smith could really get around.

But that percussive attack made hitting the keys sound like work, making his fastest playing seem even more superhuman.

Jimmy Smith's insane 1957 variations on Body and Soul look ahead a decade to Sunros interstellar organ solos.

Jimmy Smith might pepper his LPs with bewiskered oldies like Yes, sir, that's my baby and Swanny. But in the 1960s, like other jazz stars, he hoped to connect with younger rock record buyers.

Smith was better positioned to cross over than most with electric guitar and drums for a band and plenty of boogieing momentum on his own electric axe.

You can bet rock organists checked him out.

Jimmy Smith on Oliver Nelson's 1966 version of Peter and the Wolf, one of a few good albums the Arranger and organist made together, one with Wes Montgomery on guitar.

In search of radio gold, Jimmy Smith stepped out as a singer on a 1968 session. Jazzer's aiming for youth dollars didn't always hit the mark, but his playing was still on the money.

freedom dance for one and all.

Here's a freedom dance, whether you're short or tall. It's a freedom dance, let's have a ball.

A freedom freak out and free for all.

Then portable keyboard synthesizers came along and groovy Hammond B3 organs suddenly sounded old hat.

From the 1970s on, jazz organ groups would go out of and come back into fashion and Jimmy Smith's career had its corresponding downs and ups.

He'd spawned so many admirers, it could be hard to hear him with fresh ears.

But Jimmy Smith always delivered the goods, even as the beats behind him changed, and he always displayed what I think of as outlandish good taste.

The history of his instrument is neatly split. There's jazz organ before Jimmy Smith arrived and jazz organ after.

Simple as that.

Kevin Whitehead is the author of New Dutch Swing, Why Jazz, and Play the Way You Feel.

Coming up, we remember the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard. This is Fresh Air.
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One of Britain's most celebrated playwrights, Tom Stoppard, died last week at the age of 88.

Condolences and tributes came from King Charles III, Mick Jagger, and the National Theater in Britain, where many of his plays were first staged.

The theater released a statement saying that Stoppard's plays, quote, with their blend of intellectual curiosity, wit, and narrative experimentation, have made a lasting impact on the national theater and on British theater.

His bold storytelling encouraged audiences to reflect on history, philosophy, and the human experience, unquote.

Stoppard's best-known best-known plays include The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, and Rosencrantz and Guildensterner Dead.

He wrote screenplays for the movies Shakespeare in Love, The Human Factor, The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, and Empire of the Sun. He was knighted in 2007.

Terry Gross spoke with Tom Stoppard in 1991 when the movie adaptation was released of his play Rosencrantz and Guildensterner Dead.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

They're Hamlet's old friends who unknowingly become part of a plot to have Hamlet killed, but Hamlet has them executed instead.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never understand the larger story they are part of. This predicament, so typical of minor characters, is the subject of Stoppard's absurdist comedy.

The play first opened at London's National Theater in 1967 and soon after had success on Broadway. Terry asked Stoppard why he wrote a story about minor characters in Hamlet.

The first thing I liked about them is that

there were two of them and

the double act, you know, has a long and honorable comic tradition.

And I can see why, because they're fun to write. And these two people, not Shakespeare's version of them, but mine,

I turned them into the kind of double act which everybody is familiar with. There's usually one who's a little brighter and quite often angry with the other one who's a bit dim but sweet and so on.

Laurel and Hardy, Abbott Gustav. A little like that, yes.
And the other thing about them was that in the story which they've been dropped into, they have this sort of very strange predicament.

When you look at Shakespeare's text, they're not really told what's happening in that play.

And furthermore, when they end up dead,

they don't know why. They don't know what they've done.
In fact, they haven't done anything.

So they're well-meaning and they're often presented as

villains, spies, on the side of the bad King Claudius. But in point of fact,

there's no reason to look at them like that. Now I found them rather endearing.

Well, you you use a lot of wordplay in your work.

And uh as a matter of fact, let me play a clip here of um a scene in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are playing um

like word game tennis. Oh, yes.

You want to explain the

way the game works? The idea is that

it's two people who

have to avoid

answering questions. They have to answer a question with a question.
And the first time somebody forgets or breaks one of the rules, then he loses a point. What's the matter with you today?

When? What? Are you deaf? Am I dead? Yes or no? Is there a choice? Is there a gun? Foul. No non-sequiturs.
Three, two, one. Game all.
What's your name? What's yours? You first. Statement.
One love.

What's your name when you're at home? What's yours? When I'm at home? Is it different at home? What home? Haven't you got one? Why do you ask? What are you driving at? What's your name? Repetition.

Two love. Match point.

Who do you think you are? Rhetoric! Game and match! Match!

Do you think of yourself as having played word games in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as elaborate as the games Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play with each other?

What's happening is that

they're these two people

who

are stuck there waiting for the next event to discuss and talk about. Between Shakespeare's scenes, they don't really have any purpose or role and they pass the time in different ways.

They discuss things, they speculate and occasionally they get into some kind of game. Words is all they have available.

They don't have um T V or whatever. They they're just there with themselves.

So um in some

strange way the predicament of the

of the writer is the same as the predicament of the characters because in writing the play I was in exactly that situation, that they had a scene between scenes and there was no plot that they were aware of.

So they had to pass the time and I had I had to invent ways to help them to pass pass the time. So we were all three of us, Rosencranz and Grutenstern and I,

we were in the same situation.

Now one of the themes of your work is the difference between art and life, kind of comparing art and life. And both you and Shakespeare have used plays within plays.

Do you think that's a good device for exploring the difference between art and life? Because like the framing play becomes reality even though it's really theater too.

Yes, it's it's something I don't know why, but it's there's something about that which clearly appeals to me because I've used it more than once, more than twice.

There's something about

writing about the relationship between one work of art inside or up against

another known

play by somebody else. There's something which makes sparks for me.
And

it got to a point a few years ago where I had to stop myself from doing another one of those. It was becoming a kind of mannerism.

But anyway, in my case, I'm always writing about the ostensible subject matter, not the supposed subtext.

And I'm constantly coming up against uh students, for example, who believe that that uh I've written the play

in a sort of uh attempt to disguise what I'm really writing about.

And I know what they mean because because uh perhaps on some level you're doing that, But it's not honestly, it's not really the way that writers think, I don't believe.

Let's get into your background a little. You were born in Czechoslovakia, and your family fled because of the Nazis?

Yes, I mean, in the sort of general phrase, the gathering war, you know.

A lot of people left what looked like

what looked as though it might turn into a theater of war. And we went to Singapore, which was ironic because we got there in time for Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion.
And

we got, women and children went on boats. My mother tells me that our boat was supposed to go to Australia, but for some reason or other, while we were out at sea, it turned around and went to India.

And that's how I ended up there. So women and children were given the passage on the boats and the men stayed behind, so your father stayed behind? That's right, and he died in Singapore.

And after the war, when we were in India, my mother remarried an Englishman whose name I now have.

Stopper.

Exactly. Do you have a lot of memories of being frightened a lot

when you were a child and your family was fleeing Czechoslovakia and then Singapore?

I remember.

I think I remember being driven to the boat in Singapore. And I had a sense that there was some kind of air raid.
And

I certainly remember a Japanese Zero

aeroplane with its nose in the ground, just sort of where it had crashed. I remember being in the air raid shelters.
Everybody in my generation remembers the smell of sandbags.

But in India,

I'm afraid that protected by the innocence of childhood,

I never felt unhappy or worried or nervous. I mean, obviously, I must have done sometimes, but in a general way, I look on India as being a lost domain of childhood happiness.

When you were writing the screen adaptation for Empire of the Sun, did you identify with the story at all,

you know, because you were in Singapore during wartime and you and your parents got away on the ship?

Yeah, when I was asked to write that screenplay, they didn't know that

my own childhood wasn't that different from young Jim's. Was he called Jim? Yes.

But

he was in Shanghai, but

but when I

when I visited the location and

saw the little boy's bedroom, it gave me a really spooky feeling because the designers, who must have researched it very thoroughly,

they

they gave him books and things stuck on the walls, which triggered off memories of my own. I mean, they were my books and over his bed was a thing,

a little sh um a thing called Flags of All Nations, a sort of

map, a chart of different flags. And I remembered suddenly having this absolutely the same chart, Flags of All Nations, in my bedroom.
So it was a really time trip. But

as for writing the story, well, listen, I didn't get put in a prisoner of war camp and I wasn't chased around by Japanese soldiers, no.

I want to thank you very much for talking with us. Oh, I enjoyed it.
Thank you very much.

Tom Stoppard, speaking with Terry Gross in 1991. The celebrated playwright died last week at age 88.

Coming up, John Powers reviews the new Brazilian film, The Secret Agent. This is Fresh Air.
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The new Brazilian film The Secret Agent is set during that country's dictatorship, which ran from 1964 to 1985. It stars Wagner Mora as an honorable scientist who becomes a target of powerful forces.

The movie, which was directed by clever Mendoncha Filio, won two big prizes at Cannes and is Brazil's submission for this year's Academy Awards.

Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says it's even better than I'm Still Here, the Brazilian movie that won an Oscar earlier this year.

If you've spent any time in a dictatorship, I've had that happy experience. You understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy.

You quickly learn that authoritarian states are all about violence, inescapable corruption, and a sense of free-floating anxiety.

You get a masterful portrait of what that's like in The Secret Agent, an unsettling yet very enjoyable new movie by Brazil's leading filmmaker, Cleber Mendonsofilio.

Set in 1977, near the middle of his country's two-decade dictatorship, this smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency.

The superb Brazilian actor Wagner Mora, who became famous here on Narcos, stars as a research scientist called Marcelo, an innocent man on the lamb for reasons we only learn later.

He heads to Recife, a coastal city in northern Brazil, to pick up his young son from his late wife's parents and then flee the country together.

He takes refuge with Donna Sebastiana, a deliciously free-spoken Septuaginarian who's at once a real pistol and something of a saint.

Her apartment house is a secret sanctuary for people in various types of trouble.

As Marcelo makes his escape plans, we also follow the bad guys, a couple of hitmen from down south, and Recife's gleefully crooked chief of police, who's a blast to watch, even though he's a monster.

We keep waiting for and fearing the moment these villains find Marcelo.

Adding to the craziness, Recife is right in the middle of carnival, and a bout of public hysteria about a man's severed hairy leg that has supposedly come back to life and is attacking the local citizenry.

Now Mendozo began as a critic, and his tastes run from art movies to shoot-'em-ups.

Even as he honors the thriller genre by slowly building suspense, he tells his story with an auteur's freedom and looseness, leaping around in time and often stepping away from the plot to show us the interesting textures of Brazilian life.

A gay cruising area, a local movie theater, a murdered body that's been lying outside a gas station for days.

Mendonza is a loyal son of Recife, and his first major film, 2012's Neighboring Sounds, used his own residential block as a metaphor for 21st century Brazil.

Here he goes back in time to bring alive the city's swirling history.

From its cafes and apartments to its dingy alleyways and spectacular vistas, no movie this year has such a warmly detailed and loving sense of place.

Mendonza's Recife is a vibrant racially mixed place where good and bad live side by side.

In the movie, its carnival is an eruption of samba and alcohol and joy that also, newspaper headlines tell us, leaves 91 people dead.

Like a political thriller from the Hollywood 70s, the secret agent presents us with an x-ray of society from its highest reaches to its darkest corners.

It's hard to imagine a richer cast of characters, each individualized and respectfully given their humanity.

Be it the hitman who bristles at his employer's offhand racism, the Jewish tailor scarred with World War II bullet holes, the smug tycoon getting rich off the dictatorship, the secretary who has the hots for Marcelo, or Marcelo's late wife who appears in only one scene.

But she and that scene are lacerating.

Stitching it all together is Maura, whose shapeshifting performance is a triumph of watchful subtlety, so quietly warm and sympathetic that we're with him the whole way.

There may be no better piece of screen acting this year than the one in which Marcelo first meets his fellow residents at Dona Sebastiana's.

Mora's amused, melancholy gaze takes in each of them in a precise, generous way that that makes you realize the kind of big soul he actually has.

The secret agent makes clever use of the movie Jaws, which Marcelo's son wants to see, even though the poster gives him nightmares. In a way, Mendonzo's movie works like Spielberg's.

We keep wondering, with mounting dread, if and when Marcelo will get caught.

But here, of course, the danger comes not from a real shark, but from a political one, a military junta where the rich and powerful feel entitled to crush anyone who merely offends them.

At one point, eluding his pursuers, Marcelo steps onto a street filled with carnival goers ecstatically partying.

He has a drink and briefly joins in the dancing. And we realize how happy his world could be if only those in power weren't trying to kill him.

John Powers reviewed the new movie The Secret Agent, now playing in New York and L.A.

It's scheduled scheduled to roll out soon nationwide.

On Monday's show, Homelessness in America, Patrick Markey spent two decades walking through New York City's tunnels, armories, and intake centers where families sleep on floors.

His new book, Placeless, asks: What if homelessness isn't a personal failing, but a political choice? And what if the solution is simpler than we think? I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash thisisfreshair.

We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts, and iconic interviews from the archive. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Sam Brigher is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurrock.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Deanna Martinez.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Mikundi, and Anna Baum.

Our digital media producer is Molly C. V.
Nesper. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancoule.

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The pipe bursts at midnight. The heater quits on the coldest night.

Good thing Home Serve's hotline is available 24-7. Call to schedule a repair and a local pro will be on their way.
Trusted by millions. For plans starting at $4.99 a month, go to home serve.com.

Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month your first year.
Terms apply on covered repairs.