When Motown blasted through the barriers that separated Black stars from white acceptance in the 1960s, bringing the likes of Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, and the Jackson 5 to a mass audience, the record label had a key TV accomplice. He was a slightly awkward white guy in his 60s, and he had already been championing Black entertainers for years. He was the face of mainstream America, and when he pointed his finger at you, it meant good things were set to happen.
The new Netflix documentary “Sunday Best” makes the case that Ed Sullivan, derided early in his career for being a stone-faced stiff, was a low-key but high-profile civil rights pioneer. Enlisting the likes of Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Dionne Warwick, filmmaker Sacha Jenkins presents a Sullivan who took stands when he didn’t have to, at a time when beaming Black performers into white homes was still a risky venture (especially when those homes were in the South).
It’s a lively pop history lesson, and a bittersweet one. Jenkins, a stellar journalist and filmmaker, died in May of a neurodegenerative disorder. He was thorough but mischievous on the page and the screen; when I interviewed him many years ago for the publication of his erudite, comically barbed pop culture and race riff “ego trip’s Big Book of Racism,” he described himself to me as “a big, scary Black man.” His other documentaries include the hip-hop fashion study “Fresh Dressed” and “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” which, like “Sunday Best,” looks at an establishment figure whose actions were more progressive than they may have seemed during his lifetime.
Armstrong is among the artists we see performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and its predecessor, “Toast of the Town.” So are (deep breath) Ike and Tina Turner, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald … you get the picture. Sullivan famously had Elvis (in 1956 and 1957), and the Beatles, in 1964 and 1965. But he also had all of the above, and many more.
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Every Sunday night on CBS from 1948 to 1971 Sullivan booked and championed artists he admired, regardless of color. This was a big deal, especially in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, but even into the ‘60s, when “The Ed Sullivan Show” was sharing airspace with news footage of fire hoses and police dogs assailing civil rights protesters. As the doc explains, Sullivan got heat from CBS and from his major sponsor, Lincoln-Mercury, for his color-blind booking.
Lincoln-Mercury dropped him in 1962; the company never came out and pinned the decision on Southern viewers’ objection to Sullivan’s booking, but that clearly played a part. Segregationists railed against Sullivan, who had the temerity to challenge notions of white supremacy. The doc also traces Sullivan’s early life, beginning with his childhood in Harlem (then largely Irish and Jewish), where he developed a healthy distrust of racism.
“Sunday Best” leans into performance footage, which is a very good thing. Try not to get chills watching a 13-year-old Stevie Wonder blazing through the harmonica parts of “Fingertips,” or the Jackson 5, with a pipsqueak Michael Jackson up front, jamming through “The Love You Save.” Jenkins makes the wise choice to let many of the songs keep playing over footage that diverges from performance. For instance, the music from an early James Brown appearance keeps playing as we follow the story of how a young Sullivan, as a New York sports columnist, laid into New York University for benching a star Black player for a home game against the University of Georgia. “What a shameful state of affairs,” we hear Sullivan say as the text of his column appears on the screen.
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How, you might ask, do we hear him say this? This brings us to the oddest feature of “Sunday Best,” and it takes a little getting used to. As onscreen text tells us at the beginning of the doc, ”Ed Sullivan’s voice has been recreated in select portions of this film. His words have been taken verbatim from thousands of columns, articles and letters he wrote throughout his life.” It’s a strange sensation, hearing a voice we know only from its public utterances speaking in more intimate tones, and how you respond probably depends on your feelings about the age of no-limits AI. The whole thing has a bit of a bringing-out-the-dead vibe. It bothered me at first, but before long I accepted it as part of the film’s general landscape. It’s an intriguing way to go right to the source, and it cuts down on the wall-to-wall talking head factor that drives so many documentaries.
“Sunday Best” can get dangerously close to anointing its subject as Saint Ed. The film has a single-minded argument to make, and it’s not terribly interested in painting a warts-and-all portrait. But it makes that argument well, and with a head-nodding beat. The Motown connection is a sort of capstone for the whole enterprise; as we hear testimonials from Robinson and Motown founder Berry Gordy, still alive and kicking at 95, we realize that the label was tailor-made for Sullivan’s mission of presenting Black artists to as many people as possible. It seems some civil rights trailblazers come in unlikely packages.
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SUNDAY BEST
Directed by Sacha Jenkins. On Netflix starting Monday. 90 minutes.