As the opening credits of the documentary “Sunday Best” roll, Billy Preston in a killer chartreuse suit takes to “The Ed Sullivan Show” stage. Ray Charles pounds the keyboards and brass players ready to enter a sped-up version of “Agent Double-O-Soul.”
From the get-go, Sacha Jenkins’s film about the variety show trailblazer Ed Sullivan and his commitment to Black performers, entwined as it became with the Civil Rights Movement, keeps us hooked. It’s not just the trove of archival performances — Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, James Brown — that persuade. It’s observations from legends and friends; among them Harry Belafonte, Smokey Robinson and the Motown impresario Berry Gordy.
A music journalist-turned-filmmaker, Jenkins had the hip-hop bona fides to guarantee “Sunday Best” would not be a white savior tale. Instead, his film reveals the authentic amity and steadfast values of an ally. As a young sportswriter, Sullivan denounced N.Y.U.’s football program for benching a Black player when the University of Georgia came to town.
“My parents knew these things were wrong … it wasn’t broad-minded, it was just sensible,” he tells the journalist David Frost in a 1969 television interview. Born in 1901 in a Harlem of Jewish and Irish immigrants, Sullivan furthered his mother and father’s example. “You can’t do so-and-so because the South will not accept it,” Belafonte recalls execs and sponsors telling Sullivan. “Ed pushed the envelope as far as an envelope could be pushed.”
Illuminating and so entertaining, “Sunday Best” nevertheless elicits a mournful pang. Sullivan died in 1974. Belafonte is gone. Jenkins died in May at the age of 53. And a once celebrated CBS, home to Sullivan for decades, seems to be begging for last rites.
Sunday Best
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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