Trans R&B Singer Jackie Shane Shines Again in Painterly Doc Portrait Any Other Way

JACKIE SHANE: ANY OTHER WAY 

(Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, Canada, 2024, 99 minutes) 

"I was born, but never lived."

--Jackie Shane (1940-2019)

A conventional documentary wouldn't have suited R&B performer Jackie Shane. 

A coproduction of Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Film Board, Any Other Way isn't the first film about a musician of whom little performance footage exists, but unlike most, it doesn't rely strictly on still images, but on painterly recreations of her life at home and on the stage. In other words, it's a cross between a traditional documentary and an animated biopic. 

Though Jackie was making music associated with the Deep South in the 1960s, from the likes of Georgia-born Little Richard and Alabama-born Wilson Pickett, she was a visible trans performer at a time when that was anything but the norm in either Canada or the United States.  

When historians look back at the Toronto music scene of that era, it's all about Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot, all of whom deserve the attention, but Jackie was right there in the mix, and yet completely set apart from the rock scene. While all three of these artists continued to ply their trade in the 1970s and beyond, Jackie completely disappeared. 

Co-directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, alongside animators Luca Tarantini and Jared Raab, fill in the blanks, while further contextualizing the Numero Group's 2017 collection of her work. I'm pretty sure that's how I first heard about her, and it was love at first listen. 

As it turns out, Jackie had a whole life in the US, since it's where she was born, where she spent most of her life, and where she died. 

Tennessee natives Vonnie Crawford-Moore and Andrenee Majors-Douglas, a niece and a cousin, didn't find out--until she bequeathed them her modest estate--that she had lived in the same area for 40 years. All of a sudden, the two women found themselves in possession of a museum's-worth of stage apparel, costume jewelry, faded photographs, reel-to-reel tapes, and other remnants of a life about which they hadn't known a thing. Because they didn't even know she existed. Significantly, they also found a hand-written autobiography with the perfectly pulpy title Let "God" Be My Judge.

In the film, trans performers Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Walker read passages from the unpublished manuscript, sometimes as themselves, sometimes as rotoscoped versions of Jackie in her various elements. Had she not written down her story, the directorial duo would have to recreate it by sifting through the clues, but she made sure she would get to reconstruct it herself--the late Anita Pallenberg did much the same, since Catching Fire, Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill's 2024 documentary about the model and actress, also relies on a manuscript left behind after her passing. 

The Any Other Way filmmakers, who knew about Jackie before Vonnie and Andrenee, also recorded their conversations with their subject during her final year, but always over the phone, and never in person. She had become a recluse. A combination of voices, including Jackie and her admiring heirs, describes her background. She inherited a love of singing from the grandmother who raised her, and pursued it from youth as a member of the church choir. From early on, she was also drawn to all things feminine. 

In young adulthood, her music career took off just as she was becoming more feminine in her affect. 

She revealed an affinity for the drums, purchased a kit, and plunged into the blues and soul scene, backing up stars, like Joe Tex, when they came through town. She was earning her keep, having fun, and relishing her independence. She even befriended Little Richard with whom she would hang out while he was living in Nashville. 

It was Tex who encouraged Jackie to leave the Jim Crow South for greener climes, so she literally joined the circus in the form of a carnival, which traveled to Canada, and with which she fell in love, starting with Cornwall where she decamped, and then Montreal, where she set down roots as a singer, still not yet fully trans, but more feminine-looking than ever before. 

Abundant photos track every stage of Jackie's transition, from lipstick and penciled eyebrows to more elaborate makeup combined with men's suits. I mean no disrespect, but her brows were pretty crazy, though I wouldn't say it was a specifically trans thing. Sophia Loren and Giulietta Masina also had swooping eyebrows at the time--at least she was in excellent company. 

By the time Jackie made her way to Toronto, she looked more like a woman with a preference for suits, like Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, than a man who liked to wear makeup, like Little Richard or Liberace. Nonetheless, she preferred to use male pronouns, though she refused to take off her makeup or to play for segregated audiences, even if it meant missing out on star-making opportunities, like The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand. She was making the rules up as she went along, which may not play well with some viewers, but nowadays there are more resources for young trans people.

If Jackie was packing Toronto's Saphire club and even drawing fans from across the border, the city's big pop station, CHUM, ignored her music, including signature 1963 single "Any Other Way." They just weren't interested in Black artists, but Jackie's fans forced their hand, and they eventually relented, sending the song to #2 on the local singles chart.

With the release of the Red Hot Organization's 46-track compilation Transa on November 22 of this year, it's possible the song will hit the airwaves again--or for the very first time, depending on your station of choice. 

As Jim Farber noted in a New York Times preview from earlier this month, "Another historic reference point comes from a cover of the song 'Any Other Way,' which became an improbable Canadian hit in the '60s for the soul singer and early trans performer Jackie Shane. The Americana singer and banjo player Allison Russell recorded Shane's song for the project several months ago at Mexican Summer studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a stripped-down version, joined by the harpist Ahya Simone.” (The Canadian-born Russell, who identifies as queer, is cisgender, while the Detroit-based Simone is trans.) 

In 1971, Jackie returned to the States with her common-law husband Dan--a strikingly handsome man--changed her name, and settled in Pasadena where she lived fully as a woman. No more suits, no more male pronouns. She traded a public career for a private life, but it wasn't built to last. 

At this point, I was reminded of Lili Elbe, the real-life trans artist who inspired The Danish Girl, a fundamentally dishonest 2015 film that warps the circumstances that led to her death. Suffice to say her life was more fulfilling than the dismal one Tom Hooper depicts, except it wasn't enough. Just as Jackie longed to be a suburban housewife, Lili longed to have a baby. Neither woman got her wish--but at least Jackie's dream didn't kill her.

In the late-1970s, she returned to Nashville to take care of her ailing mother and stepfather. She also reclaimed the name Jackie Shane. After her parents passed, she went into seclusion. She maintained contact with a few friends, but it was mostly just her and her little black cat, and since cats only live so long—I lost my 19-year-old Lola in January—there are times she may have been completely alone. 

The filmmakers make space for Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Walker to share their thoughts about Jackie's journey, and also about their own lives. Caldwell, who is especially forthcoming, found a way to reconcile her personal and professional selves, but Jackie chose one over the other. Sad as it may seem now, it's possible she made the best choice, because she may not have been able to hold on to her career if she had fully transitioned in the public eye, but we lost all the music she might have made. 

Fortunately, we didn't lose the music she did make. Just as Light in the Attic brought the work of Betty Davis, another trailblazer-turned-recluse, to a new audience, the Numero Group did the same when they tracked Jackie down and arranged to package her life's work in a box set filled with singles, live tracks, and an 80-page biography. After the set received a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album, she started to make plans that fate did not allow her to bring to fruition, but she was thrilled to speak with the press about her music and to receive messages of praise from fans old and new.

So, it's a sort of happy ending. Some artists, like Nick Drake and Arthur Russell, don't get their flowers until long after they're gone, but Jackie lived long enough to get hers. Other than the fact that I was never certain how she made a living once her music career had come to an end--a problem with too many documentaries about long-forgotten or newly-rediscovered artists--Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee did right by their subject. 

Beyond the participants mentioned above, they also spoke with music historian Michael Gray, gender studies professor Marisa Richmond, singer and dancer James Baley, choreographer Rodney Diverlus, writer Elaine Gaber-Katz, and biographer Rob Bowman. Further, they tapped some notable Canadian talent as producers: Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Page and Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, the directors behind several fine hard rock documentaries.

In her life, Jackie didn't get everything she wanted, but she lived her truth, and Any Other Way honors a woman of color who refused to let racism, homophobia, and transphobia define or destroy her, even as that same toxic brew led her to leave the wider world behind for an intimate space filled with glittering mementos of that brief, shining moment she was a sexy, sassy, singing star. A Sylvester before Sylvester, a Prince before Prince. A groundbreaker and a path-maker for more new and exciting performers.

12/17/24 update: the film opens at Northwest Film Forum on Feb 21. 

 

Jackie Shane: Any Other Way, which has received theatrical play in Canada, is currently making the festival rounds in the US. I'll update this post once it becomes possible to see in Seattle, whether in-person or online. Images from Image Amplified (Jackie on the bed), Spotify ("Any Other Way" single), Hot Docs (Jackie and Little Richard), Vintage Everyday (Jackie with swooping brows), Ahya Simone Live, and Vogue (Jackie in the suburbs).

Don’t Mess Around with the Cemetery Man

CEMETERY MAN / Delamorte Dellamore 

(Michele Soavi, Italy, 1987, 103 minutes) 

Cemetery Man, Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi's fourth feature film, has it all. 

To be sure, it's a horror film, zombie division. There are zombies, "returners" in the film's parlance, lurching all over this thing, but it's also a comedy and a love story--two love stories, no less. Other zom-coms, like 2013's Warm Bodies and 2014's Life After Beth, have combined the same genres, but Soavi got there decades before, and Cemetery Man, Delamorte Dellamore in its native country, is a model of the horror/comedy/romance form. 

But wait! There's more, because it's also a star vehicle. No disrespect to the film's continental cast, who offer excellent value, but the film, in the best of ways, could be considered The Rupert Everett Show. Forget, or put aside, all of those period pieces, like Mike Newell's 1985 Dance With a Stranger, Everett has to carry this entire film on his back, and he makes it look easy. 

Cemetery Man begins with Everett's Francesco Delamorte in his home at night. He's shirtless, cigarette dangling from the side of his downturned mouth, and looking for all the world like a goddamn movie star. He hears a sound at the door, opens it, comes face to face with an ashen-faced zombie with a fly buzzing around his ear, and shoots him in the noggin. The insouciant way he goes about the task indicates that this happens all the time. It's as funny as it is unexpected–an opening sequence for the ages. 

And it does, indeed, happen all the time. 

Ever since an epidemic ravaged Francesco's mountain village, many newly dead humans come back to life after seven days. Someone has to keep the zombie population under control, and he ended up with the gig. Instead of gratitude, however, the townspeople treat him like a pariah. The way they see it, he's no different than a garbage collector. Fortunately, he doesn't really care. Francisco is perfectly content to fill a role to which he appears to be well suited. 

Nor is he alone, since he he has a trusty assistant, Gnaghi (actor-musician François Hadji-Lazaro of The City of Lost Children and French band Les Garçons Bouchers), who lives in the basement, digs the graves, gobbles food like an overgrown toddler, and spends his free time parked in front of the boob tube. Throughout the film, he makes non-verbal noises, but refrains from any recognizable words, with the possible exception of "gna." 

Not insignificantly, Gnaghi serves as Francesco's negative image, a squat, shaven-headed cross between Moe of the Three Stooges and Buster Bloodvessel of British ska-punk outfit Bad Manners. He may not look like anyone's idea of a romantic hero, but just like his boss, Gnaghi will fall in love with a lovely young local, who will return his ardor in ways you can't possibly imagine--unless you've read the novel. Soavi pulls out all the stops to depict their hilariously grotesque and strangely touching romance.

Writer Gianni Romoli, meanwhile, adapted the screenplay from Tiziano Sclavi's 1991 novel Delamorte Dellamore. 

Though the film has taken hits over the years for the switch to Cemetery Man for English-speaking territories, it's an apt title that doubled as a savvy commercial move. Further, by 1994, Everett had starred in an Oscar-winning short, 1982's A Shocking Accident, and scored a BAFTA nomination for 1984's Another Country, in which he played a role he had originated on stage in 1981. Though Soavi had a track record in Italy for his work in the horror genre, both on his own and with Dario Argento, Everett was seen as an international star who would make the film a hit, except it wasn't. And nor was it the fault of either gentleman, though I do have a few theories… 

First of all, one of the film's biggest strengths, the way it mixes and mingles genres, may have confused critics, audiences, and exhibitors. 

Second, the high-born Everett was a name, but he was best known for literary adaptations drawn from the works of Ian McEwan, Alan Bennett, and numerous others. There's nothing wrong with that–on the contrary–but it may have created a disconnect, with horror fans staying away, because he seemed too refined for the genre, and with Everett fans staying away because the material seemed beneath him. It's neither of those things, and the actor proved he could get his well-manicured hands as dirty as necessary, but I can understand the confusion his casting may have caused.

Then there's the more delicate matter of his sexual orientation. 

It may not have been a factor, but I couldn't say for sure. Though Everett had played a gay character in both versions of Another Country, he didn't come out, in real life, until 1989. Afterward, he says, the job offers went away. 

If anything, Soavi may have gotten a better deal for his services in 1994 than he would have in 1986 when Sclavi modeled the paranormal investigator at the center of his comic series Dylan Dog on Everett's handsomely-tousled appearance in Another Country. Further, Everett may have been drawn to the project more because he needed the money than because he was passionate about the material, though knowing he had inspired a previous Sclavi character may have proved irresistibly appealing.

Not surprisingly, they've been conflated, but Dylan Dog and Francesco Dellamorte are different characters, though they do share similar, baddie-fighting characteristics. Amazingly, the series has continued for nearly 40 years, though Sclavi has been increasingly less involved with the writing. 

In Cemetery Man, Everett plays things unambiguously straight–so straight that it becomes a liability. 

Francesco's commitment to the bit will be put to the test toward the end, in ways both physical and spiritual. If anything, the discontents of hyper-heterosexuality is kind of the point of the film. 

Francesco can slay zombies with the best of them, but he's so emotionally stunted that he can't form anything other than a purely sexual relationship with a woman. Some moviegoers may not have been ready to see this particular actor play that particular part, and yet Everett's ability to project both movie star charisma and an underdeveloped, adolescent sensibility is precisely what makes his performance sing. 

Francesco is so unworldly and poorly educated, in fact, that he has only "read" two books, one he never finished and the phone book in which he crosses out the name of each corpse that ends up in the graveyard.

Everything changes--and not necessarily for the better--when he spots Anna Falchi's very young, very sexy widow in a funeral procession at his place of business, mourning the loss of her much older, very dead husband.

In Romoli's screenplay, she's simply named She. 

Normally, it would irritate me that the men have proper names while the primary female character doesn't, except she represents Francesco's ideal, and he doesn't really see her as a person. Furthermore, Falchi will end up playing two more women in quick succession. Soavi never establishes whether they all really look alike, or whether Francesco simply imagines that they do, because his obsession with this unattainable creature has so thoroughly clouded his vision. 

Since Cemetery Man is filled with surprises, I would rather avoid too many plot specifics, other than to say that Soavi, in his excellent commentary track, demurs that it's pretty episodic. He's not completely wrong, but that's hardly a liability, since it plays like a series of intricately-rendered comic book panels come to life--not least when a zombified motorcyclist bursts through the soil to ride again, an absolutely stunning in-camera effect that would not have made the same impact if created digitally. I went into the film cold, and I love the way it consistently keeps predictability at bay. 

And that includes Falchi. There's no doubt that the model-turned-actress was hired for her looks, but she holds her own with Everett, despite the fact that it was her first leading role. It's quite a remarkable achievement. 

Prior to Cemetery Man, Falchi was best known for a perfume ad shot by Federico Fellini. 

Not a bad calling card for a 22-year-old aspiring actress, but no guarantee that she could credibly play three characters, one of whom will turn into a moldering zombie, and that isn't exactly a spoiler, since it happens surprisingly early on in the proceedings. 

In the interview included with the new release, Falchi says the makeup sessions took as long as seven to eight hours. The release also comes with a making-of documentary, which includes footage of the painstaking process. 

Though the film is filled with plenty of fun zombie jump scares, few things gave me more of a start than Falchi's first appearance on screen wearing sheer, designer-style widow's weeds, because she didn't seem quite real.

Just as the two teenage boys in John Hughes' 1985 horror-comedy Weird Science managed to miraculously create the seemingly perfect woman in the form of Kelly LeBrock–in a decidedly '80s twist on Frankenstein–Falchi's widow looks exactly like the kind of living centerfold a teenage boy or sex-obsessed comic book illustrator would dream up, and that isn't a knock. 

Much as Australian transplant Margot Robbie had to conform to an all-American image of female perfection to play the living doll in Barbie, the Finnish-Italian actress wouldn't have passed muster if she looked too ordinary. With her full lips, almond eyes, ample bosom, and wasp waist, she's like something engineered in a lab, i.e. what most every member of the Kardashian clan wishes they looked like, except it's all apparently real. In the new interview, Falchi admits that she had extensions to make her long, honey-blonde hair look extra-luxurious, but that doesn't count as fakery in my book, just a touch of movie magic.    

Aging comes for anyone who lives long enough, but many va-va-voom female performers don't wear it well. Falchi, who has aged more gracefully than your average blonde bombshell, is a major exception to the rule.

Everett, on the other hand, showed up for his on-camera interview wearing a very unflattering, extra-tall, red knit cap. I have no idea why, especially since it doesn't even look comfortable–it looks itchy. A fully-grown adult has the right to wear whatever he wants, of course, but it's a bizarre choice.  

He also speaks about the film in flattering terms, though Soavi admits that they locked horns. By 1994, Everett had made films in both Italy and Spain, so I don't know if language or cultural differences left him feeling isolated, if the role of an antihero who makes a heel turn was getting to him, or if he expected more coddling on the set, but he appears to have had a fairly miserable time. Then, when the film proved something other than a hit, he claimed that Soavi was the worst director he had ever worked with. Though he doesn't mention it in his interview, Soavi definitely mentions it in his. 

It wouldn't take long, however, for Cemetery Man to become a deserving cult classic. If Everett has warmed to it over the years, it may simply be because time has healed his wounds, or because it's no longer the redheaded stepchild of his CV. If anything, it's one of the glittering jewels in his crown. Unlike Soavi, who appears to have stopped working as a feature-film director in 2018, or Falchi, who appears to have stopped working as a leading lady in 2013, Everett is still plugging away. 

Leading roles may be a thing of the past, but the 65-year-old continues to show up in studio productions, like Ridley Scott's 2023 Napoleon, in which he plays the Duke of Wellington, or Starz's The Serpent Queen, on which he plays Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Everett has also kept busy as a memoirist and novelist, and Simon and Schuster will release his next book, a collection of short stories called The American No, on October 3, 2024.

After Cemetery Man, Everett would avoid horror, notwithstanding a role as a demon in 2019's Muse and a guru in 2022's She Will. It wasn't really his thing, though he's perfect as Francesco Dellamorte. On the other hand, if the film had been a hit, we might have gotten a series of increasingly less heartfelt, less handcrafted sequels--better one great film that stands alone.

Cemetery Man, fully restored from the Cinecittà negative, is available on Blu-ray and 4K HD from Severin Films. Images from StudioCanal and IGN (Rupert Everett), Talk Film Society (Everett and François Hadji-Lazaro), IntoMore.com (Everett and Cary Elwes in Another Country), Hey Kids Comics! (Dylan Dog No. 1 cover by Claudio Villa), the IMDb (Everett admiring Anna Falchi), American Cinematheque (Falchi after zombification), Pinterest (Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science), and X (actor-director Michel Soavi on the set of 1991's The Sect with actor-director Dario Argento).