#45 — Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (Jeff Margolis, 1979)
I had an old friend who theorized that watching someone who is the best at what they do plying their trade is always an amazing experience, even if (or maybe especially if) you have no inherent interest in what’s being done. I believe he first shared this notion after Yo-Yo Ma perform with his cello on some television program, but I always think of Muhammad Ali as the positive proof for me. I don’t like boxing in the slightest, but seeing old footage of Ali in the ring during his prime is like glimpsing perfection itself, a human endeavor of toil and sweat transformed into pure art simply through the ideal doing of it. While I have far more affection for the form being practiced in this case, I have much the same feeling when I watch Richard Pryor: Live in Concert.

Pryor was an undisputed star at the time his first full-length concert film was released. Besides years on the stand-up circuit, he’d made the transition to film acting with both parts that stretched him artistically (Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar and the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues, for which he may very well have missed an Oscar nomination by inches) and fueled his celebrity (1976’s initial teaming with Gene Wilder in Silver Streak would be the chief culprit here). Live in Concert is a document that argues, perhaps indisputably, that Pryor was at his very best when he was alone on the stage with a microphone, expressing himself with brutal honesty and staggering intellectual alacrity. Watching him in this venue, performing at this level, it’s wonder anyone would ever even want him to do anything else.

Pryor’s material is all strong, but it’s his actual delivery that elevates it to a whole other level. Pryor slips effortlessly from one character to another throughout the performance, adopting different voices but also instantaneously taking on entirely a new demeanor when the moment calls for it. In the time it takes to draw a breath, Pryor transforms himself as thoroughly as the most devoted Method actor of the day. He also demonstrates an incredible physicality. Lean and springy, Pryor stalks the stage like a caged jungle cat, but can also slump into a sensory-alert stillness or coil his body into tense, exhausting evocations of physical pain. Pryor is so tuned into himself that he draws the audience in as well; it’s hard to watch this without feeling like an extension of his very being.

The chief task of director Jeff Margolis is to just keep up with Pryor, to capture his ingenuity and energy. The film is lean and without embellishment. Margolis figures out when to press in on Pryor to get the emotions spinning across his face and when to position the camera in roughly fourth row center to marvel at the way he utterly commands the stage, both does so without arrogance or a sense of excessive control. On the contrary, Pryor looks completely giving and free up there before the lights, feeling the laughs ping off of him. He interacts with the audience here and there, never ceding control while always making the shared endeavor of laughing at life’s absurdities seem like the pinnacle of spiritual insurrection. In putting in down on film and helping to shape it for the screen, Margolis did a great service. He didn’t only shoot a concert film, he preserved the genius of a virtuoso.