He augments the truth, but he does it responsibly. Remarkably, he has embroidered the facts without losing a sense of veracity. Not many documentaries have the lean, unsparing urgency that can be found in Mr. His book, which takes its title from the Robert Johnson blues song, arrives in conjunction with “Roads to Memphis,” a documentary to be broadcast on PBS May 3. Sides writes in forceful, dignified, obscenity-free language and creates the momentum of a tightly constructed nonfiction film. Sides’s objectives are entirely different, even if Ray’s tastes for strip joints, Brylcreem, aliases, guns and cheap motels are inevitably part of the story. Confidential,” “My Dark Places” and “The Cold Six Thousand”), he revels in this stuff. Ellroy writes of sleaze, conspiracy, corruption and murder (as he frequently has, most famously in “L.A. Here is the King assassination as imagined not only in the black and white of the civil rights movement’s era but in James Ellroy’s noir.
The potential for exploitation is immense, especially in light of Mr. King’s story with the maneuverings of James Earl Ray, the man tried and convicted as his assassin. He has pieced together a viscerally dramatic account of the last days of the Rev. In writing “Hellhound on His Trail,” the hands-on historian Hampton Sides (“Ghost Soldiers,” “Blood and Thunder”) has undertaken a hugely risky proposition.
0 kommentar(er)
