When documentary filmmaker Sacha Jenkins passed away in May of this year, he left a formidable legacy.
Jenkins, a multihyphenate who started out as a zine creator and co-founder of Ego Trip magazine, found considerable success in the film space, directing documentaries surveying Black music's landmark figures in Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues, All Up in the Biz, and Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James.
It's curious then that his final film, Sunday Best, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2023, would be about a white man.
Sunday Best is a tightly structured and endlessly soulful biographical narrative about variety show host Ed Sullivan, the man whose stage introduced America to the newest and brightest sounds in music, from 1948 through 1971. Looking beyond Sullivan's well-known legacy, Jenkins' film posits Sullivan as a racial revolutionary who supported Black artists like Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and more, long before seeing Black faces on the relatively new medium of television was normalized. Without Sullivan, as this poppy and politically simple film claims, our everyday and musical world would be far different today.
How does Sunday Best dress to impress?
Beginning on a laudatory note, the first 10 minutes of Sunday Best is filled with testimonials by industry titans on Sullivan's importance. The film's opening credits features celebrities like Ringo Starr, Wanda Sykes, Keegan-Michael Key, Bruce Springsteen, and Ice-T expressing their admiration for the late-night host. The film's talking heads, which include Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy, elaborate further on how Sullivan broke many of television's earliest rules, particularly on race. When television first started, claims the documentary, the only Black faces viewers could hope to see was on Amos 'n' Andy. As Gordy shares, when The Ed Sullivan Show premiered on Sunday, June 20, 1948, "Everything changed."
Jenkins tells us how Sullivan altered the entertainment industry in the host's own words. Intertitles explain that for Sunday Best, Jenkins leaned on Respeecher's AI tech to recreate Sullivan's voice to narrate the columns, articles, and letters Sullivan wrote during his life. It has the effect of a kind of melodious uncanny valley, sounding like an impression of Sullivan rather than the man himself.
Still, after the first 10 minutes, the film performs a nifty musical trick that becomes its calling card. A clip of an 11-year-old Toni Harper singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" on Sullivan's show sets the mood, while Jenkins and editors Billy McMillin and Monique Zavistovski allow the song to play out as Sullivan's voice provides his biographical details. He was born in Harlem in 1901, back when Harlem was inhabited by Jewish and Irish people. His twin brother died when he was two years old. His father taught him to respect people, no matter their background. By combining the show's classic performances — the film combed through the series' 10,000 musical numbers — with Sullivan's recollections, Jenkins kills two birds at once: He keeps the film at its tight 80 minutes in length without shorting on any important information or music.
The percussive score by Ryan "Bullet" Shields also provides an easeful counterbalance to the barrage of biographical notes. As the music shuffles, we learn that Sullivan played in an integrated baseball league in high school and began his career as a sports writer. In 1929, when NYU football decided to sit their Black player to appease the segregationist policy of their opponent the University of Georgia, Sullivan wrote an article for the New York Evening Graphic denouncing the school's decision. In the 1930s, when Sullivan switched from the sports beat to covering Broadway, he became emcee of the Harvest Moon Ball, which hosted Black vaudeville performers. All of these anecdotes are combined to demonstrate how Sullivan seemed far ahead of the era's other white men.
Sunday Best is a hit parade.
Jenkins spends much of Sunday Best matching the rise of Sullivan's show with the brewing racial tensions concurrently happening. When Sullivan began bringing vaudevillian acts like Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lena Horne, and Pearl Bailey onto television, he did so knowing advertisers were skittish about losing Southern viewers. By 1952, Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge began demanding that television remain segregated. And though Talmadge never directly commented on Sullivan, the film does position the governor's viewpoint, via a newspaper headline reading "Talmadge Hits TV 'Offense' to South on Race," as being diametrically opposite to the TV host.
For every moment in history, Jenkins has a hit to accompany it. Through various anecdotes, we learn that Sullivan remained loyal to Harry Belafonte, even when the latter was blacklisted for being a communist. When the film touches upon racial violence in the South, it follows those events, ironically, with Nat King Cole and Tony Martin dueting to "On the Sunny Side of the Street." When it comes time to talk about the March on Washington, the film precedes it with Mahalia Jackson, MLK's favorite singer, performing "Give Me That Old Time Religion."
By the time Jenkins begins leaning into Motown, you get the sense that he wants to draw a direct line from Sullivan to the studio called Hitsville USA. In the film, Smokey Robinson expresses his belief that Motown's music broke down barriers and put people together. Berry Gordy more nakedly expresses how he wanted his artists to crossover into (white) America.
Sunday Best is historically simplistic.
In that regard, the title Sunday Best has a double-edged meaning. The phrase, of course, refers to putting on your finest clothes for church. It's telling, then, that Gordy recalls not putting the Black faces of his artists on early Motown records for fear they would turn off white listeners. That impulse suggests a second desire for his Black artists to present themselves in a nonthreatening manner to appeal to white audiences.
It's why Sunday Best could easily be read as an integrationist film. The film flatly sees racial progress as linear and as defined by the white acceptance proffered by appearing on Sullivan's show. That isn't to say ending segregation wasn't a monumental feat. But the film never allows for the possibility that craving Sullivan's mainstream audience might in itself be a different kind of erasure — an assimilation that ultimately packaged Black performers as palatable nods toward a white sensibility.
With that in mind, where Sunday Best struggles as a sociopolitical documentary, it remains memorable due the fascinating way it places Sullivan on the timeline of Black progress — even if that placement is almost too simplistically conceived.
