"What's Love Got To Do With It"
                          A Film Review
                               by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister

    The new Tina Turner "bio pic" "What's Love Got to Do With It"
that opened yesterday in theaters throughout the Bay area is
generating a lot of interest locally for several reasons.  First of
all Tina Turner herself will be performing at the USF Sundome on
August 21, secondly Angela Bassett who gives a remarkable and
riveting performance playing Turner in the film is a local-girl-
made-good, having lived most of her childhood and teenage years
right here in St. Petersburg.  The third reason it's attracting
attention is that it's quite a compelling film despite the fact
that its plot is minimal.  Country girl is discovered by
established musician, they marry and have professional success,
he's selfish and mean and she finds herself stuck in a loveless and
abusive marriage, after many years, with the help of friends, she
finds the strength first to fight back and then to get out of the
marriage, she goes on to professional success on her own and lives
happily ever after. This account of Tina's life comes from her
autobiography _I, Tina_.

    What makes this film as good as it is is clearly not the plot
but the way the characters are presented.  The opening sequence, in
which little Anna Mae Bullock is thrown out of the church choir for
adding her own energetic and original riffs to the hymns and then
gets to her grandmother's home in time to see her Mother abandon
her, is screenwriter Kate Lanier's touching and concise way of
summing up Tina's childhood.  Child actor Rae'ven Kelly is perfect in
her brief appearance.  Grown up, Angela Bassett takes over as Anna Mae
who meets Ike Turner in a St. Louis club where her older sister works
and she becomes the latest in the string of women he promotes
professionally and personally gains control over even to the point
of assigning her a new name, Tina, and then marrying her
after the birth of their first child.  The acting here is really
good; both Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as Ike Turner have a kind
of charisma about them that make the characters highly believable.

   The matinee audience with which I saw this film was made up
predominantly of middle-aged African American women--one suspects
they'd been Tina Turner fans for a long time--and they identified
completely with her on the screen, gasping empathetically when she
was brutalized, clapping and cheering passionately when she finally
finds the strength to kick him in the groin and walk out for good.
We don't have too many film models of women fighting their way out
of abusive relationships--a feat made all the harder in Turner's case
because she knew what it felt like to be abandoned as a child and
she couldn't bring herself to leave her and Ike's family while
their numerous children were small.  It is really the support of a
woman friend Jackie (Vanessa Bell Calloway) and the spiritual
awakening she introduced Tina to--Buddhism in this case--that made
it possible for her to find herself and the inner strength she
needed to break free from Ike's escalating violence and drug abuse.

   I can't close without mentioning the music that the film is
filled with from beginning to end, almost all of it lip-synched by
Angela Bassett to performances by Tina Turner herself, though the
numbers originally recorded with Ike Turner have been redone here
with Larry Fishburne doing his own performing.  Anyway, it's first-
rate stuff and runs through the several musical styles that Tina
Turner has gone through in her long career, ending with a final
number in which we see not Bassett but the real Tina Turner as she
performs in concert today bringing down the house with the title
song, What's Love Got to Do With It.

   I've never been a particular Tina Turner fan--my musical tastes
run more to classical music and jazz--so I wasn't sure how much I
was going to like this film.  But I have to tell you I liked it a
lot, especially as an example and, I hope, an inspiration to women
caught in abusive relationships.  And I left the theater literally
thinking about trying to get tickets to the Tina Turner concert.
The woman, now in her mid-fifties, is really a phenomenon.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.