Photos Top cast Edit. Vivica A. Miguel A. Nunez Jr. Norris Young Jimmy as Jimmy. Little Richard Self as Self. August Richards Sherman as Sherman. Gregory Nava. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. In the mids, three women each with an attorney arrive at the office of New York entertainment manager Morris Levy. One is a singer from Los Angeles, formerly of the Platters; one is a petty thief from Philadelphia; one teaches high school in a small Georgia town.
Each claims to be the widow of long-dead doo-wop singer-songwriter Frankie Lyman, and each wants years of royalties due to his estate, money Levy has never shared.
During an ensuing civil trial, flashbacks tell the story of each one's life with Lyman, a boyish, high-pitched, dynamic performer, lost to heroin. Slowly, the three widows come together and establish their own bond. The story of three very different women Rated R for language and some sexuality. Add content advisory.
Did you know Edit. Goofs When the scenes changes to Lamberton Prison in , Diana Ross' version of "Why Do Fools" is more than once referred to as a new hit, when in fact, it was released in User reviews 35 Review. Top review.
Great music, adequate characterizations. I enjoyed a lot of this movie but I would have liked a tad more insight into the life of Frankie Lyman. In one scene, he talks about his abusive father, but other than that, there was little revealed about him. I understand it was mostly from his wives point-of-view, but it have helped the story along. In addition, you couldn't tell which of the wives was spinning a tale in order to get a larger settlement. The large cast was very talented and I especially appreciated that the make-up on the three women was not overdone to make them age.
All in all, I enjoyed it very much, but it could have been much better. Boyo-2 Nov 3, Details Edit. Release date August 28, United States. What made Frankie run? The movie clearly doesn't know. It sets the story against a convincing backdrop of the s rock 'n' roll industry, provides some high-energy musical sequences, and finds moments of drama as Frankie is beaten by drug money collectors, steals a mink stole from one woman to give to another and threatens to throw dogs out the window--all while somehow remaining a lovable madcap.
Well, most of the time. The usual generic conventions seem missing. There is no real sense of loss in Frankie's death, since his early promise, if genuine, was so quickly dissipated. There is no sense that be betrayed the three women: He loved them all, after his fashion, and was so needy, he simply reached out to the closest one. An awkward courtroom scene at the end belatedly tries to pin some of the blame on a record producer Paul Mazursky who stole co-writing credit and perhaps a lot of Frankie's profits, but the producer, if guilty, was still not responsible for most of the events in the movie.
Frankie was. It's as if someone read about Lymon's three wives in court and decided it would be a great story, without ever deciding what the story was. The four principal actors all provide the spectacle of talent without purpose: They do what they can with their characters and their scenes, but the screenplay doesn't provide them with an arc or a purpose.
When their characters reappear, we haven't been waiting for them. When they're offscreen, we don't miss them. That's true even of Frankie, who is missing a fair amount of the time.
What approach might have worked? Hard to say. Maybe the whole thing should have been seen exclusively through Frankie's eyes, as a kid who has his 15 minutes of fame at an early age and then dines out for the rest of his life on other people's memories. That would have meant jettisoning the whole court case and its flashbacks, but the court stuff doesn't work anyway.
Maybe straight chronology would have been a better idea, allowing Frankie to be the focus, and allowing us to follow his moves more clearly from one woman to the next and back again. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Larenz Tate as Frankie Lymon.
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