Uncle Howard attempts to do much the same thing as I Called Him Morgan but with less success. Helen may be as bereaved by the murder she committed as anyone else, but ultimately no one is simply a victim in I Called Him Morgan, which pulls off the delicate maneuver of mourning Lee’s early demise while celebrating the exhilarating love, liberty, and artistic brilliance that characterized most of his life. The story of the night Helen shot Lee is related by a number of witnesses and deftly edited together-by no less than four editors-to tell the story of a death within a story that’s overwhelmingly life-affirming. Meanwhile, period photos, album covers, video and stills of Lee playing trumpet or just styling (both Morgans, we’re also told, were sharp dressers), along with ample clips of his supple trumpet-playing, a little talk recorded in a studio session, and an interview he recorded in 1971 help bring him to life. There aren’t many visuals of Helen, who, we’re told, hated to have her picture taken, but the frank talking she did in an interview just a month before her 1996 death provide vivid insights into her background, her feelings about Lee, and her state of mind before, during, and after the shooting.
The rewinder abacus how to#
It also reprises the tone of this mournful yet life-affirming tale of the lives Helen and Lee lived before meeting, the joy and stability they gained from getting together, and what they both lost on that snowy night.Ĭinematographer Bradford Young shot the interviews, in which old friends and colleagues like Wayne Shorter talk as lovingly about Helen’s cooking and her good influence on Lee, whom she helped to kick heroin, as they do about Lee’s blazing talent as a musician (“He knew how to tell a story musically,” Shorter says), precocious self-confidence, and contagious smile. Opening the documentary and recurring toward the end, the dreamily beautiful image foreshadows the snowy night when Helen Morgan shot her husband, jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. Large snowflakes falling toward the camera out of a white sky are a motif in filmmaker Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan. But as he surfaces the systemic prejudice that underlies even this financial tale, James unearths yet another story about ethnicity, institutional arrogance, and an underdog’s battle to overcome powerful forces woven deep into the fabric of American life. Over the years, he’s most often focused on how poverty and racism can warp lives, and on the routes people seek-often through sports-as they attempt to overcome those handicaps. James also captures many frank and emotional discussions between members of the family, who seem oblivious to the camera as they plot strategy or talk about how the case is affecting them and their community.Īt first glance, this might seem to be an atypical documentary for James. James gets excellent access to people on all sides of the case, from lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense, to jurors who explain what they and their fellow jurors were thinking, to Chinatown leaders who assert that the assault on the bank was experienced as an attack on the integrity of the community as a whole. The film anatomizes the bank’s sense of mission, the peculiarities of banking in a Chinese immigrant community, and the Sungs’ hard-fought lawsuit, which lasted five years and cost the family $10 million.
Sung founded after finding that all the banks then in Chinatown were happy to take his money but refused to give him a loan-for the sake of the community that depended on it. They also insist that they felt obligated to save the bank-which Mr. Sung and his four daughters, all of whom had left other jobs to help their father at the bank, explain, they wanted to fight for the family’s honor.
The rewinder abacus trial#
“Too big to fail translates to small enough to jail, and Abacus is small enough to jail,” he says.Īfter charging Abacus and 19 individuals who worked there, prosecutor Cyrus Vance’s law office pressured the defendants to plead guilty, but the Sung family who owned the bank took the risky path of going to trial instead, insisting on their innocence. The rest of the film’s title comes from journalist Matt Taibbi, who explains that the banks actually responsible for the crisis were all deemed “too big to fail,” so none were prosecuted for their crimes. bank ever indicted for fraud in connection with the subprime mortgage scandal of the late 2000s. This time it’s the oddly underreported story of Abacus, the eponymous family-owned Chinatown business, which is the only U.S. Steve James displays his usual savvy for picking culturally resonant topics in his latest documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
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