MOVIE REVIEW : Film Recalls When ‘Wild Women’ Ruled Blues : The documentary that will screen at the Fullerton Museum Center tells the story of the dynasty of queens who brought the music to prominence during the 1920s.

For the past half-century, the blues realm has been a kingdom, ruled by such male giants as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King.

“Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues,” a film documentary screening Saturday at the Fullerton Museum Center in conjunction with Black History Month, goes deeper into the past to tell the story of the dynasty of queens who brought blues music to prominence during the 1920s.

The 58-minute film, first released in 1989 and broadcast that year on PBS, is a wide-ranging overview of early blues that covers an extensive sweep of musical and social history. While a viewer won’t go away intimately familiar with the music and lives of such charismatic and imposing stars as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and Alberta Hunter, “Wild Women” does a fine job of weaving those individuals into a larger, epic-scale story of artistic revolution and social change.

The earliest era of the blues is captured in still photos, which lend a sense of mythic distance to the story’s central figures. But producers Carole van Valkenburgh and Christine Dall find needed warmth, intimacy and immediacy by splicing in eyewitness testimony--and some delightfully spry performances--from veterans who plied the circuit of tent shows and black theaters during those formative years.

We see the blues progress along with the prospects of black America: originating in Deep South cotton fields, it evolves as a regional entertainment in minstrel shows (where matriarchs Rainey and Smith both began their careers), then moves north after World War I to blossom into a cultural force that ultimately leaps racial boundaries.

It’s a common lament among today’s leading black blues musicians that most young blacks keep their distance from the blues, regarding the music in narrow, reductive terms as a reminder of racial oppression passively endured. But Sammy Price, a pianist who was caught up in the transformations surrounding blues and black life in the ‘20s, describes on camera how liberating it was to move north, and to move in blues circles.

In the South, Price recalls, blacks who had fun in public risked being jailed if they ran into a cop who didn’t like the sound of their laughter. But in the blues clubs of Chicago, “you could buy a drink and drink it. You didn’t have to bow your head.” At the same time, the documentary makes clear, racism exerted a pull from which the blues singers of the era were never free.

While the film does justice to the social history surrounding the blues, its delight lies in its respect and affection for the music itself. Koko Taylor, one of today’s leading female blues singers, gives testimony to the continuing influence of the early blues women. She cites their records as her own early inspiration and describes a philosophy of emotional realism in blues songwriting that she traces to those original stars.

The question of sacred versus profane in black music--gospel versus the blues--gets wry, engaging treatment in the person of Ida Goodson, a veteran performer of the early blues period.

First she is seen banging out a rollicking, piano-pumping song of praise to Jesus; then the filmmakers cut to show Goodson performing in a Florida nightclub, where the sounds are similar, but the theme is sex. With a grin, Goodson concludes that there is nothing wrong in giving the devil his musical due--as long as God gets his as well.

The film’s denouement is poignant: As the Depression sets in, public tastes move away from the blues, toward sprightlier jazz and Tin Pan Alley styles. Some of the “wild women” adapt by changing their repertoire (a move that helped Ethel Waters emerge as a major film and stage star). Rainey retreats to the church before her death in 1939; Bessie Smith’s career wanes before a fatal 1937 car wreck.

The implication is that the story of the blues ended with the decline of its earliest greats. But after these indispensable women had done their work, an equally imposing generation of blues men arrived following World War II to reignite the form commercially, heighten its sonic possibilities and impact with electric instruments, and provide the initial spark for rock ‘n’ roll (Koko Taylor’s music, for instance, owes as much to the 1950s innovations of Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters as to the initial inspiration of Rainey and Smith).

The makers of “Wild Women” do a service in reminding us that women dominate the story of the early blues. But they should have acknowledged that, while it is already historic, the blues is a history still unfolding.

“Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” will be shown with two other short films, “Oscar Micheaux, Film Pioneer” and “Hairpiece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People,” Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave. Admission: $5. Information: (714) 738-6545.