PREVIEW: BLUES BROTHERS

Musicians Jake and Elwood Blues don’t always take the law too seriously, but they’re on a mission from God: After Jake’s long stint in prison, the band must be reunited to save the orphanage where they grew up. The “Penguin”—the Mother Superior who runs the orphanage with gruff charm—is short $5,000. So the brothers hop into their beat-up police car and, with unshakable calm, take on all their adversaries: the police, former lovers, a horde of neo-Nazis, and rivals who are quite prone to violence. On what is arguably the most famous road trip in music history, they shatter all conventions and seemingly effortlessly turn every obstacle into a musical highlight . . .

The band The Blues Brothers was originally intended as an opening act for the NBC show *Saturday Night Live*. But the gag project by actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd was so successful that John Landis took on the film adaptation (1980), which quickly became a cult classic, thanks in part to the participation of numerous world-famous blues stars such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and Matt Murphy.