Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over
                                                                                                      
Director: David Heilbroner/ Dave Wooley
Year: 2021
Rating: 7.0
Fairly standard tribute to an artist that focuses on the positive, but in this case there is a lot of positive to focus on. A great singer, an activist and by all accounts a good friend. It's the voice though that launched a ton of songs - incredible range and so astonishingly fluid that in one simple word she can play with it, raise it, lower it. Listen to some of those early hits and just focus on how the smooth voice varies from word to word. She had a tough task master early on. Burt Bacharach. Like so many black singers at the time, she was brought to music through the church and sang gospel with a group called The Drinkard Singers. Clearly, there was music in her DNA. Her aunt Cissy Houston was a successful gospel singer, Whitney Houston was her cousin and her sister Dee Dee Warwick had a singing career.

In one of those wonderful serendipitous moments, the Drinkard singers were hired to be back-up singers in a recording for a Hal David-Burt Bacharach song. Bacharach thought she had something special and decided to record her. Warwick had graduated from university and could read music which was essential to sing the complexities of Bacharach's music. In their first collaboration "Presenting Dionne Warwick" there were three classics - Wishin' and Hopin', Don't Make Me Over and Make It Easy on Yourself. Her music though didn't fall comfortably into any category - it wasn't R&B and it wasn't pop. It was just her voice and the David-Bacharach songs. She went on to a lengthy career and is still performing live.

This covers her early years touring in the south and how she came close to being arrested a few times. Outside of music she was an advocate for civil rights and a very strong voice for AIDS research long before it was fashionable. She says she forced Reagan to say the word. Her song That's What Friend are For along with Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder has made millions in fees, all donated to AIDS research. This documentary has the usual talking heads saying how great she is, also has her co-operating with the filmmakers with lengthy interviews but the strong point are the many clips of her singing live. One clip of her roasting Sammy Davis Jr. was great - she dated him for a while. "I don't know why Sammi dated me. I wasn't sexy, I wasn't beautiful and I wasn't white." Another time upset with the lyrics of gangsta rap music, she invited a group of them over including Snoop Dogg and dared them all to call her a bitch to her face. None of them did.