Review by C.J. Bunce
When I was a kid I collected trading cards, and one of those was Topps series on U.S. Presidents. I remember rummaging through a box of non-sports cards at a local card shop and finding one with a Black Woman on it. I knew the U.S. hadn’t had a Black President or Woman President yet. After some slow research (this was long before the Internet) I learned the Topps set in 1972 had seven supplemental cards featuring candidates that year. They included Edmund Muskie, George Wallace, George McGovern, John Lindsay, Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, and Shirley Chisholm. A Woman, a Black Woman, ran for President? Why hadn’t I learned about her in grade school?
What the educational system skipped over was that in 1968 of the 435 members of Congress only 11 were women, five were Black, and none were Black women. That’s until a schoolteacher named Mrs. Shirley Chisholm was elected to the 91st Congress. Academy Award-winning actor Regina King fully inhabits the accent, style, vibe, determination, and strength of the real Congresswoman Chisholm and her run for the White House in the 2024 theatrical release Shirley, now streaming on Netflix. Surprisingly Hollywood has created very few great movies about the Presidency–you need to look to something like All the President’s Men to dig into great storytelling. But the story of the 1972 election had many threads besides Nixon. One of those began here.
Being first at anything is difficult. Being first at something with so much pressure, drawing so much attention from an entire nation, must be a Herculean effort. Ridley’s script captures the challenges with the backdrop of the early 1970s via archival footage of leaders and public figures of the era. As King recounts and conjures Chisholm’s inspiring speeches and conversations, viewers will understand all that stood in her way.
At a Christmas party at Chisholm’s house she learns donors have collected money for her to run for the U.S. Presidency, and the idea catches on. Along with Michael Cherrie (Westwood Park) as her husband Conrad, the one-two punch of Lance Reddick (Bosch, Resident Evil) as Wesley “Mac” Holder and Terrence Howard (Iron Man, Fight Night) as Arthur Hardwick, Jr., completes a dream team of acting gravitas for this story. Watch for Brian Stokes Mitchell (Mr. Robot, Prodigal Son) as Chisholm’s campaign manager. André Holland plays the smarmy Walter Fauntroy, whose breaking of a promise with Chisholm leads to her not getting on the ballot. Christina Jackson (Boardwalk Empire) and Lucas Hedges (Three Billboards) are brilliant as campaign workers. And Amirah Vann has a good spin on celebrity supporter Diahann Caroll.
The movie gets bogged down a bit when it spends too much time on Chisholm’s relationship with her husband, yet it illustrates that she was fighting a more subtle struggle each day before she even set foot out the door. So much is so right in this movie, like the re-creation of a candidate’s election headquarters, something we’ve seen best in The Candidate, a great fictional movie about running for office starring Robert Redford and Peter Boyle. Even the most honest candidates must play this game, getting the right words said the right way so they aren’t misquoted or intentionally twisted by their opponent. The shame is viewers will see the issues that the numerous candidates twisted for their own ends in 1972 are the very same issues still unresolved in 2024.
One high point of the movie sees Chisholm suing the three TV networks for violating the FCC’s (now defunct) equal access rules. The music selection, the vintage cars, the design elements, the bumper stickers and signs, all help time travel viewers back to 1972, but nothing does it better than Chisholm’s outfits, which costume designer Megan Coates (Midnight Special, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Iron Man 3, Twilight, Black Dynamite) accurately re-creates for the film.
Whoever at Topps had the idea for putting the 1972 candidates on a set of collectible cards was trying to communicate something to collectors of all ages, something nobody had encountered before. Something ahead of its time, or something stolen from the nation because of the influence of wealth and power to maintain the status quo? Chisholm didn’t get elected in 1972, but she’d serve seven terms in Congress and work on 50 major pieces of legislation, taking her ideas to change the nation. What more could she have done had those obstacles not stood in her way? That’s really the unspoken message of this film.
It dramatizes an important but lost part of American history with quality storytelling and a great cast and production. Don’t miss it. Shirley is now streaming on Netflix.
