• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • Donate

The Arts Fuse

Boston's Online Arts Magazine: Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theater, and more

  • Podcasts
  • Coming Attractions
  • Reviews
  • Short Fuses
  • Interviews
  • Commentary
  • The Arts
    • Performing Arts
      • Dance
      • Music
      • Theater
    • Other
      • Books
      • Film
      • Food
      • Television
      • Visual Arts
You are here: Home / Featured / Television Review: A Rousing Documentary on the Liberal Gusto of Ann Richards

Television Review: A Rousing Documentary on the Liberal Gusto of Ann Richards

April 28, 2014 1 Comment

This fine, partisan documentary resurrects Ann Richards, and it’s showing on HBO in a Lone Star election year. The Republicans better worry about Texans seeing it.

(Courtesy of HBO/HBO)
Ann Richards in “All About Ann.” Photo: HBO.

By Gerald Peary

Bill Clinton recalls one of the great dinners of his life, sitting down with Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Ann Richards. The funniest of the group by far was Richards. “She joked them under the table,” says Clinton. There are laughs aplenty in the rousing, excellent documentary, All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State, playing on HBO April 28 through May. With a charming country drawl and the astute comic timing of a Lucille Ball, Richards won over conservative Texas with her warmth and humor and sharp intelligence. She was elected to the governorship in 1991 as an unabashed liberal, a pro-choice progressive. This film spends lots of time on that immensely colorful campaign, showing how Richardson defeated two shaky, name-calling Democrats in the primary, and demolished perhaps the world’s most ignoramus candidate, Republican Clayton Williams, in the general election, soon after Williams advised raped woman to “just relax and enjoy it.”

I wish I’d been there in Austin the day she was sworn in as Texas’s 45th governor, amidst the jubilant crowds on Congress Street. And I applaud Richards’ four years in office, taking on the insurance lobby, bringing drug and alcohol programs to the state’s prisons, thrusting blacks, Latinos, and women into power, and, unlike every other Texas governor in memory, not using the office as a “Thumbs Up” for executing one and all on Death Row.

Do all good things come to an end? They sure did in Texas where Richards, starting with a nifty 60% approval rating, was knocked out of office in 1995 by Karl Rove and his pinhead Pinocchio, George W. Bush. Although crime was down during Richards’ time in office, Rove and his puppet insisted, speech after speech, that Texas, with a softy female in the reigns, was becoming more dangerous by the day. And there was the Republican whispering campaign too, that Richards, a grandmother with four children, was a lesbian. “She’s a liberal in a conservative state,” Rove gave George W. his mantra. “I’m a conservative in a conservative state.”

It was unthinkable, but Bush was Texas’s new governor. In public appearances, Richards refused to be pinned down when asked, dozens of times a day, what she would do next. “I’m going to do any damned thing I want to,” she said. And that meant, when not working for a Washington law firm, traveling the country campaigning for pro-choice women candidates. And speaking up for gay and lesbian rights.

Good things do come to an end, Richards died of esophageal cancer in 2006, far too early at 73. But this fine, partisan documentary resurrects her, and it’s showing on HBO in a Lone Star election year. The Republicans better worry about Texans seeing it. Clearly, Wendy Davis, the outspoken pro-choice Democratic candidate, carries the spirit of Ann Richards: “Feisty, funny, and unafraid…. Liberal and unafraid.”

It’s only partially hyperbole when Richards’ friend, ageless journalist Liz Smith, said at her funeral that, though Smith was acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt, Katharine Hepburn, and Mother Theresa, “Ann Richards was the greatest woman I ever knew.”


Gerald Peary is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of 9 books on cinema, writer-director of the documentary For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess.

Share
Tweet
Pin
Share

By: Gerald Peary Filed Under: Featured, Review, Television Tagged: All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State, Ann Richards, documentary, HBO, politics

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Shelley says

    April 29, 2014 at 10:54 am

    As a Texas writer, what I love most about Ann Richards is that she embodies the “feisty” spirit that has been languishing now for years as the state was taken over by the Tea Party.

    There’s another Texas, and it’s beginning to wake again.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search

Popular Posts

  • Film Commentary: “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — The Most Serene Movie in Years This movie reminds us that -- if there is any meaning t... posted on May 7, 2022
  • Classical Album Review: Violinist Lea Birringer plays Sinding and Mendelssohn Violinist Lea Birringer's performance of the Christian... posted on May 14, 2022
  • Book Review: Thomas Mann in America In the US, Thomas Mann tacitly proposed himself as an a... posted on May 5, 2022
  • Jazz Album Review: Guitarist John Scofield — A Solo Album, Finally Now that he’s 70, it’s only right that guitarist John... posted on May 3, 2022
  • Jazz Album Review: “Charles Mingus Trio” — One Kind of Masterpiece Even without the new takes, this Rhino reissue would be... posted on May 2, 2022

Social

Follow us:

Follow the Conversation

  • Flo May 20, 2022 at 8:53 pm on Music Remembrance: Singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith (1953-2021)How very sad, Daniel, that you came so close to meeting Nanci but it didn't happen. I hope her family...
  • J May 20, 2022 at 4:11 pm on WATCH CLOSELY: PBS’ “Jamestown” — Glossy Heritage TVIf “everyone who calls themself American”is descended from immigrants, where did indigenous American people come from?
  • tim jackson May 20, 2022 at 11:43 am on Film Review: Driving to the Exit – Panah Panahi’s “Hit the Road”What a tease! I love Panahi and regret that this can’t yet be seen. Hoping for distribution, I’ll meanwhile put...
  • Bill Marx, Editor of The Arts Fuse May 20, 2022 at 10:15 am on Theater Review: “Sea Sick” — How Damned Is the Ocean?Heed Mitchell's call to action. The seas are becoming sicker according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). A May 18...
  • Mark Neil Patterson May 20, 2022 at 10:00 am on Rock Concert Review: Bob Dylan X 2 — Performing in Boston and ProvidenceThis is a very odd way of saying "he performed the sort of set you'd expect of an artist still...

Footer

  • About Us
  • Advertising/Underwriting
  • Syndication
  • Media Resources
  • Editors and Contributors

We Are

Boston’s online arts magazine since 2007. Powered by 70+ experts and writers.

Follow Us

Monthly Archives

Categories

"Use the point of your pen, not the feather." -- Jonathan Swift

Copyright © 2022 · The Arts Fuse - All Rights Reserved · Website by Stephanie Franz