Although Cadillac Records (2008) has some excellent acting and some of my favourite music, it has no juice. It never comes alive. I never really cared about the characters. Part of the problem is the editing jumping here, there, and everywhere. But deeper than that the movie doesn’t seem to have a compelling story. Len Chess, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, is struggling and maybe discriminated against, and he starts a club featuring black blues musicians and goes on to build a recording studio, the famous Chess Records. But I didn’t feel the struggle, and I didn’t understand why he turned to Delta bluesmen. The drama is Chess’s changing relationship with the musicians on his label. Muddy Waters and Little Walter like the approach which some nowadays would call paternalistic, but Howlin’ Wolf insists on being his own man, not friends with the white businessman. Chess explains that when he started, a black man could not have started a record business, but by the late 1960s things had changed so much that Chess reluctantly sold the business. The voice-over narration provided by the Willie Dixon character does not make it any easier to get deeply involved with these characters and their struggles.