For Susan and Lloyd Eckers, Sophie Tucker is a cottage industry. 'The Outrageous Sophie Tucker' is a brain child of theirs, and years of patient research are paying off: a three-volume not a biography, a compact disk with Tucker's hits, and a possible movie contract with the Weinstein organization. Inspired by the Divine Bette Middler's worship of her idol Tucker, set the Eckers on a long journey leading to this thoroughly satisfying documentary. Tucker was bigger than life: a jazz singer of the first water, a brilliant self promoter, a skillful business woman. She ate men and spit them out; she loved women; and as a woman ahead of her time, she was, sassy, out sized in all bodily ways, and bawdy. She hobnobbed with royalty but never lost the common touch with the little people. During WW2 she got thousands of letters from GIs, and to each, she replied in her large bold, handwriting. She palled around with Al Capone, understandably since the Mafia controlled the night clubs.J. Edgar Hoover courted her, and her spangled gowns. (As a denizen of musical halls, Broadway, saloons and the margins of life, she had an indifference to queerness.) For 60 years, she was the 'last of the Red Hot Mammas', and the documentary lets you know why. Although she came from an Orthodox Jewish home, her family never stopped her from pursuing a career. Once out of the house, she left her only child in the care of her sister and remained troubled by him for the rest of her life. She gave everything but tenderness and love, the giant Narcissist that she was. Known for her brassy voice, size 48, cup D or E breasts, she had an appetite for life that only death could diminish. The only Yiddish song the Eckers include, and this for the demands of the narrative is "My Yiddishe Mama', which has more English that Yiddish. The English Yiddish novelty songs she sang, the Eckers left out, and more's the pity. A song like 'Mr. Siegal make it legal', is fun and accessible to all including Jews whose grasp of Yiddish is tenuous if non existent. Overall,'The Outrageous Sophie Tucker' is a must to see. For some, it might revive the embers of nostalgia, of times gone by but welcomed today, or a tale of a gal with an outrageous hair do, who made a life for herself at a time when women stayed at home, bore children and spent hours in the kitchen. Like Mae West, she broke taboos and lived to tell about without going to jail.

The fact that she had so many scrapbooks of her career meant that this had access to so much historical ephemera and photographs which made it shine. It may not have quite examined why she became forgotten or what she thought of her imitators etc, but for a chance to see someone who was hugely famous and isn't now's life, this did a great job.

There's a puppetry credit at the end of the Susan and Lloyd Ecker documentary of the life of Sophie Tucker. I assume that refers to the modest special effect where occasionally an image of Sophie moves her limbs and body against the still background. That minor flourish could be the film's central metaphor. Sophie's animation sets her apart from the static world around her.

Of course her 60-year career, which extended from vaudeville and radio through films silent and sound to television, through WW II and Korea, was hardly static. But however dynamic or even frenzied the world she still stood apart, her voice and manner and innovations always ahead of her time. The first and last of the red hot mamas made even the fast-moving world around her seem static.

Her brassy bawdy style facilitated the various stardoms from Mae West through Bette Midler (and Lady Gaga). Her rhythms, timing and emotions made her the first of America's great jazz singers. Her early self-advertisement made her the first star to brand herself. Later her personal outreach to individual audience members, whether townsfolk or soldiers, made her the first to reach beyond the mass appeal of stardom, to recover the individual connection by reading and responding to thousands of fan letters.

In several ways she anticipated much of our modern feminism: her sexual authority and initiative, her celebration of her own unfashionably abundant body, even her apparent ultimate lesbianism. Her influence on the careers she mentored — e.g., West, Judy Garland, Jerry Lewis, Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Paul Anka, etc., etc., etc. — is incalculable.

Sophie Tucker was a large woman with a large career and an even larger heart. She'd make any world seem inert in comparison.