I really like 1920s jazz culture and am a fan of Judy Garland (even - and perhaps especially - as an aging addict belting out Never Will I Marry in the 1960s) and so I felt at once robbed by society and embarrassed that I didn't discover The Last of the Red Hot Mommas sooner.
I cried at least three times during this documentary, most notably at the death of the plucky Jewish American soldier whose fellow troop members, in his honor, played the Nazi German-banned song, My Yiddishe Momme by Sophie Tucker, on loud speaker through the streets of Berlin FOR EIGHT HOURS, following the defeat of the Nazis by the Allies a the end of WW2.
Sophie Tucker was a magical woman, an early loud supporter of women's rights to be independent, as well as normalizing the social acceptance and sexual eroticism of fat women in a time when no one else did. Judy Garland credited Sophie for teaching her how to really present a song, and that's one of the vital things I love about Judy Garland was her feeling, her panache, her giant personality on the stage - and this is partly due to Judy working with Sophie in a film when Judy Garland was still in her teens.
Those were the elements of the documentary that were highlights for me, but there's so much more to this woman's long and meaningful life, including the way she would write letters personally to her fans and meet with them and make friends with some of them in a time when again, apparently no one else was doing that. The only reason I didn't give this documentary 10 stars is that I felt some details were left out for some strange reason I felt compelled to "fill in the blanks" by reading websites on-line afterward.