Punch 9 for Harold Washington
Directed by Joe Winston
Written by Documentary
Starring Harold Washington, Richard Daley, David Axelrod
Release Date October 14th, 2021
Punch 9 for Harold Washington documents the rise to Chicago Mayor of former Congressman Harold Washington, a brilliant, charismatic, and dedicated reformer. After years of patronage determining the fate of Chicago under the Mayor Daley regime, Washington’s rise to the highest office in the third largest city in the country felt like a breath of fresh air. The optimism and heart of Washington’s leadership felt like a new dawn and made his far too early death all the more tragic, especially as Chicago sank back to the depths of Daley era duplicitousness.
Punch 9 for Harold Washington picks up in the late 1960s when the patronage and corruption of the Mayor Richard J Daley regime was in full effect. We don’t linger here but we get enough of a sense of how a political machine worked. We need that information to show us just what a reformer like Harold Washington was up against, a city run by one man, shaped in his image and crafted via graft to keep it as it was, a self-sustaining, greed addled monstrosity built to keep Richard J Daley at the top.
Find my full length review at Swamp.Media, linked here.
