On the evening of Thursday, January 13, 1972, as the audience assembled in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, the Reverend James Cleveland instructed the crowd not to be bashful as movie cameras swirled around them. There was no guarantee that the cameras would return, he told folks as they slid into the pews and made themselves comfortable. “So while it’s coming your way, get in on it,” he joked, encouraging his flock to make their enthusiasm for that evening’s service evident to director Sydney Pollack and his camera crew.

Cleveland’s encouragement wasn’t really necessary: this was the first of two evenings marking Aretha Franklin’s much-anticipated return to gospel. It probably didn’t matter that Pollack and his crew were roaming around the sanctuary that night and the next; the congregation was ready to receive Franklin regardless of the third-party presence.

And receive her they did.

Amazing Grace, the film documenting that two-night live recording of the titular album, finally saw release in 2018, after a nearly fifty-year delay. By 1972, Franklin was undeniably a pop star, and Pollack captures her as such. She is the film’s magisterial Queen of Soul: her Afro is perfectly shaped, her skin is flawless, and her metallic eye shadow gleams under the camera crew’s lights. At one point, the camera is trained in on her restrained, stately smile as she squeezes the hands of fans reaching out to her from the pews. At the pulpit, she is a poised and attentive performer; when the opening of “Climbing Higher Mountains” isn’t to her liking, she turns to Cleveland and requests that she and the choir try it “one more time.”

Yet Franklin, a daughter of the black Baptist church, knew quite well what happens when worshippers gather. She guided the audience assembled at New Temple that weekend into an extended worship service that showed how firmly rooted she was in the music of the church. Amazing Grace supposedly brought her back to gospel music, and would go on to become the best-selling gospel album of all time, but the fact is that Franklin never left the church. Even as the film demonstrates her commanding, diva-esque presence, we also see how deeply attuned she was to the unspoken codes of the gospel ethos that shaped her. This is to say, the spirit was present.

The spirit...