Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

Detroit 9000 (1973)
Directed by Arthur Marks
Written by Orville H. Hampton
Produced by Arthur Marks
106 minutes

Despite using formulas from just about every cop thriller you’ve ever seen, Detroit 9000 has a refreshing taste that’s difficult to resist. The first black themed film shot in Motown, Detroit 9000 was financed and produced by General Film Corporation, a B-movie distributor co-founded by Arthur Marks, who’d segued from Perry Mason episodes in the ’60s to drive-in features in the ’70s. Marks would make three highly entertaining pictures dubbed “blaxploitation”  due to the racial complexion of their casts — Bucktown (1975), J.D.’s Revenge (1976) and Monkey Hustle (1976) — but Quentin Tarantino was so enamored by Detroit 9000 that he chose it for a theatrical and home video re-release in 1998 through his short lived retro distributor Rolling Thunder. Tarantino even devoted a track on the Jackie Brown CD soundtrack to a line of dialogue from the movie.

Ridiculously over the top — with a body count that keeps pace with the annual homicide figures for Detroit and cheeseball dialogue whenever men and women mix it up — Detroit 9000 has a pleasing familiarity more welcoming than worn out. A country cousin to Lethal Weapon, budget limitations reduce the pyrotechnics and give the audience room to chew over the racial complexities of a black cop struggling to identify with a white partner on a case where the racial profile of their suspects is political dynamite either way. The plot is both idiotic and irrelevant. What makes Detroit 9000 worth viewing are the performances, with Alex Rocco as an irascible Archie Bunker cop and a vivacious Vonetta McGee as the most wonderful archetype in the movies, the call girl with a conscience. Luchi De Jesus composed the pulse pounding music.

Trouble hits the Motor City when U.S. Congressman Aubrey Hale Clayton (Rudy Challenger) returns home to announce his candidacy for governor at the “Hail Our Heroes” ball for the black community. In a crackerjack robbery, four masked thieves make off with Hale’s war chest of $400,000 in jewelry and cash contributions. Detroit PD puts its best cop on the case: Lt. Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco), who makes up for what he lacks in racial sensitivity with street savvy. Meanwhile, pro footballer turned homicide cop Sgt. Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes) investigates a dismembered body pulled out of the Detroit River. Running with a hunch that their cases are linked, Williams proposes they work together. Hesitant to the idea of a partner, Bassett is overruled by Captain Chalmers (Robert Phillips), an old friend Bassett accuses of taking his promotion.

Visiting his stressed out wife at Longview Sanitarium, Bassett is harangued for refusing to sacrifice his ethics to do a favor here or there for some cash. Unsure whether his enigmatic white partner is on the take or not, Williams works a tip that Congressman Hale’s right-hand man isn’t too thrilled about his pompous, self-serving boss running for governor and might have organized the robbery. Bassett has more luck with the manager of the brothel he frequents, who reveals that two out-of-town clients came in and aroused suspicion. Bassett & Williams suspect that the thieves must have had contact inside the cathouse and sure enough, professional lady of leisure Roby Harris (Vonetta McGee) warns her manager Ferdy (Herbert Jefferson Jr.) that the cops are on their trail. Shootouts, boat chases and double crosses ensue.

What do you say?

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

Across 110th Street (1972)
Directed by Barry Shear
Screenplay by Luther Davis, based on the novel Across 110th by Wally Ferris
Produced by Ralph Serpe, Fouad Said
102 minutes

Short on pimps, prostitutes or private dicks, long on urban decay as New York caught a peek at itself in the mirror, Across 110th Street is one of the few legitimate A-movies to emerge from the “blaxploitation” genre. Hitting bookshelves in 1970, Across 110th was the first and last published novel by Wally Ferris, a career television cameraman who worked at WNEW in Manhattan for many years. United Artists acquired film rights and Film Guarantors — a motion picture completion bond company — made what would be a brief splash into production. Producer Fouad Said hired veteran playwright/ screenwriter Luther Davis to adapt a script and Barry Shear, whose only notable feature was the ’60s cult movie Wild In The Streets, to direct; Shear did have hundreds of hours of TV credits on his resume, from Hawaii Five-O to Julia to The Streets of San Francisco.

Anthony Quinn came on board as executive producer, but when the role of Frank Matelli was apparently turned down by John Wayne and Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, Quinn stepped in front of the camera. Across 110th Street barely qualifies as “blaxploitation”; the same production could have been staged a decade earlier (or later) and would be far better known as the morally complex, street smart film noir it actually is. The bleak but fast moving story examines how one robbery ripples across a community, from the cops struggling to keep the peace, to the perps looking to make a clean getaway, to the civilians trying to make it through the day. While Quinn doesn’t seem fully committed to his character of Archie Bunker cop, Yaphet Kotto and Paul Benjamin are electric. Bobby Womack wrote (with J.J. Johnson) and performed five smooth tunes.

Summer gets a whole lot hotter when three black men — epileptic ex-con Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin), dry cleaner Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) and driver Henry Jackson (Antonio Fargas) — rob a bank operated by the Italian mob in Harlem. The brazen heist ends with two blacks, two Italians and two New York City police officers dead and flips the neighborhood upside down. Don Gennarro (Frank Mascetta) dispatches his dilettante son-in-law Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) to restore order by capturing the perpetrators and making an example of them. Meanwhile, Capt. Frank Matelli (Anthony Quinn), a veteran of enforcing his own style of law in Harlem, is disconcerted to learn that the investigation has been handed to Lt. William Pope (Yaphet Kotto), whose youth and ethnicity reflect the new NYPD.

Sent uptown to crack skulls, D’Salvio is greeted as little more than “a punk errand boy” by Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), the kingpin who runs Harlem on behalf of the Italians. Doc dispatches his fearsome right hand man Shevvy (Gilbert Lewis) to piece together information on the robbery, one $100 bill at a time. Shevvy approaches a dancer named Laurelene (Gloria Hendry) for help, unaware that her boyfriend Jim Harris is the man they’re after. Trying to stay one step ahead of the hoods, Matelli and Pope are slowed by contrasting methods in everything from how to question a suspect to how to do favors in Harlem. As the night drags on, the 55-year-old cop realizes that his era is over. Mobsters, police and thieves finally meet atop an abandoned tenement on Lenox Avenue & 142nd Street, where Harris is holed up and armed to the teeth.

What do you say?

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)
Directed by Ivan Dixon
Screenplay by Sam Greenlee and Mel Clay, based on the novel by Sam Greenlee
Produced by Ivan Dixon, Sam Greenlee
102 minutes

Any trip through “blaxploitation” would be missing something without The Spook Who Sat By The Door. Written in 1966 and published in 1969, Sam Greenlee‘s political thriller notched 1.5 million copies sold. The author went into business with Ivan Dixon, an actor and television director who’d gunned his way into features with Trouble Man in 1972. Greenlee & Dixon’s plan to finance and distribute the film independently stalled when black investors proved scarce; Greenlee’s attorney put up roughly $800,000 to get cameras rolling and United Artists acquired distribution rights, contributing $200,000 in completion bonds. Yanked from release by exhibitors fearful that the movie would spark revolution in theater lobbies across America, The Spook Who Sat By The Door went underground for almost 30 years.

In 2000, actor/producers Tim and Daphne Reid offered to distribute the cult classic on DVD through their Obsidian Home Entertainment. Fitting to Greenlee’s fantasy of America’s ghetto masses mobilizing into a resistance movement, The Spook Who Sat By The Door is hard hat wearing, metal lunchbox swinging independent filmmaking at its finest, a professional piece of work that makes up for what it lacks in budget with ample amounts of backbone. The material goes easy on the sermonizing to settle into a potent blend of social drama, character study and espionage thriller. Lawrence Cook is exceptionally well cast in the lead, soft spoken and scholarly, highly motivated and lethal, a militant Jack Ryan. Herbie Hancock composed a musical score that’s as durable, spartan and means-business as the movie.

Running a tight reelection campaign, a U.S. senator opts to raise his profile among urban voters by appointing a token black agent to the Central Intelligence Agency. One promising finalist appears to be Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), ostracized by his classmates for studying too much and initially overlooked by management due to his habit of fading into the woodwork. But Freeman’s physical, intellectual and personal assets match what the CIA is looking for and he wins the spot. Freeman spends five dutiful years in a sub-basement toiling as a document “reproduction section chief”, growing estranged from his childhood love, a social worker (Janet League) who wants to get married and start a family. Instead, Freeman resigns his position as the first black spy to return home to Chicago, ostensibly to become a social worker.

Freeman makes contact with the leadership of a street gang he ran with as a teenager. Unimpressed with the gang’s puny resistance against the pigs, Freeman drills the hoodlums in guerilla warfare tactics, from building explosives, to organization, to how to rip off the enemy (“Remember, a black man with a mop, tray or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling black man is invisible.”) Freeman connects with an ex-hoodlum turned cop (J.A. Preston) he hopes to flip to their cause, as well as a D.C. prostitute Freeman dubs “Dahomey Queen” (Paula Kelly) who becomes a crucial source of information. The Black Freedom Fighters of North America find their plans for armed resistance rushed into the field when Chicago police shoot a dope peddler, striking the match for rebellion.

What do you say?

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

The Mack (1973)
Directed by Michael Campus
Written by Robert J. Poole and Max Julien (uncredited)
Produced by Harvey Bernhard
110 minutes

Helping graft the message and style of hip hop, there’s room to argue that The Mack is flat out the best “blaxploitation” movie ever made. Robert J. Poole was a convict who — according to legend — wrote a 40-page treatment for a movie on prison toilet paper. Titled Black Is Beautiful, Poole ultimately got his material to producer Harvey Bernhard. Fascinated with the concept of a street Svengali, Bernhard hired a young (white) filmmaker named Michael Campus, who’d shot a few documentaries for ABC, to direct. To play the title role, Max Julien was approached. Julien had written the screenplay for Cleopatra Jones and given the go-ahead to fill in Poole’s blueprint, got on board. Traveling to Oakland, Campus and Julien sought the help of the Ward brothers, the four men who ran the bay city’s underworld. Frank Ward agreed to take the filmmakers into his world, provided they took Ward into theirs.

In addition to being granted a cameo, Frank Ward inspired the title character as Campus and Julien fleshed out the script. Murdered during its production, Ward had the film dedicated to him. Financed by the soon to be defunct Cinerama Releasing Corp., The Mack was shot on a substantially low budget, yet endures because nearly every frame seems infused with a pure love for movies. Julien and co-star Richard Pryor bring star level magnetism to this low down dirty B-movie, while the necessities of shooting on the fly gives the film the power of a documentary on 1970s Oakland. The Mack is still a shoot ‘em up at heart and does get repetitive, but it’s also politically hip to the conflict between capitalism and the greater good of the community. If that’s too much to ponder, Willie Hutch wrote and performed nine killer tunes, including “I Choose You,” “Theme of The Mack” and “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out”.

John “Goldie” Mickens (Max Julien) and his partner Slim (Richard Pryor) shoot it out with gunmen who’ve ambushed them in a junkyard. Unable to escape, Goldie is taunted by two cops (Dan Gordon, William Watson) who debate whether to finish the hustler off or not. Enduring almost five years in prison, Goldie returns to the streets of Oakland. He visits his mentor, The Blind Man (Paul Harris) who ruminates about pimping and the opportunity there for the taking if his protégé adopts the right mental angle. Goldie runs into an old girlfriend named Lulu (Carol Speed), an “outlaw” turning tricks; she implores Goldie to manage her. The ex-con next reunites with his brother Olinga (Roger Mosley), a political organizer dedicated to black empowerment and to running the pimps and pushers out of the community.

Announcing to his brother that he’s down with self-empowerment — while keeping the true nature of his business secret from his Mother (Juanita Moore) — Goldie dedicates himself to becoming “the meanest mack who ever lived.” He reteams with Slim and with Lulu’s help, Goldie’s “professional ladies of leisure” are drilled in the finer points of shoplifting and grand larceny. To control their minds, Goldie rents a planetarium and lays down his rules under the cosmos. Rising to such success that he wins Mack of the Year honors at the annual Players Ball, Goldie spurns an offer from his former employer Fatman (George Murdock) to return to work for him. The vile cops who busted Goldie five years ago resurface next, intent on taking him down. To get out of the game with his life intact, Goldie turns to his brother for help.

What do you say?

Directed by Michael Schultz and written by Eric Monte, Cooley High was the first film to show black teens having fun and growing up like white kids had been doing in movies for years. Other than having an all-black cast and being released by American International Pictures in the mid-’70s, the film owes more to the comedy drama than it does a “Blaxploitation” flick.

The movie also sorta became the basis for the TV series What’s Happening!! After the pilot episode was poorly received, ABC retooled it completely, keeping the idea of a group of black high school buddies and a lead character who wore glasses (Preach/Rog) but nothing else. Fans of the sitcom will be disappointed to find no Rerun or roller boogie in the film version.

Monte, who also served as co-creator of Good Times, spent the ’70s fighting the networks and producers of Good Times, What’s Happening!!, and The Jeffersons – whose lead characters he created on an episode of All In The Family – accusing them of stealing his ideas without pay. He would be awarded $1 million in a court settlement, but ended up becoming addicted to crack and living in a Salvation Army shelter by 2003.

Cooley High has been compared to American Graffiti, and I guess if you replace Northern California with Chicago, white kids with black kids, and great cars with dudes too broke to drive running everywhere on foot, it is.

Mainly, there’s the problem of Monte’s script. The writing is pretty rough and unsophisticated, with dialogue that lays there flat. It isn’t even very funny. Saturday Night Live‘s Garret Morris, whose character steals the film as a sympathetic teacher, doesn’t even appear until over half way through the movie, and then makes a quick exit.

A lot of the acting – particularly by the attractive but wooden Cynthia Davis as Preach’s love interest – is amateur hour, though it is nice to see Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs played someone other than “Boom Boom” Washington on Welcome Back, Kotter. He and Turman are pretty good in the flick.

Something Monte’s screenplay did have going for it was heart, and that at least shines through. Cooley High does capture the black experience during a particular point in time in a way no other movie bothered to do. The soundtrack proliferates with Motown artists like The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and The Four Tops. It’s another respectable touch, but none of this film is on par with American Graffiti.

Isaac Hayes stars in this terrific American International Pictures drive-in flick as the title character, a football player turned bounty hunter.

Truck and his partner Jerry (Alan Weeks) are dispatched to bring an armed and dangerous pimp to jail. The pimp escapes by eventually running into a bar and throwing wads of cash at anyone who can beat up the “punks” getting ready to fly through the door. Truck and Jerry later find him, but when he reaches for his pistol, the skip tracers are forced to shoot the pimp dead.

This provokes a venomous madam played by Nichelle Nichols – Uhura from Star Trek – to offer up her stable of ladies to the sucka who can take Truck out. At the front of the line is Harvard Blue, a pimp played by Yaphet Kotto. Meanwhile, Truck has to handle a girlfriend (Annazette Chase) getting out of jail for petty larceny.

Directed by Jonathan Kaplan – who would go on to helm Heart Like A Wheel, The Accused and several other A-list studio dramas – from a script by Oscar Williams and Michael Allin, and from a story by Jerry Wilkes, Truck Turner is one of the best entries in the Blaxploitation genre.

For starters, AIP actually bought a script. The first half of the movie simply follows Truck around, as his girlfriend’s cat pees on his last “clean” shirt and he goes about his day. Truck and Jerry go to an army barracks to pick up a prisoner and run the barricade, hoping the MP shoots the bad tire Truck needs replacing.

Their prisoner starts yelling racial slurs, so we cut to Truck taking the cuffs off him and whopping his ass in a field (the punching sound effects in the movie are dynamite). Truck promises his girl he’ll pick her up from jail, and goofs around with Jerry in his new Dodge Charger. All of his before any real plot kicks in.

Once it does, the movie slows to a crawl. Kotto is not given much playing time as the bad guy, though it is amusing to hear Lt. Uhura spewing obscenities. Every moment Isaac Hayes is off screen, the movie suffers, which is ironic, because this would be the only film he would ever play a leading role in.

As an actor – even in ’74 – Hayes knew his limitations. He doesn’t attempt any emoting and he doesn’t try to be a handsome leading man, but instead plays a working class dude having fun with his buddies, suffering his woman and putting a foot in the ass of anyone who messes with his day.

Even better, Hayes is funny. Truck Turner is really an action comedy. The scene where Truck picks Annazette Chase up from jail, a whole day late, but offers her a six pack of beer, is hilarious.

Sam Laws co-stars as the grizzled old bail bondsman Truck works for, while Scatman Crothers (when he still had hair), Dick Miller and Charles Cyphers pop up in bit parts that add a lot of flavor to the movie. Kaplan, who got on-the-job training from Roger Corman directing classics like Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers, makes the film feel real by shooting on location in L.A. and incorporating lots of locals into the over-the-top action.

Hayes also supplied the musical score, which doesn’t measure up to his Academy Award winning work on Shaft, but is still pretty damn funky.

When a couple are blown up by a car bomb, their son, a retired Green Beret named Slaughter (Jim Brown) goes gunning for revenge. “The Man” gets Slaughter to agree to go to South America, and for reasons that defy logic, work for the FBI. Slaughter is paired with two agents (Don Gordon and Marlene Clark) and gets on the bad side of a hotheaded mafia chief (Rip Torn) by getting cozy with his woman (Stella Stevens).

Directed by Jack Starrett, from a script by Mark Hanna and Don Williams, this American International Pictures release is a bucket of dumb fun that benefits hugely from Brown’s screen presence and by Starrett’s energetic direction.

Starrett would next direct Cleopatra Jones and Ride With The Devil, and shows real flair as an action director, not only executing action sequences in anamorphic frame, but doing so with style. Several choice moments of beat down are purposely distorted, as if the Hulk were stretching the sides of the screen. For other moments, the film is undercranked, which can look cartoonish if done for too long, but Starrett’s flourishes give the movie a visual wit the script completely lacks.

There’s no script here, at least not one that makes any kind of sense. The plot involves the mob – for unexplained reasons (probably budget) are headquartered in South America – using a computer to store records. Slaughter’s father knew about the computer and was killed. Slaughter’s surveillance technique involves making himself a target for mafia hoods, whom he dispatches with a .45 one at a time. The dialogue is a flat tire and the characters behave in a way that defies explanation, even for a Blaxploitation flick.

Rip Torn is woefully under used as Mister Big. In his final scene, he admits to killing Slaughter’s parents and throws in a racial slur for good measure, before asking Brown to help him out of an overturned car. Not the most intelligent villain in the history of film. Naturally, he doesn’t make it.

On a positive note, the musical score by Luchi de Jesus is good, and Billy Preston provided the decent theme song. There is a stylish opening credits sequence that kicks things off on the right note as well. Between Brown’s ease playing a superhero, and Starrett’s ability to capture the action, Slaughter is fun enough to recommend. Jim Brown would return in the sequel, Slaughter’s Big Rip-off.

Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby were paired together again in this follow-up to Uptown Saturday Night, this time playing working class, married men from Atlanta (Poitier is a milkman, Cosby a factory worker). When their community lodge has to come up with cash to relocate, Cosby convinces Poitier to accompany him to New Orleans and to use his knack for hypnosis to fix a big boxing match.

Accompanied by their wives – the uptight Lee Chamberlain and soulful Denise Nicholas – Poitier & Cosby “put the whammy” on a boxer played by Jimmie Walker, transforming him from a chump into a he-man. The con nets a big payoff from rival gangsters (played supremely well by John Amos and Calvin Lockhart). But Amos tracks the pair down and forces them to return to New Orleans and put the whammy on the rematch. Poitier & Cosby decide instead to sting the gangsters, with a little help from their wives.

Directed by Sidney Poitier and written by Richard Wesley (from a story by Timothy March), Let’s Do It Again is perhaps the best buddy comedy of the era, and I’m including the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor pictures and the Eddie Murphy comedies of the ’80s in that statement. There isn’t one scene that falls flat here. The movie works beautifully from beginning to end.

As the lead performer of an impressive ensemble, Poitier shows much greater comfort doing comedy than he did in Uptown. Instead of playing the straight man and deferring to Cosby, Poitier gives himself a lot more to do here, “putting the whammy” on people or impersonating a high rolling hustler, complete with pimp hat and cape.

Cosby once again runs away with the movie, delivering perhaps the best film work of his career. The well traveled setup is for Poitier & Cosby to be discovered someplace they’re not supposed to be, and Cosby’s character having to talk their way out.

Classic bits include Cosby imitating a hotel detective, before realizing the dude he’s trying to con is the real hotel detective, and a laugh-out-loud bit where Cosby, decked out in pimp Bermuda shorts, cap and wraparound shades, tries to play himself off to Amos as a high roller. Nothing could be further away from Heathcliff Huxtable than Cosby playing a super fly hustler, but he’s brilliant in the movie.

As director, Poitier not only delivers laughs, but cast his movie extremely well. In addition to Amos – who is great fun to watch get furious – Chamberlain & Nicholas play women with wit who get to strut their stuff as a part of the sting. Jimmie Walker – who on one hand, always wore on the nerves the more dialogue he was given – gets laughs just by appearing in boxing trunks. The scene where he comes out to spar with superhuman strength, launching a punching bag through a window, is hilarious.

Ossie Davis is well utilized as the elder of the lodge, amusingly named “The Sons and Daughters of Shaka.” Also of note is George Foreman, who pops up as a factory worker at the beginning of the film, heckling Cosby and radiating all the charm he would during his boxing comeback the following decade.

Curtis Mayfield, whose music for Super Fly ranks as one of the best soundtracks ever recorded for a movie, wrote and produced the sensational soul music here. Among nine tracks, The Staples Singers performed a classic theme song in “Let’ Do It Again” that captures the fun and flirtatious vibe of the movie. Highly recommended.

Sidney Poitier & Bill Cosby star as working class married men in Chicago (Poitier is an ironworker, Cosby a cabbie). Cosby convinces his straight pal Poitier to take a walk on the wilder side and accompany him to an upscale speakeasy. After Cosby bluffs their way inside, masked men rob the joint, stealing Poitier’s wallet, which he discovers the next day holds a winning $50,000 lottery ticket.

The working stiffs first approach a jumpy private eye (Richard Pryor, in a hilarious cameo) to help them, but after that fails, resort to conning rival gangsters “Geechie” Dan Beauford (Harry Belafonte, imitating Marlon Brando) and Silky Slim (Calvin Lockhart) in an effort to retrieve the wallet.

Directed by Sidney Poitier, from a screenplay by Richard Wesley, this was the first of three popular buddy comedies featuring Poitier & Cosby in the mid-’70s. Poitier wanted to answer critics who felt that his dignified screen persona – espousing upper middle class (re: white) values – had alienated urban audiences. When he began his directing, Poitier shifted to comedies, which proved extremely successful with both white and urban audiences.

Uptown Saturday Night is funny in spots, but is uneven, as if the filmmakers were unsure whether what they were trying was working from scene to scene. Poitier originally wanted to produce and direct, rather than also play a lead role, and his character acts the straight man, standing around and deferring too much to Cosby, who runs away with the picture.

Cosby does amazing work here, playing a bearded, working class cat with a cool rap. In a hilarious scene, Cosby marches into a bar and starts throwing his weight around, chasing a dude out with a barstool, before having to talk his way past a diminutive gangster (Harold Nicholas) with karate skills. The bit is even funnier than Eddie Murphy’s bar raising scene in 48 HRS. because Cosby has to play both a loudmouth and a chump in the same scene.

Other cast members don’t fare as well. Flip Wilson appears in two scenes as a preacher and brings absolutely nothing to the film. Rosalind Cash and Ketty Lester are woefully underwritten as the wives and have nothing to do here. In addition to Pryor’s great bit, Paula Kelly pops up as a two-fisted speakeasy patron and is dynamite, while Poitier & Cosby do work extremely well together. The film suffers greatly whenever they’re off screen.

Universal Pictures’ foray into the Blaxploitation genre stars Roscoe Orman as the title character, a Manhattan pimp whose ambition to shoot to the top of the game is gradually tempered by the efforts of a social worker (the late Diana Sands) and her D.A. boyfriend (Thalmus Rasulala).

Directed by Gilbert Moses, from a screen story by Ron Culter and Joe Keyes Jr. and a screenplay by Cutler, Willie Dynamite is like a hooker with a heart of gold. It has good intentions (Richard Zanuck and David Brown were actually the producers, many, many years before winning Oscars for Driving Miss Daisy) but it is still a mangy, banged up affair, a trifle when compared to its contemporaries.

The movie starts off reasonably savvy with Willie D.’s seven ladies of leisure parting a sea of Shriners massed at a hotel, employing capitalist savvy to get business as a Shriner gives a speech on free market enterprise in the background.

But upon the entrance of Orman – who would later assay the role of Gordon on Sesame Street (man, is it weird seeing him strut around in a pimp costume!) – the movie is aimless. The filmmakers seem genuinely confused over whether Willie D. is the hero of the film, or a bad guy that Sands must take down. He’s never nasty enough to want to see fall a la Tony Montana, or evil enough to despise as a heavy. With a little more effort, the movie might have worked as a comedy.

Willie D. is repeatedly harassed by the cops (his Cadillac El Dorado is either towed or confiscated throughout the movie) to almost comic effect, but there are long stretches of dialogue where Sands tries to educate the prostitutes to the errors of their ways, like an afterschool special. There are some chases and shootouts about half way through the picture, but by then, I could have cared less what calamity befell Willie D.

The intention here seemed to be to chronicle the wayward ways of a street hustler and show why he chooses to give up the game and go straight, something Super Fly was much more adept at dealing with, without pages and pages of anti-pimp dialogue. There is much too much talking in the movie and very little atmosphere to vibe on. The soundtrack by J.J. Johnson is entirely forgettable.