Uptown Saturday Night

The next Sidney Poitier trilogy that I will be looking at co-stars a famous comedian that I know a lot of people are bashing now because of his cases with women. However, I still want to talk about these and not mention any of the issues that are going on right now, so let’s get started with the first in the trilogy, “Uptown Saturday Night,” released in 1974.

Dick Lochte started his review by saying, “I can't believe that screenwriter Richard Wesley and director Sidney Poitier were unconscious of the ghosts of Amos and Andy when they went to work on Uptown Saturday Night. The film's heroes are too similar to those radio and television prototypes.”

Lochte continued, “Poitier's Steve Jackson, like Andrew H. Brown, is a middleage, lower-middle-class fellow of meager imagination. Bill Cosby’s Wardell Franklin combines the bogus smarts and self-deception of Kingfish Stevens with the cab-driver occupation of Amos Jones. And their night on the town which leads to an involvement with gangsters, fast women and assorted jive artists is straight from the Amos 'n' Andy book of record.”

Lochte went on, “Yet it is not quite correct for a critic, a white one especially, to dismiss the results as a throwback to the golden days of radio, not that the movie is funny and old-fashioned and let it go at that. Something else is at work here.”

The obvious difference between this movie and the sitcom is who worked on this, laughing with the characters rather than at them. The mood is actually proud in the work of difficult everyday reality. Cosby, dressed like a gangster, steps outside and gets arrested because he slightly looks like a wanted man. The scene is there for laughs, but the original idea of black life – that police can pull you over at any time for any reason – does not go unnoticed.

Look at Roscoe Lee Browne’s two-faced Congressman Lincoln, a large sketch who puts a dashiki over his sharkskin suit to meet “the people,” gives laughter with a real edge. Also, Richard Pryor’s Sharp Eye Washington, a con man who is known for coning fellow Africans, is another example of this strangely effective setting of laughs with bitter truth.

Lochte said, “Throughout the film I had the feeling that it was too weighed down with talent, that it wasn't funny enough to justify its overwhleming cast, because nothing could.” (A black celebrity not included must really feel insulted.)

Lochte admitted, “But in thinking back on it, I have nothing but good feelings about the movie. Poitier and Cosby, two sophisticated entertainers, doing their numbers as uncomplicated ghetto dwellers: Flip Wilson, as the Reverend, flailing and railing through a sermon about loose lips leading to sin.” Harry Belafonte’s dangerously spoofs Godfather Brando mockery as gang lord Geechie Dan. Calvin Lockhart’s sneaky thief enjoying himself at a church picnic, and the rest all complete a pretty enjoyable total.

Lochte noted, “Recent movies like Claudme and Five on The Black Hand Side and now Uptown Saturday Night are hopefully harbingers of a new direction in black cinema away from the crude, self-destructive and violent exploitation films of the past few years.” It would be nice if their success would act as an inspiration for the film industry completely.

This is actually a good comedy that I think everyone should watch. If you can put all of the stuff Cosby is guilty for aside and just watch this film, you will actually enjoy this. There are a lot of good laughs in here that everyone will laugh at this from beginning to end. Check it out and give it a chance.

Now, as I already mentioned, this film was successful that it became a trilogy. I will be looking at them next week in “Sidney Poitier Month.”