Uptown Saturday Night

Steve and his friend Wardell go out to a nightclub for one evening off. The club is held up; armed men rob everyone and take Steve's wallet. The next day he realises something: there was a lottery ticket in it, and that ticket has won. They have to find the wallet. The two start moving through the underside of the city: neighbourhood bosses, a fraudulent preacher, a private detective and two rival gangs. Sidney Poitier directs and takes a lead. Bill Cosby plays Wardell and Harry Belafonte plays the gang boss Geechie Dan, with Richard Pryor in the cast. Belafonte's boss openly imitates the type from the mafia films that had just appeared, and the part is entirely parody. It is the first of the comedies Poitier directed; two more were made with the same team. The importance is in the casting: a comedy made in the seventies with black actors for a black audience that is not built on crime or violence. It stands outside the common mould of the period. The humour is close to stage comedy; the sequences are independent of each other and each is built like a turn. Who it is for: anyone curious about seventies American comedy and the black cinema of the period. Who it is not for: the structure is loose, some passages run long, and the humour stays of its time.