Uptown Saturday Night (1974)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) For some cinephiles, casting can be an attraction in itself—even if it’s never a good predictor of quality. So it is that 1970s blaxploitation comedy Uptown Saturday Night features a rich assortment of names: Sidney Poitier directing himself, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte and (in a comparatively smaller role) Richard Pryor in a crime comedy that would spawn two other unrelated follow-ups. Under Poitier’s direction, the film is self-consciously aiming higher than the usual blaxploitation film (to the point where that label is very much open to discussion)—the characters are dignified, the all-black cast isn’t reducible to stereotypes and the film has a welcome comedic pep that sustains most of its duration. There are two generations of leading black actors here in between Bellafonte and Poitier (gentlemen to the core), then Cosby and Pryor (whose respective stars were more than tarnished later on). It’s an interesting counterpart to the harder crime-edged thrillers that compose most of the mid-1970s black-cast movies and should prove interesting to black film historians for that reason. Otherwise, well, the actresses are beautiful and the jokes generally land—what else would you want? Much of the humour comes from ordinary middle-class people getting embroiled in the underworld for want of a lost lottery ticket and lying to their wives—there’s a relaxed easiness to the comedy as it comes to Cosby and Poitier and the sum of it is much greater than seeing a few known names working together in the same film.