Blaxploitation Education: Uptown Saturday Night

In which it becomes impossible to avoid talking about Bill Cosby.

Uptown Saturday Night
Written by Richard Wesley
Directed by Sidney Poitier
1974

When it comes to Black comedy, Bill Cosby is a touchy subject, to say the least. Since the mid-2010s, his reputation has plummeted after revelations about his activities came to light. While he was busy preaching respectability politics, he had spent decades (allegedly) committing sexual assault against women. The “allegedly” is something that has to be included, but when dozens of women have come forward with credible accusations, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of ambiguity about what really happened. The most upsetting aspect of the whole situation is that the allegations date all the way back to the 1960s, but nobody got around to doing much of anything about it for 50 years or so.

Nowadays, most people would like to forget that Cosby was once one of the most recognizable and beloved celebrities in the world. For most of the 1980s, The Cosby Show was the most popular sitcom on TV, with Cosby serving in a role that was often referred to as “America’s Dad,” but his popularity stretched well before and after that point. It’s hard to accept that while all of that was going on, he was engaging in horrific crimes that many people worked very hard to ignore. So we would like to try to forget about him, but it’s impossible, given that he was an inescapable component of Black culture who was so inoffensively entertaining that he was accepted by white culture as well.

And that brings us to Uptown Saturday Night, the first of a loose trilogy of films that Cosby made along with Sidney Poitier in the mid-1970s. They’re movies that have to be discussed in the context of Blaxploitation, since they were pretty successful, perhaps providing some crossover appeal for white audiences who were familiar with the stars. The role Cosby plays here isn’t too different from his public persona, making it yet another inoffensive example of his ability to win audiences over through general affability, with any undercurrent of darkness regarding his behind-the-scenes actions having to be assumed.

Interestingly, while the Blaxploitation genre was on the rise, giving some filmmakers the opportunity to highlight the concerns faced by Black people, Sidney Poitier, who had spent the last couple decades breaking barriers and playing roles in which he stood up to racism, took a step back from that sort of thing and decided to make a goofy comedy. He had previously directed Buck and the Preacher, a Western that focused on some of those themes, but here, he seems completely uninterested in serious subjects, choosing instead to just have some fun.

Poitier plays Steve, a blue-collar worker in Chicago who is happily married to his wife Sarah (Rosalind Cash, from Amazing Grace and Melinda). His pal Wardell (Cosby, sporting a bushy beard and moustache), a taxi driver, convinces him to go out to a private club known as Madame Zenobia’s, where they’re excited to ogle some beautiful women and act like they want to get up to some nasty business, but they’re most likely not going to do anything especially salacious. Wardell does do some gambling, but just when he’s winning while a loud woman known as Leggy Peggy (Paula Kelly, from Tough Guys, Trouble Man, and more) keeps making great dice rolls, some masked men bust in and rob everyone.

The robbery would be bad enough on its own, but the next day, Steve is reading the paper and realizes that he had bought a winning lottery ticket that’s worth $50,000, but it was in his wallet, and thus is now in the possession of the robbers. So he recruits Wardell to join him in finding the robbers and getting the ticket back. Cue lots of wacky adventures, some of which are pretty funny, but the whole thing kind of goes on for too long, eventually leading to a tedious action sequence and a shrug of an ending.

As mentioned, Cosby pretty much plays the same type of character he always did, so there’s not much surprise there, aside from the strangeness of hearing him and Poitier refer to each other using slang like “young blood” and “homeboy.” However, Poitier seems to be going for a new comic persona here, doing a lot of outsized comedy reactions to the craziness going on around him, but still trying to remain restrained rather than being an over-the-top caricature. He does occasionally get some laughs from being a square who is unconvincingly attempting to act tough, but most of his work is pretty unmemorable. Having spent so many years playing dramatic roles, comedy just may not have been his strong suit.

Most of the movie consists of scenes in which Steve and Wardell come across some wacky character or another. They try to hire a private detective played by Richard Pryor, who has a hilarious one-scene performance in which he complains about the loneliness and risks of being a detective before trying to run off with their payment, only to be immediately arrested by the police who have been investigating his con artist schemes. There’s another bit where the duo goes to a bar where one of the potential robbers may hang out, thinking that they won’t get much trouble from a guy known as Little Seymour. Wardell talks a big game, making it sound like he’s going to kick some ass, but when Seymour and his enforcer, a huge guy known as Big Percy, show up, he’s forced to take everything he said back. Also, Seymour turns out to have kung fu skills, so he and Percy team up to beat our heroes up in a raucous bar fight.

One of the more amusing bits takes place when Steve and Wardell decide to seek help from their local congressman for some reason. When Congressman Lincoln (Roscoe Lee Brown, from Super Fly T.N.T. and UpTight) realizes that he’ll be meeting some of his constituents, he turns around a portrait of Richard Nixon on the wall to reveal one of Malcolm X, dons a dashiki, and greets them with street-style handshakes. When they try to inform him about their situation, he acts appalled, referring to Madame Zenobia’s as a den of sin, but when his wife walks into the office unexpectedly, she turns out to be Leggy Peggy! She reveals that her husband is the one who introduced her to the club, puncturing his self-important image.

Eventually, the search leads to a gangster known as Geechie Dan, who is played by Harry Belafonte in what seems to be a strange attempt at a Marlon Brando impression. Dan didn’t do the robbery, but he’s pretty sure that his rival, Silky Slim (Calvin Lockhart, from Melinda and Cotton Comes to Harlem), did. Steve and Wardell eventually convince Dan and Slim to team up, making them think they have an angle on a diamond heist, all in hopes that they can get access to the wallet in Slim’s possession.

The group of gangsters and the guys trying to scam them all end up attending a church picnic together (first, they go to a church service, where comedian Flip Wilson plays the reverend and gives a pretty funny sermon about how the World War II military slogan “loose lips sink ships” should apply to the congregation’s gossiping ways), and there are a variety of shenanigans before the cops show up and everything culminates in a chase scene. This involves an extended bit of cheesy green-screen work where Poitier pretends to be hanging onto the roof of the gangsters’ car. Amusingly, the chase takes place on a mountainous road, which is terrain that would not be found anywhere near the flat landscape surrounding Chicago.

Aside from the lame effects work, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, and there are definitely some good comedy bits throughout the movie. But the whole thing is so inoffensive and generally wholesome that it doesn’t have much weight. The most memorable Blaxploitation movies had an edge to them, an aura of dangerousness that came from people who previously hadn’t had much of a voice being given the chance to show why audiences should care about them. Maybe Poitier was too much of an established star to do anything too controversial, or maybe he just wanted to have some fun without ruffling anybody’s feathers. The results end up being entertaining enough, but when there’s barely enough material to put together something vaguely approaching a plot, it’s not surprising that the movie is easily forgotten.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace