No Show

By J.C.

UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT

Directed by SIDNEY POITIER

Screenplay by RICHARD WESLEY

What a wonderful title -- raffish, with a street-smart tone, and with the promise, too, of a gaudy carnival running full tilt dusk to dawn. Uptown Saturday Night could have been, should have been, a neon mosaic of high spirits and lowlife.

The first hint that something rather different is going to be delivered here comes at the very opening, when Sidney Poitier, serving as both star and director, gets off his factory job and steps into some dog dirt. Poitier is one of the more fastidious of movie stars, so perhaps he saw this as his symbolic initiation into the realms of folk comedy. He did not, in any case, summon a double for the scene, but carried straight through with it himself, sparing no sacrifice to get into a little funk.

Soon after that, he falls in with a cab-driver buddy (Bill Cosby) who suggests that they party it up that night at a gilt-edged fancy house. Now Poitier is basically a nice family man, but his vacation is coming up and he could use a night on the town. The friends arrange to meet at Madam Zenobia's after their wives have gone to bed. They show up, eye the girls, but are robbed, along with everyone else, when four masked men hit the place. The rest of the movie deals with the contortive lengths Cosby and Poitier go to to retrieve Poitier's wallet, which contains, as it turns out, a winning raffle ticket.

The cast is laden with all sorts of luminaries (Harry Belafonte, Calvin Lockhart, Richard Pryor, Rosalind Cash) and among them there are a couple of nice but wide comic turns: Roscoe Lee Browne as an enjoyably fulsome and hypocritical politician, and Flip Wilson as a preacher who exhorts his congregation, "We need more romance and less hot pants." Cosby is affably anxious, but Poitier's idea of comic acting is to bulge his eyes out, as if doing a Mantan Moreland impression. It is said of some movies that they look like photographed stage plays. Uptown Saturday Night looks like a photographed radio show.

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