Black Power

By J.C.

AMAZING GRACE

Directed by STAN LATHAN Screenplay by MATT ROBINSON

If television sitcoms in the 1950s had been about blacks, they would have looked very much like Amazing Grace, a wheezy little family comedy starring "Moms" Mabley. Such excellent actors as Rosalind Cash and Moses Gunn are also lurking in the vicinity, and there are a couple of cameo appearances--for camp and sentimental value--by Stepin Fetchit and Butterfly McQueen. But the movie is clearly a vehicle for Moms.

The role she has tailored for herself over the years at places like Harlem's Apollo Theater is an outrageous caricature of a menial black. She is a whole lot smarter than she looks, and she sure looks terrible. Her hair--what there is left of it--is styled by Mixmaster. Her speech is so slurred that she sounds as if she has gargled with molasses. What she says may sound like gibberish, but she is always savvy.

Moms, in short, is a broad and earthy clown. The script of Amazing Grace, however, calls on her mostly to be goodhearted and forward-looking and does not allow her enough wry humor. "That woman would make coffee nervous," she mutters at one point, one of the best lines in a movie notably short on them.

Moms appears as Grace Teasdale Grimes, a resident of a Baltimore ghetto who, with the aid of her man friend Forthwith (Slappy White), helps her next-door neighbor get elected mayor.

She does this by rallying the support of a lot of black college students with a political speech that combines about equal portions of sentiment and gags. The kids, enchanted, get out and stump for Grace's neighbor friend. It may not be much, but at least it has Moms.

-J .C .

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