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Sidney Poitier’s third film as a director, Uptown Saturday Night, is a delightful, rowdy minor work. His work as a director is still a bit too stuffy and heavy-handed for what is essentially a situation comedy blown to feature-length, but it’s still enjoyable. He counterbalances this stiff direction with a performance that is fleet-footed and refreshingly loose threatening to lose his control as the failures pile up.
Uptown Saturday Night follows Poitier’s factory worker and best friend (Bill Cosby) sneak away to underground gambling club where they get robbed and lose a winning lottery ticket. The rest of the plot involves their various setbacks and adventures in trying to get $50,000 ticket back, including Harry Belafonte’s raspy-voiced parody of Vito Corleone and Richard Pryor as PI on the take. There’s an overall pleasing vibe to Uptown even as some episodes divert and drain away the energy necessary for comedy. (I’m thinking of Flip Wilson’s extended bit as a preacher that never successfully builds tension as it clearly intended to do.)
The whole thing is just so… pleasant. Although, the presence of Bill Cosby does render enjoyment a hurdle to jump through in the beginning given recent events. Having said that, Poitier and Cosby generate a buddy-comedy chemistry that works like gangbusters.
But a more focused story structure would’ve made it better. There’s the underground club, crooked politicians, an extended church sequence, kung fu (‘cause 70s), and seemingly everything else that screenwriter Richard Wesley can think up. Still, it’s nice to see Poitier in clown mode after spending so much time being in respectable message movies.
