Up Town Saturday Night (1974)

I was back on the Blaxploitation this past weekend, catching up with a few more classics of the genre.  While most Blaxploitation movies were essentially low budget productions distributed by the likes of AIP, the genre's success at the box office meant that the bigger studios would inevitably want to get in on the act.  Likewise, established black stars who would probably not  be seen dead in an AIP production, also wanted in on the action.  Hence we got movies like Up Town Saturday Night (1974), directed by and starring Sidney Poitier, from Warner Brothers.  Boasting a bigger budget than any regular Blaxploitation movie could muster and featuring just about every 'mainstream' black star of the era - including Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor and Roscoe Lee Browne - it pitches itself as a free-wheeling comedy.  Unfortunately, it never really seems to spark into life.  The scenario and situations should be amusing and entertaining, but somehow they just fall short every time, leaving the whole affair feeling anti-climactic.  It starts reasonably well, with average working class guys Poitier and Cosby deciding, behind their wives' backs, to visit an exclusive night club cum casino, cum brothel, one Saturday night.  Unfortunately, the night they manage to gain entry under false pretences - they have a fake letter of introduction claiming that they are visiting diamond dealers - is the night that the joint is robbed by an armed gang.  As if losing his wallet isn't bad enough, Poitier subsequently realises that a winning lottery ticket was in said wallet.  The rest of the film concerns his and Cosby's attempts to recover the wallet while keeping their illicit escapade secret from wives and friends.

Unfortunately, after this the film fails to shift up a gear, with its episodic format preventing any real pace or tension to build up.  Of the series of what are, in essence, sketches that follow, only the encounter with Richard Pryor's con man posing as private detective 'Sharp Eyes' Washington, manages to muster any real amusement.  The other episodes, involving variously Roscoe Lee Browne's senator, Harry Belafonte's gangster and Flip Wilson's preacher, are all underwhelming.  The climax, at a church social outing, where Cosby and Poitier have conned Belafonte and his rival Calvin Lockhart (who carried out the robbery) into exchanging the proceeds of the heist, falls horribly flat, with not even a final car chase managing to generate much excitement.  Ultimately, Up Town Saturday Night's problem is that it tries to play it too safe.  While it clearly wants to cash in on the Blaxploitation band wagon, it also wants to be seen as more 'upmarket' and 'sophisticated'.  So, rather than follow any established Blaxploitation formula, whether that be black crime movies, horror movies or action films, it seems to want to model itself on mainstream comedy formats like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, (I probably left a couple of 'Mads' out there).  While it does make reference to the Blaxploitation genre in its gangster characters, who are clear caricatures of the same sort of characters portrayed in that genre, overall Up Town Saturday Night seems to want to portrays black people in a more 'positive' light.  The price its pays for this is to sacrifice the social commentary and often ferocious critriques of racism found in true Blaxploitation films, exchanging them for blandness.  Nonetheless, Up Town Saturday Night was successful enough to spawn two 'sequels', also starring Poitier and Cosby, in Let's Do It Again (1976) and A Piece of the Action (1979).