Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Comedy/ Blaxploitation
Director: Ossie Davis
Year: 1970
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
Ossie Davis, the writer/director of Cotton Comes to Harlem (from a novel by Chester Himes), was also a civil rights activist who delivered Malcolm X’s eulogy at his funeral. Davis was from an earlier generation, and the style of Cotton Comes to Harlem derives largely from vaudeville, tempered by Ossie Davis’ obvious determination to avoid denigrating the black experience.
Cotton Comes To Harlem concerns how Reverend Deke O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart, in a amateurish dinner theater performance) attempts to abscond with $87,000 from the pockets of Harlem’s residents hidden in a bale of cotton (don’t ask), generated from a back-to-Africa swindle. The rest of the plot consists of a series of double crosses and fake outs as detectives Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) attempt to locate the bale of cotton and get the goods on Reverend O’Malley.
It’s fascinating, in a way, to see how writer director Davis repeatedly defuses his material to avoid giving offense. Time after time, the situations in his movie seem to call for a harsh and bitter tone, somewhat like The French Connection, which came out a year later. But Cotton Comes To Harlem is the anti-French Connection.
First off, the acting is in a broad vaudevillian style, which makes the picture hard to take seriously. Then broad comedy, often with a faintly ribald edge, is injected probably more often than it makes sense. There’s even some singing and dancing.
Ossie Davis, no dummy, was surely aware of the recent trend in realistic violence in cinema, as exemplified by then recent movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, so there are scenes where people get shot by machine guns, hit by cars and burned alive, but somehow none of it registers. I’m not sure why.
The obligatory car chase scene, early on in the picture, is embarrassing. The camera was obviously undercranked to make the cars seem like they’re going faster.
Politically speaking, Ossie Davis ties himself into knots. His viewpoint towards whites is that they’re foolish and ignorant, particularly about any part of the black experience, but he refuses to make them into the villains. Davis reserves his ire for black people who steal from black people. The N word is conspicuously absent, replaced by “colored,” which was the politically correct term at the time.
One treat is that Ossie Davis takes us into the Harlem of 1970, so we get a rare opportunity to see a fair share of soul food places, street scenes, performance spaces, churches, black fashion and so on from the period.
But in the end, Cotton Comes to Harlem is too corny, careful, slow, and lethargic to hold much interest for lovers of trash cinema in general, or even fans of blaxploitation pictures.
However, for cultural anthropologists, Cotton Comes to Harlem is an indispensible portrait of a black filmmaker struggling to make a socially responsible comic thriller while still managing to entertain. Ossie Davis fails, but not for lack of trying.
