Uptown Saturday Night

Some one said not a great movie. Are you out of your mind. Any movie with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier is the best. They don't make movies like those anymore. Please if you haven't seen Uptown Saturday Night, A Piece of The Action, and Let's do It Again. SEE THEM YOU WILL NOT BE DISSAPOINTED AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

with this little movie, Poitier and Cosby manage to elude the traditional stereotypes of black comedies and the blacksploitation films. rather than laughing AT the characters, we are laughing at the situations and their reactions.

i also heard that Marlon Brando laughed out loud at the gangster parody of his Godfather role. me? i couldn't stop laughing throughout the film. madcap and absurd, this movie has several memorable sequences and conversations.

i don't know why this film is not more widely known. it plays with film convention, parodies everything from Godfather to hard-boiled detective movies, and all the while maintains an inspired sense of humor mixed with stand-up and vaudeville influences.

This film still holds up years after it was first released. Steve and Wardell (Sidney Portier and Bill Cosby) are two working stiffs that try to get by. Wardell talks Steve into coming with him to a place called Madame Zenobia's (A HOT spot!). During the outing, the place gets robbed. Steve finds out later that he won the lottery. Trouble is, the winning ticket is in the wallet that was stolen. With the help of Wardell, they do just about ANYTHING to get the ticket back, and that is what makes this film fun. Harry Belafonte, Richard Pryor and Calvin Lockhart and just as wonderful. Worth checking out for the laughs, not just for 70's nostalgia.

Despite it's obvious lack of a huge budget and the wildly out-of-style fashions and slang (yes, kids..we really DID dress and talk like that back in the '70's...I KNOW...I was THERE) UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT shouldn't be passed up when it's shown on your cable or satellite provider stations.

Sidney Poitier (who directed) and Bill Cosby play two working stiffs who sneak out of their homes to hang at Madame Zenobia's, a high-class after-hours joint. After bluffing their way in, they immediately set about enjoying themselves at the gambling tables and are on a roll when the joint is robbed. The two consider themselves lucky to have gotten out alive, but then Poitier's character finds out he's got a winning lottery ticket worth $50,000(don't laugh..back in '74, that was a LOT of money) and the two pals start a frantic search to find the robbers and locate the winning ticket (it's in a wallet taken during the robbery)

UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT is filled with quirky and oddball hustlers, grifters, crooked politicians, ghetto gangsters and cheap floozies, all brought to life by some of the most talented black actors of the day. And the movie also has two of the most beautiful actresses ever to be filmed, namely Rosalind Cash and Paula Kelly. Poitier and Cosby encounter a series of very funny adventures as their hunt for the winning lottery ticket forces them into a partnership with Geechy Dan Buford (an outlandishly hilarious Harry Belafonte) and Silky Slim (Calvin Lockhart) in order to get it back. Can the two working stiffs outhustle and outwit the hordes of street-wise slicks standing between them and a fortune? Watch the movie to find out and I think you'll agree that its worth the time to find out the answer.

Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby made two other films in this kind of comedy/caper genre. LET'S DO IT AGAIN is just as good (with a thrilling and side-splitting foot chase near the end and Jimmy J.J. Walker as the heavyweight champion boxer of the world) but A PIECE OF THE ACTION is a little bit more on the serious side with an added dose of social commentary...still, during the blaxplotation era of the '70's, these films were a delightful alternative to the 'kill-whitey-stick-it-to-The-Man-superbrotha-pimpin'-and-shootin-' movies that were also being produced then. I recommend all three of them very highly. Enjoy.

This was the first of 3 movies with Sidney Poitier and Billy Cosby. They have great chemistry as they move through this story of friends spending a night out and then get robbed. They were not supposed to be there in the first place. The supporting stars provide great comic relief. The wives in the movie are great women of African American theater. Harry Belafonte does a hilarious send up of Marlon Brando from "The Godfather". Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor also have parts in the movie and are hilarious. There are a number of great scenes with bill and Sidney running and escaping the gangsters and the end is definitely worth it!