Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)

Really Surprised!

Not even bad in a good way

Brilliant and touching

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Brilliant B style blaxploitation movie. it has so many comedic moments intentional or otherwise. It's simply a comedy that will have you smiling or giggling throughout, if you've watched police squad you'll get the general idea.

One of the better black exploitation pictures to come out of the Seventies was Cotton Comes To Harlem where Raymond St. Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge gave a black twist to the male buddy film that so many white actors had done over the years going all the way back to James Cagney and Pat O'Brien.St. Jacques and Cambridge play a pair of police detectives assigned to a precinct north of Central Park where they've drawn duty being security for a rally headed by the Reverend Calvin Lockhart who's got a nascent Back to Africa movement going. He's collecting money at his rally and preaching up a storm when some masked bandits armed with automatic weapons take off with the proceeds. The money gets hidden in a bale of cotton and then the bale gets ripped off.Our two detectives got a whole host of suspects, some white numbers gangsters from Pleasant Avenue, black militants, the good reverend himself who St. Jacques has a passionate dislike for and various and assorted other criminal types. Lockhart is one charismatic preacher and as he says himself, he could be another Marcus Garvey who immediately came to mind before Lockhart mentioned his name during the film.John Anderson and Eugene Roche are St. Jacques and Cambridge's superiors in the police department, Anderson impatient with them and Roche inclined to give them plenty of room to maneuver. Judy Pace plays Lockhart's mistress and one seductive temptress if there ever was one. And we can't forget Redd Foxx in a delightful performance as an old rummy whose ship might just be coming in.Cotton Comes To Harlem moves at a very fast pace with absolutely not a wasted frame of film. It holds up very well after almost 40 years even if those fashions and those Afros don't.

I've been curious about this film since it came out, when I was nine, and since I got lost in Harlem alone, when I was eleven. After finally seeing it, at age forty two, I think my perspectives are just slightly different than they would have been, had I watched it when it was first released. For one thing, when I was a pre-teen, the film would have validated some of the lines we used to use in games of cops and robbers, like `calling all cars,' or `stop in the name of the law!' As an adult, I instead find myself wondering why the police never heard of phrases like `officers in pursuit in need of backup.' Also, at age nine, I probably wouldn't have questioned whether or not the police were within their rights, when they did things like park themselves in a woman's apartment for days so they could wait for her criminal boyfriend to show up, without any kind of warrant or authorization to do so.However, if you overlook all the obvious points that the writers obviously overlooked, this is an interesting, entertaining film that was a pioneer in it's time. The scene with the "bag headed" cop was brilliant, hilarious and a genuine classic. And of course, one look at this film and you'll never again ask yourself what inspired Norman Lear to cast the relatively unknown Redd Foxx as an old junk man.

I agree with those that say this was an entertaining movie. Of the blaxploitation films, this was the more classier. Fine acting from Cambridge, Lockhart, and others. Ossie Davis direction very good.