Cotton Comes to Harlem

Esteemed stage and screen actor and famed civil rights leader Ossie Davis made his directorial debut with this 1970 adaptation of Chester Himes's crime novel. Godfrey Cambridge is the wisecracking “Gravedigger Jones” and Raymond St. Jacques plays the more serious “Coffin Ed,” tough Harlem police detective partners who go after a black con-man preacher (Calvin Lockhart) and the white gunmen who robbed him of the $87,000 he had collected for his phony "Back to Africa" movement. Nightclub comic Redd Foxx has a small but central role as Uncle Budd, the neighborhood scrounger who finds the bale of cotton where the stolen cash was stashed. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones were the first black cop buddy team in the movies and they play the kind of tough, rule-breaking mavericks that was standard for depiction of white cops at the time. Davis, who was one of the first African-American filmmakers to direct a Hollywood studio film, updates the original story from the ‘50s to the era of black power and black pride of the late ‘60s, shooting the film on the streets of Harlem, which lends it a gritty yet also colorful sense of place. Unfortunately, the film slips into familiar clichés and stereotypes along the way and Davis plays it more for comedy than urban action. A sometimes confusing crime caper free-for-all that is largely sustained by Cambridge and St. Jacques, who give their characters personalities and passions absent in the script, this is a strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)