Best known for hard-boiled crime novels with NYPD detectives Grave Digger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson (COTTON has Godfrey Cambridge & Raymond St. Jacques doing Good Cop/Bad Cop honors; RAGE’s cops are supporting players), author Chester Himes’s discouragingly small Hollywood footprint is led by these two down & dirty violent comedies.* Actor/writer Ossie Davis made his directing debut in COTTON, not quite in control of a Harlem treasure hunt to find a stash of money hidden inside a bale of cotton. The fun of the thing is in the tasty cast and rude atmosphere as the police, a smooth-talking Prosperity Preacher, a vicious gang of thugs, church ladies, and various Black Power revolutionary political parties (rivals with activist uniformed associates) rush to find the missing bale (and its contents), happy to break a few heads along the way. With real Harlem locations & hosts of fresh-to-the-screen Black actors (Redd Foxx, Calvin Lockhart, Cleavon Little) in on the action (tasty white guys, too: Lou Jacobi, Eugene Roche), it’s a fun, fast-paced mess. Worth it just to see Cambridge in a proper leading role.
RAGE is something else entirely.* Directed with flair and action chops by Bill Duke (alas without real Harlem locations off a script by novices without further credits), you need to give it a chance to settle in after a superb (and superbly violent) prologue sets up the trunk of gold sexy Robin Givens hauls to NYC. Landing on her feet between step-brothers Gregory Hines’s two-bit hustler and Forest Whitaker’s sainted undertaker, she uses them as buffer between Danny Glover’s dog-loving ‘Numbers’ King and the surviving thugs from the prologue, still in pursuit. Loads of startling character turns, none better than a menacing Badja Djola (in the role of a lifetime) as a cold-blooded killer in love for real. The whole film pulling itself into a steam roller of pacey comic action, style & expressive color. Only Whitaker disappoints, too bulky to get his laughs or make us believe Givens is serious about him. (Where’s 1970s Richard Pryor when you need him?)
DOUBLE-BILL: Still acting, if no longer directing, in his 80s, go back to THE KILLING FLOOR/’84 to see just how quickly Duke found his feet working behind the camera.
RAAI/LINK: *Fresh appreciation for Himes just now, as per this NYTimes piece. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/books/review/chester-himes-essential-harlem-detectives.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *How many times did Quentin Tarantino watch this David Duke film before he made RESERVOIR DOGS/’92 and PULP FICTION/’94?
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