Word: kotto
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...seems to have trouble with comedy. Early attempts to wring bitter laughter out of assembly-line conditions and the financial woes of the three central figures (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto) do not entirely pay off. Still, these scenes help motivate the film's central incident, a robbery of their own union's safe in which the three turn up not the cash they wanted but a ledger hinting at various forms of venality and corruption. Their attempts to capitalize on the information are ambiguous: they would like to blackmail some money out of the union...
...part, the answers lie in the fact that the so-called entertainment is never really entertaining. A couple of solid citizens, Yaphet Kotto and Geoffrey Holder, are underemployed as an island dictator cum pusher and his witchdoctor hireling while Jane Seymour, Gloria Hendry and Madeline Smith are comely enough but curiously sexless sex objects. They, like Moore, suffer a sort of weightlessness, a lack of humanness, which is what Sean Connery as 007 lent previous Bond adventures. The raunchy adolescent humor that helped audiences giggle past the ugly inhuman stuff in previous Bond films like Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever...
...such a story, they could have produced a kind of Battle of Algiers in Harlem. Director Barry Shear (Wild in the Streets) concentrates mostly on a hoked-up conflict between a fading police captain (Anthony Quinn, also one of the film's producers) and his black successor (Yaphet Kotto). Anthony Franciosa impersonates a notably dumb and vicious Mafia muscle man, whose sole function is to torture various blacks and die spectacularly, providing the audience with opportunity for plenty of indignation and vicarious, bloody triumph...
...were the training or proving grounds not only for Moses Gunn but for James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope) and Diana Sands (The Owl and the Pussycat"), as well as for Gloria Foster, Clarence Williams III, Cicely Tyson, Barbara Ann Teer, Rosalind Cash, Lou Gossett, Vinie Burrows, Yaphet Kotto, Hattie Winston, Nathan George, Roscoe Lee Browne and many more. Simultaneously, a band of black playwrights got their first chance to render and explore black experience to increasingly black audiences. In a sense, it has been a drama of exorcism, a casting out of white devils from black minds. LeRoi...
...opening-week guests were Mets Pitcher Tom Seaver and the latest star of Broadway's The Great White Hope, Yaphet Kotto, whose name Namath mispronounced even though he had inked it phonetically on his palm. Most of the interrogation and badinage revolved around Joe's booze-and-broads approach to athletic training. Namath suggested that they drop the subject when he spotted Mrs. Seaver in the audience...