Word: leroy
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...frontuh uh labor-union cat who axing foh volunteeahs tuh sign up. Photographuh's rat thayuh, an-OOO-EE!-next day Richard, his pitchuh in duh papuh. Orange-growin boss, he don't want no truck with no union, an he run Richard-name's Leroy Jones in duh movie-rat on outuh town, an nemmine that Leroy has tuh leave his wife behine...
Pretty soon Leroy finds himself in Los Angeles, shacked up with a pretty union maid (Lonette McKee), working as a painter for an arm of the same agribiz octopus that chased him away from home, and talking more like this than like thay-uht. He's not a hero, but he's a gifted survivor and a natural-born fink. In return for forgetting what he knows of an assassination attempt by a company thug on the union leader, Leroy is promoted to foreman, and he loses touch with his worker friends in La Causa as quickly...
There's an oddly balanced load of ideology here, and a few other touches that are not right for the Thunderbird-and-chicken-wings film this seems to be. When the Lonette McKee character agrees to live with Leroy, for instance, she plays the scene with Mediterranean fire in her eye and makes him promise never to sleep with another woman. That's not Los Angeles in 1977, and sure enough, it turns out that Which Way Is Up? is an adaptation of Lina Wertmuller's 1972 comedy The Seduction of Mimi, which is set in Sicily...
...develops that Leroy's wife has been made pregnant by a chicken-flickin' preacher. Leroy declares that vengeance will be his (more Sicilian tomato sauce) and sets out to seduce the preacher's wife. Pryor plays the preacher's role-essentially the same cash-unto-me evangelist he has done on television-with superbly lubricious piety, and also plays Leroy's father, an impressively dirty old man who should have been given more lines...
...Bureau began taking their pictures the moment the people who had been aboard the plane reached the airport operations building. Says Leroy: "I lived at that airport for 24 hours. The rescue was one of the most emotional events I have ever covered...