Word: poitiers
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Among more pressing issues ad dressed in The Wilby Conspiracy is the matter of how Sidney Poitier, shackled by handcuffs, manages to . . . well, relieve himself. Mr. Poitier often finds himself in dilemmas of this kind. You will recall, for example, that in The Defiant Ones (1958), where Poitier ran about chained to Tony Curtis, Director Stanley Kramer was too busy fretting over the human condition to attend to mundane matters of nature. No such constraints apply to the people involved with The Wilby Conspiracy, which features a proper white engineer (Michael Caine) and a black revolutionary (Poitier) dashing about South...
...Poitier's colleagues in the underground is an incompetent Indian dentist who is described as "deeply committed." Comments Caine with a resigned sneer: "A deeply committed Indian dentist? That sounds like all the people I hate at cocktail parties...
...first hint that something rather different is going to be delivered here comes at the very opening, when Sidney Poitier, serving as both star and director, gets off his factory job and steps into some dog dirt. Poitier is one of the more fastidious of movie stars, so perhaps he saw this as his symbolic initiation into the realms of folk comedy. He did not, in any case, summon a double for the scene, but carried straight through with it himself, sparing no sacrifice to get into a little funk...
Soon after that, he falls in with a cab-driver buddy (Bill Cosby) who suggests that they party it up that night at a gilt-edged fancy house. Now Poitier is basically a nice family man, but his vacation is coming up and he could use a night on the town. The friends arrange to meet at Madam Zenobia's after their wives have gone to bed. They show up, eye the girls, but are robbed, along with everyone else, when four masked men hit the place. The rest of the movie deals with the contortive lengths Cosby...
...Pryor, Rosalind Cash) and among them there are a couple of nice but wide comic turns: Roscoe Lee Browne as an enjoyably fulsome and hypocritical politician, and Flip Wilson as a preacher who exhorts his congregation, "We need more romance and less hot pants." Cosby is affably anxious, but Poitier's idea of comic acting is to bulge his eyes out, as if doing a Mantan Moreland impression. It is said of some movies that they look like photographed stage plays. Uptown Saturday Night looks like a photographed radio show...