The part of George Bailey is now being played by... Richard Pryor?!

I've mentioned before that I was born in 1972, which means there are quite a few movies from the 1980s that I have a good memory of being talked about when they came out, but that I was too young to have seen in the theater on their original release. Another one that TCM showed some months back is one that I remember hearing being savaged by the criticis back in the day: Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. Not having seen it before, I wanted to record it so that I could watch and judge for myself.

Richard Pryor plays Jo Jo Dancer, who as the movie opens is a successful comedian living in Los Angeles. At least, he's successful professionally; he personal life has long been a mess. He's also addicted to cocaine. Having dropped a crack rock in the shag carpeting of his house, Jo Jo crawls on the floor to find it, because he's desperate and that stuff is pricey. He finally finds it and goes to light it... but the next thing we see he's being wheeled into a hospital room with severe burns.

Standing next to the hospital bed is a man who looks surprisingly like Jo Jo, asking Jo Jo how he could do such a thing to himself. Jo Jo flatlines, until the other man's hitting him starts his heart again. This is Jo Jo's guardian angel, and like Henry Travers in It's a Wonderful Life, he's here to go back over Jo Jo's life....

Flash back to small-town Ohio, some time in the 1950s. Jo Jo is just a boy, going home after school to a grandmother who loves him and a mother who is raising him in a brothel, since it's where she works to make ends meet. Jo Jo as a child is able to see the guardian angel, and in one or two other scenes, other people like Mom can too. Fast forward several more years, and Jo Jo is about 20 years old. He has dreams of going into entertainment, and a young wife, but a crummy job because something needs to pay the bills and this is what Dad (Scoey Mitchell) was able to get for his son. Dad kicks Jo Jo out of the house for insubordination, leading Jo Jo to go to the big city.

Jo Jo finds a club where he thinks he can get a job as the talent, but it doesn't quite work that way. After a series of reversals, he runs into a stripper named Satin Doll (Paula Kelly) backstage at another club, and she helps him get a tryout doing comedy. His first attempt goes very badly, but he keeps trying until finally he has a bit of success, except that the club has Mob ties.

More hardship follows, but Jo Jo starts to become more of a professional success. Still, as he keeps climing the ladder of fame professionally, he personal life becomes more of a mess as he's not able to have a stable relationship with a woman. There's a white woman who eventually starts sleeping with other men, and then a second wife Michelle (Debbie Allen) who becomes the mother of Jo Jo's kid, except that she's horrified by his increasing drug use and erratic behavior.

As I said at the beginning, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling was a critical disaster on its release back in 1986. Having seen it, I have to say that's unfair. It's not great, or to put it more accurately, it's uneven. Richard Pryor is clearly drawing from his personal life in this movie, and he was stretching himself by directing as well as writing and starring. I think this is the sort of movie where Pryor clearly needed somebody else to be directing him.

So, even though there's a lot about Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling that's a mess, it's still an interesting mess, an something that I think should be seen if you get the chance.

Greased Lightning

This being Memorial Day weekend here in the US, one of the non-movie related things that used to be a much bigger deal is the Indianapolis 500 car race, which is one of the oldest car races, dating back to 1903. "Indy Car" racing has declined in popularity for a bunch of reasons, partly I think because of the internal politics of the governing body, and in part because of the rise in popularity of stock car racing, which grew into NASCAR. (Note the SC which certainly used to stand for "stock car" although as someone who's not that much a fan of auto racing of any flavor, I don't know if it still does, and certainly the cars don't seem to be constructed from "stock" products any more.) The open-wheel racing got more attention from the movies in part because it's older, and in part for class reasons, as stock car racing grew out of moonshiners in the south trying to outrun the revenuers. There are some movies looking at the early days of what would become NASCAR; I've previous mentioned The Last American Hero; recently, I watched another one, Greased Lightning.

Wendell Scott was a real person who lived from 1921 to 1990 and who grew up in Danville, VA. There's an opening scene in the movie which shows his love for racing, although it's an informal bike race since none of the people depicted would have been well-off enough to race cars. Fast forward about a dozen years, and we're at 1945 or so which of course means the end of World War II and a lot of soldiers being demobbed and returning to their home towns. Scott (played by Richard Pryor) is one of those soldiers. Being black and from the small-town southern US, and then having gone off and seen a bit of the world fighting for his country, Scott doesn't want to go back to what was the normal career choice for black men in Danville, which would be to work in the cotton mills. Instead, he'd like to become an auto mechanic and own his own garage

However, starting one's own business takes money, so Wendell has to start off small, using the money he saved up from his military pay to buy a taxicab. He meets and falls in love with Mary (Pam Grier) and eventually marries her, telling her that his real dream is to race cars, although considering the sort of tracks they had in those days, you wonder where the money in it is. Not that there's much money in driving a taxicab either.

Wendell has a friend Slack (Cleavon Little) who is working for the moonshiners, who offer the opportunity of a much bigger payday, although obviously that money comes from the fact that the legitimate authorites are banning what these people are doing. The power of the black market in action. Wendell, seeing no other way to make money, joins in with the moonshiners. But of course it's not all that long before he gets arrested.

The sheriff (Vincent Gardenia) is in cahoots with a local racetrack owner, Byrnes (Noble Willingham), and they make a proposal to drop most of the charges against Wendell in exchange for his racing at Byrnes' track. It's a chance for Wendell and a cozy arrangement for the two white men: the novelty of a black driver might well bring in black patrons, while simultaneously giving certain sections of the white audience a villain to root against. The only white guy who seems to be honestly on Wendell's side is Hutch (Beau Bridges).

Scott slowly moves up the ladder as the sport of stock car racing grows, and eventually gets the chance to race in the big race....

Greased Lightning follows a lot of the stock (pun intended) formulas for sports movies, but it does them fairly well. Pryor shows, as he had done in Lady Sings the Blues, that he was actually a pretty darn good actor, not just a comic actor. Pam Grier doesn't have much to do, but she also shows that she could have done well in serious films had she not been pigeonholed into the blaxploitation genre.

If you're into car racing films, definitely give Greased Lightning a chance.

Harlem Nights

I've got a backlog of movies that I recorded during one free preview weekend or another, and I generally try to get through them as they come up on the premium channels again. This means that I now get the chance to blog about Harlem Nights, which has an airing tonight at 11:30 PM on HBO Comedy.

The movie starts off with a scene in Harlem, 1918. Sugar Ray (Richard Pryor) runs an underground floating craps game somewhere in Harlem. One night during the game, a young boy who runs errands for Ray shows up, much to the consternation of one of the gamblers, who claims that kids bring him bad luck. Ray has the reaction of "yeah, right", and besides, he's the one running the game, so the kid stays. The other guy craps out, and then threatens to knife Ray to death if he doesn't get his money back. Ray has a gun for just this sort of thing, but wouldn't you know it, the kid has already taken it to shoot the other guy dead just in case.

Twenty years pass. Ray, having found out the kid is an orphan, raised the kid as his own son, giving him the nickname Quick (Eddie Murphy). Ray and Quick are running a swanky but thoroughly gray-market at best club called Sugar Ray's, which offers gambling and a brothel run by Ray's friend Madame Vera (Della Reese before she was fondled by an angel). Among the people running the craps tables is Bennie (Redd Foxx), who had been at that fateful craps game two decades earlier.

However, the sort of club that Ray runs is usually the province of gangsters. Bugsy Calhoune (Michael Lerner) is the gangster who seems to have a monopoly on such clubs in Manhattan, so he sends one of his black enforcers, Tommy Smalls, to check out Sugar Ray's to try to find out how much they make so that Bugsy can give Sugar Ray an offer he can't refuse. Tommy brings along the lovely Creole woman Dominique La Rue (Jasmine Guy) along, and Quick immediately falls for her, not realizing that it's a trap. For not only is Bugsy a violent mobster, he's got corrupt police on his side in the form of detective Phil Cantone (Danny Aiello).

Eventually, Bugsy does make Sugar Ray that offer, which amounts to taking two-thirds off the top, so you can understand why Sugar Ray wouldn't want to take it even though there's a good chance it will lead to him and everybody else high up in the club getting shot. And indeed, Quick does have to run for his life and lay low when Bugsy starts sending people after him. So Sugar Ray comes up with a plan to double cross Bugsy.

Bugsy will be handling the betting for the boxing title fight, between black champion Jenkins and a white Irish challenger. The thinking is that all the white people will make the sucker bet on the white guy even though Jenkins is a heavy favorite. So Sugar Ray and his associates will also bet on the white guy to make Bugsy think that Jenkins has been paid to throw the fight, and try to cover things himself. Meanwhile, Sugar Ray will take the money bet on the fight while it's being transported.

Harlem Nights, in addition to starring Eddie Murphy, was also directed by him, and that's where a lot of the flaws of the movie come in. It's a formulaic, by-the-numbers movie, which isn't necessarily a terrible thing, beyond the fact that there's nothing original here. Heck, it was already almost 20 years since movies like Shaft started mainstreaming black crime movies, although I don't think most of them were period pieces like Harlem Nights.

The other problem the movie has is that it's not quite sure what genre it wants to be. Tonight's showing is on HBO Comedy, and my box guide has it listed as a comedy, but it's really more of a lighter drama that has some humor to break up the tension. It's not as serious as the 1930s gangster movies, but it's not a straight comedy either, and that doesn't always work considering how many of the leads had a reputation for comedy instead of drama.

Still, Harlem Nights is an interesting misfire that certainly deserves at least one viewing. There's a reason why it was a critical failure but reasonably successful commercially on its first release back in 1989.

Tough to Review

A couple of months back, I did a post on The TAMI Show, the sort of movie that's difficult to review, and even more difficult to do a synopsis on. After all, it's just a concert movie, and whether you'll like it depends a whole lot on what sort of music you like. A similar movie is Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, which is getting an airing tomorrow at 3:30 AM on The Movie Channel. (It's also got a few more airings later in the week on various parts of the Showtime family.)

In December of 1981, comedian Richard Pryor gave some sold out performances at the Palladium theater on Los Angeles' Sunset Blvd. Director Joe Layton filmed them and edited them together into the movie we have. (I figured that even with the number of cameras Layton had, it had to be a composite from multiple shows; IMDb says the most obvious sign is in Pryor's handkerchief.)

Pryor covers a wide range of topics, starting with relationships; going to discussion of a trip to Africa as a black man; working as a young man being an MC in a Mob-owned nightclub; and, finally, ending the show with discussion of his cocaine addiction and, most notably, the accident he had trying to light cocain for freebasing in which he severely burned himself.

Thankfully, the sort of material Pryor proffers dates much less than people like the interminably unfunny Mark Russell, who had satirical material based on current events. Still, even though we know when watching old movies with story lines that it doesn't necessarily matter if some of the comedy seems old-fashioned, with stand-up it still seems different. There are a few references to Presidents Carter and Reagan at the beginning, but after that, it's more about Pryor's own life experiences, which sound as though they're just suitably far in some unspecified past, just like any memoir.

My personal feeling was that the movie started off rather slowly, which is a bit of a problem since 78 minutes is more than long enough for a stand-up comedy set and the best material comes toward the end. This includes the parts about the Mob, as well as all of the cocaine-related stuff.

If you've never actually seen any of Richard Pryor's stand-up, give it a try. Just be warned that there's a lot of talk about sex as well as bad language, so it's not exactly a family-friendly movie.

Critical Condition

A couple of months back, Showtime rejiggered their channel lineup, replacing Showtime Beyond with SHOxBET, a collaboration with Black Entertainment Television, both I believe being owned by Viacom. On DirecTV, they moved another one of the Showtime channels into Beyond's old space; I don't know if other cable systems moved channels around. In any case, when the Showtime channels last had a free preview weekend I had the chance to record Critical Condition. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 5:45 PM, and several other times over the weekend on various Showtime channels.

Richard Pryor plays Kevin Lenihan, a New York property developer who has an idea for a cineplex, but to get the financing, he needs to see a loan shark who's got his office in the back of an adult goods store. However, the meeting goes wrong as the police have been watching the place. And wouldn't you know it, Kevin is the one who is literally left holding the bag, so it looks as though there's no way he's getting out of going to prison.

Kevin plans to plead guilty in exchange for a shorter sentence, although he's also worried about getting killed by the people he still owes money to. So when he remembers that it's possible to claim not guilty by reason of insanity, he actually decides to try it, despite not being nuts at all. The judge, however, has to respect that plea and remand Kevin to a mental hospital pending an evaluation.

Kevin gets sent to Empire General Hospital on Governor's Island, a hospital in a parlous state that frankly I don't know why it would even be there unless it were solely a prison hospital. There's only one causeway leading to the island; it's constantly low on funds; and there's the remnants of a hurricane heading for New York. To top things off, a new hospital administrator, Rachel Atwood (Rachel Ticotin), is applying for an administrator's job there and is being given this weekend as her trial. (You'd think with a hurricane coming, that would be delayed.)

I mentioned that there's a hurricane approaching, and you can probably guess a couple of things that happen. One is that the rain floods the causeway, cutting off the only means off the island (well, technically, they could helicopter out, but in a hurricane?). The other is that the power goes out. Now, any hospital worth its salt will have emergency generators for just an emergency like this. Empire General does, although because of poor maintenance and flooding they go in and out.

During the darkness and general confusion, Kevin is able to escape from the mental wing of the hospital. He heads for the office of the doctor who examined him, and who was certainly going to diagnose him as being perfectly sane, so that he can destroy her records. However, Rachel walks in on him. She sees him, and naturally presumes that he's not Kevin, but a Dr. Slattery who was scheduled to be on duty.

Kevin goes along with the misidentification, even though he's by no means a doctor and doesn't know the first thing about practicing medicine or running a hospital. But since he's otherwise going to be caught as an escapee, he lets Rachel have her mistaken impression. From here on out we get a bunch of predictable scenes of "Slattery" trying to get other doctors and nurses to perform while doing the minimum possible himself what with is not being a doctor. There's also another escaped criminal, Stucky (Joe Dallesandro) on the loose.

I've stated on a number of occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of what I call the "comedy of lies", where the plot is moved along by a little lie at first and then lies have to pile one atop another to keep the original ruse going. Critical Condition suffers from the same problem, and although there are some good scenes, the plot is ultimately predictable and even Richard Pryor can't bring this to be more than mediocre. He really needed a strong lead opposite him, I think.

Now, don't get me wrong; Richard Pryor is still interesting even in something that goes wrong like Critical Condition. There are also some supporting roles that are worth a mention, such as Bob Saget as a young doctor, Sylvia Miles as a nurse, Joe Mantegna as the hospital administrator held hostage in the mental ward, and a brief role from Wesley Snipes as an ambulance driver. But overall, there's a lot of Richard Pryor's work that I'd recommend before Critical Condition.

Critical Condition is out of print on DVD, although you can get it at Amazon Prime streaming, especially if you have the Showtime package.