Cotton Comes to Harlem
| Cotton Comes to Harlem | |
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Theatrical release poster by Robert McGinnis
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| Directed by | Ossie Davis |
| Produced by | Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. |
| Written by | Ossie Davis Arnold Perl Chester Himes (novel) |
| Starring |
Godfrey Cambridge Raymond St. Jacques Calvin Lockhart |
| Music by | Galt MacDermot |
| Cinematography | Gerald Hirschfeld |
| Edited by | Robert Q. Lovett |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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Running time
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97 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $5.2 million (rentals) |
Cotton Comes to Harlem is an action film co-written and directed in 1970 by Ossie Davis and starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx: it is based on Chester Himes' novel of the same name. The opening theme, "Ain't Now But It's Gonna Be" was written by Ossie Davis and performed by Melba Moore. It was followed two years later by the sequel Come Back, Charleston Blue.
Reverend Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart) is selling shares in a Harlem rally for a Back-to-Africa movement ship to be called The Black Beauty. During the rally, several masked gunman jump out of a meat truck and steal $87,000 in cash from the back of an armored car. Two Harlem detectives, Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and "Coffin" Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) chase the car and a bale of cotton falls out of the vehicle. Uncle Budd (Redd Foxx) has found the bale of cotton and sells it for $25 to a junk dealer but buys it back later for $30. There was a reward out for the bale of cotton because the $87,000 was thought to be hidden inside of the bale. After accusing O’Malley for stealing the money and taking him captive, Detectives Jones and Johnson were able to bribe Calhoun (J.D. Cannon), a mob leader, to give them $87,000 after discovering that Uncle Budd had run off with the money to retire in Africa. According to Bud Wilkins, the reviewer in Slant Magazine, "under the sway of a fundamentally unjust and corrupt system, "Cotton Comes to Harlem" seems to suggest, the best that the impoverished and disenfranchised can hope for is to clamber and fight to carve out a larger slice of the pie any way they can."
The film Cotton Comes to Harlem is perhaps the most commercially successful film Hollywood produced in the 1970 starring blacks. Produced on a budget of $1.2 million, it earned $5.2 million in theatrical rentals during its North American release, making it the 21st highest grossing film of 1970.
The film was one of the many black films that appeared in the 1970s and became an overnight hit. Davis parleyed both humor and drama together and got a film that worked. He also attracted a black audience, which helped make the film a cult classic over the years. It inspired more black films during the '70s, including more action-packed numbers like Shaft and Super Fly.
Ossie Davis declined to direct a sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem due to strong artistic differences with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) so the sequel Come Back, Charleston Blue, loosely based on The Heat's On with much original material injected, ended up being directed by Mark Warren.
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