PG, 110 min.
Director: John Badham
Writers: Hal Barwood,
Matthew Robbins, William Brashler (novel)
Starring: Billy Dee
Williams, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor, Rico Dawson, ‘Birmingham’ Sam
Brison, Jophery Brown, Leon Wagner, Tony Burton, John McCurry, Stan Shaw,
DeWayne Jessie, Ted Ross, Mabel King, Sam Laws, Alvin Childress, Ken Foree,
Carl Gordon
Richard Pryor was born
December 1, 1940. He died December 10, 2005. He has the reputation of
revolutionizing the stand up world by breaking race barriers and turning
several of his later stand up concerts into successful feature films in which
he opens up to his audience in extremely personal terms, speaking frankly about
his drug abuse and many other personal problems. What is often ignored is his
film acting career. His collaborations with Gene Wilder in several films is
often praised, and he had several successful films, including the hit “The Toy”,
but his acting is never much talked about.
In 1976, he played a
supporting role in the baseball movie about the Negro Baseball League, which
shows what a talent the man really was. The movie stars Billy Dee Williams and
James Earl Jones as a couple of Negro League players who break off to form a
team of their own due to abuses placed on the players by the owners. Pryor
plays the Right Fielder, who plans on playing major league ball by pretending
to be a Cuban. Pryor’s accents are great and he brings his own freshness to the
film, which has a unique energy throughout.
Once Pryor started pulling
in leading roles, he seemed to get stuck into his own kind of shtick, which
while funny, restricted him from exploring much of the ability he had to offer
a role. It seems in supporting roles, like this one, he’s more relaxed and
freer to really explore the character he’s developed. Here he spends most of
his time explaining how he can get into “white” ball playing by pretending not
to be black. He also has a recurring gag where he tries to explain baseball
statistics to a younger player.
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