Honkies in the Woodpile

With Hollywood scrambling to exploit every current trend, "soul" movies were probably inevitable. Enter Cotton Comes to Harlem, a meretricious thriller that should offend the sensibilities of any audience--black or white.

For what little it's worth, a black cat of a preacher (Calvin Lockhart) collects $87,000 from Harlem residents for a back-to-Africa movement, then gets involved in a blood-spattered holdup while making off with the loot. Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques are the soul detectives that set about tracking him. It is at best a rickety track. Cambridge is a terribly funny comedian and a terribly unconvincing actor; St. Jacques is a splendid dramatic actor who comes on as a melodramatic heavy in such a farce. Everything that happens is supposed to be very, very black because the money is hidden in a bale of Mississippi cotton, and the pursuing detectives crash into a watermelon stand, and everybody goes around saying "nigger" and "Is that black enough for you?" Biggest joke: when the detectives discover that a white man was in on the heist, Cambridge rumbles, "Honkies in the woodpile."

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