Chicken Flickin'

By John Skow

WHICH WAY IS UP? Directed by Michael Schultz Screenplay by Carl Gottlieb and Cecil Brown

Now, lessee. Yeah. Richard Pryor, he spose to be uh orange pickuh, or suth-in, an he fall offuh his ladder one day, smack in frontuh uh labor-union cat who axing foh volunteeahs tuh sign up. Photographuh's rat thayuh, an--OOO-EE!--next day Richard, his pitchuh in duh papuh. Orange-growin boss, he don't want no truck with no union, an he run Richard--name's Leroy Jones in duh movie--rat on outuh town, an nemmine that Leroy has tuh leave his wife behine.

Pretty soon Leroy finds himself in Los Angeles, shacked up with a pretty union maid (Lonette McKee), working as a painter for an arm of the same agribiz octopus that chased him away from home, and talking more like this than like thay-uht. He's not a hero, but he's a gifted survivor and a natural-born fink. In return for forgetting what he knows of an assassination attempt by a company thug on the union leader, Leroy is promoted to foreman, and he loses touch with his worker friends in La Causa as quickly as he lost his accent.

There's an oddly balanced load of ideology here, and a few other touches that are not right for the Thunderbird-and-chicken-wings film this seems to be. When the Lonette McKee character agrees to live with Leroy, for instance, she plays the scene with Mediterranean fire in her eye and makes him promise never to sleep with another woman. That's not Los Angeles in 1977, and sure enough, it turns out that Which Way Is Up? is an adaptation of Lina Wertmuller's 1972 comedy The Seduction of Mimi, which is set in Sicily and contains Wertmuller's customary message of proletarian indignation.

Why do film makers foul themselves up this way? Why mess around paying good money for the rights to Wertmuller's film and then have to pretend that her ironic perceptions about Sicily have anything to do with Los Angeles and the Imperial Valley? Why not just say, "O.K., we'll start with Pryor, and he can be, I dunno, a sex-mad orange picker ..."?

Now for the good part: Pryor is splendidly funny. When the agribiz company transfers him back to his home town--by now he's an exec in a three-piece suit--he sets up his mistress and their baby on one side of town and lives with his wife (Margaret Avery) on the other. Since he is trying to be true to his mistress (here Sicily obtrudes), he doesn't make love to his wife. She decides that he must be accustomed to a sophisticated, Los Angeles kind of foreplay, and a marvelously boisterous (and girlsterous) scene follows in which she handcuffs him to the bedposts, whips him a bit, and then commits indignities on him with a vibrator. (Cultural note: vibrators seem to have no shock value now, unless you drop one in the bath water, but they do provoke widespread guffaws of recognition.)

It develops that Leroy's wife has been made pregnant by a chicken-flickin' preacher. Leroy declares that vengeance will be his (more Sicilian tomato sauce) and sets out to seduce the preacher's wife. Pryor plays the preacher's role--essentially the same cash-unto-me evangelist he has done on television--with superbly lubricious piety, and also plays Leroy's father, an impressively dirty old man who should have been given more lines.

Successful humor is much rarer than successful class war, so it may not matter that Wertmuller's original notion of a weak character disintegrating under economic pressures gets lost in all the commotion. It may be worth mentioning, however, that Pryor's characterizations have nothing to do with the cool black humor of such modern comics as Bill Cosby and the late Godfrey Cambridge. He plays eye-rolling, foot-shuffling, minstrel-show darkies, with a bit of ghetto fast-mouth thrown in. On the other hand, the audience in which this reviewer sat was 90% black, and everyone seemed to be having a great time.

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