SHORT TAKES
CLAUDINE (20th Century Fox):: Diahann Carroll is a welfare mother of six who secretly works as a maid to supplement her subsistence-level checks. James Earl Jones is a garbage man. They meet over the trash cans in some suburban driveway, start spending nights together and end up being, quite realistically, in love. But if he wins over her suspicious kids (or most of them), he finds he can't fight the welfare system, and, frustrated, gives into his impulse to just disappear.
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SHORT TAKES
ADMIT ONE
CLAUDINE (20th Century Fox):: Diahann Carroll is a welfare mother of six who secretly works as a maid to supplement her subsistence-level checks. James Earl Jones is a garbage man. They meet over the trash cans in some suburban driveway, start spending nights together and end up being, quite realistically, in love. But if he wins over her suspicious kids (or most of them), he finds he can't fight the welfare system, and, frustrated, gives into his impulse to just disappear. If this sounds like a collection of sociological stereotypes brought together for a modern soap opera, I suppose in some ways it is. But Claudine faces the stereotypes and turns them around, makes them real. Or at least believable. Still, the combination of sentimentality and humor gets pretty mushy at times, especially when it all winds down to an inevitable happy ending (though even that is turned around with one of the films's few decidedly false notes: a cops and militants confrontation and chase that no one but a situation comedy writer could believe). This will undoubtedly be received as one of the best black films of recent years and, unfortunately, it is. But that's like comparing Miss Black America to a bunch of junkie hookers on 14th Street; she might have the competition beat, but she still ain't Lena Horne. So you take what you can get and a Curtis Mayfield score performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips makes it a lot easier to swallow.
Vince Aletti
BUSTER AND BILLIE (Columbia):: A nostalgiac inducing excitement, pain and relief. Useless Bits of Information No. 48: How To Make It in Dad's Old Pickup. The girl who said she wouldn't doesn't, the boy who said he would wait doesn't, and the girl who will gets the action, the boy, and a gangbang from his friends. Plus, the night after she says "I do?" to him, he sports her in church to show what a sincere person he is! Included in this movie: one albino, one jilting, and three deaths. Whacked-out and violent times, those times when we were young. Exactly when were those times, anyhow?
Georgia Christgau
THREE TOUGH GUYS (Paramount):: Know what happens when you mix spaghetti with chitlins? It tastes like turkey, and it's called Three Tough Guys. This low-blow dealt us by producer Dino de Laurentis is an AfroItalio co-conspiracy of sorts, implicating Lino Ventura, the veteran continental heavy, here playing a two-fisted ex-con turned priest (watch out, he can bend a quarter with two fingers); and Isaac Hayes, rendered almost invisible in uncharacteristic rumpled tweeds, as an ex-cop who can't shake his taste for the law and order game. Hayes teams up with the priest to fight Fred Williamson, playing Joe Snake, an overambitious hood responsible for the eminently forgettable intrigues the plot embodies. A vaguely Felliniesque vision of the urban ghetto hooker scene, wherein familiar Italian character actors spouting dubbed-in Chicago dialects intermingle with the real thing, offers the viewer some amusement, if only by virtue of its sheer ludicrousness. But there's nothing in Three Tough Guys I'd get out .of bed and walk across the street for. Besides, it's all so tame; this is one black movie you can be sure will find its way to the tube very quickly.
Brian Zabawski
