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After the pulverizing Baadasssss song, the restorative cacophony. Nuit de fête, music and romance following a long week of drudgery, "you just beggin' for the Devil!" The tiny apartment hums like a barrel house, all it takes is a Victrola and a quick sip for Joshie Jo Armstead to transform the living room with "You Cut Up the Clothes in the Closet of My Dreams." To curtail the festivities is the task of the neophyte imp (Joseph Keyes), he insults the sandwiches of the pink-swathed ingénue (Rhetta Hughes) and warbles "I'm a Bad Character," flaunting his uvula right into the camera while the set behind him sways from side to side. Still, the visitor turns out to be grudging in his villainy, more interested in finding love than raising hell. Enter Avon Long as the veteran demon, whose Cotton Club rhythms catch the eye of the matriarch (Esther Rolle). "Well, if the Lord can't take a little joke..." Carné's Le Visiteurs du Soir in Harlem, then, part of a mighty tradition (cf. Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky and Burnett's To Sleep with Anger). Melvin Van Peebles keeps the proscenium evident onscreen, the better to stretch it with prismatic superimpositions and solarized filters, plus a dash of shadow play. Proles and stuffed shirts, good hostesses and party crashers, even rats and cockroaches have their arias. Glad sights and sounds abound, Mabel King in bodysuit and blonde ringlets and George "Ooppee" McCurn's soaring gospel basso, "Feast on Me" and then some. "Saturday night, Lord, that's a biiiiiiig day!" The long joke on black middle-class consciousness comes to rest on the temptations of Hollywood musical conventions, Van Peebles simply and joyously chases them away with a rolled-up newspaper. With Thomas Anderson, Jay Van Leer, Robert Dunn, Frank Carey, and Nate Barnett.
--- Fernando F. Croce |