Cotton Comes to Harlem: Ossie Davis's Caper

The history everybody recites goes: Sweet Sweetback in 1971 lit the fuse, Shaft in 1971 showed the studios there was money in it, and the cycle ran until about 1976. It is a clean story and it leaves out the film that was already in profit before any of it started. Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem opened in 1970, made a great deal of money for United Artists, and demonstrated the entire commercial thesis a full year ahead of the pictures that got the credit.

It has been under-credited ever since, largely because it is a comedy. The cycle’s mythology prefers the outlaw and the avenger, and this is a farce about two working detectives, a bale of cotton and a con man. That is the film’s misfortune and also, watched now, its enormous advantage. It has aged better than most of what followed.

Chester Himes, and where the detectives came from

The source is Chester Himes’s 1965 novel, part of a run of Harlem crime books built around two police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Himes wrote them from France. He had served a prison sentence in Ohio for armed robbery in his twenties, started writing inside, published serious literary novels in America to indifferent sales, and left the country in disgust. In Paris, an editor at Gallimard’s Série noire asked him for a detective story, and Himes — reportedly with no particular affection for the form — produced a Harlem cycle that was published in French first and won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.

That origin explains the books’ peculiar tone, which the film catches better than it is usually given credit for. Himes writes Harlem as an absurdist landscape where violence is constant, ridiculous and completely unremarkable to the people living in it. His detectives are brutal. They are also the only two men in the story who are trying to do anything useful, and Himes is entirely clear-eyed about the contradiction of Black cops policing Black people for a white department.

Ossie Davis directed and co-wrote the adaptation with Arnold Perl. Davis was an established actor and playwright — Purlie Victorious was his — and this was his first feature as director. He kept Himes’s structure and dialled the absurdity up until the whole thing plays as farce.

The plot is a machine

Reverend Deke O’Malley, played by Calvin Lockhart with a preacher’s silk and a shark’s eyes, is running a Back-to-Africa movement out of Harlem: eighty-seven thousand dollars collected from people buying passage to a new life. At the rally, the money is stolen in an armed robbery, and in the chaos it vanishes inside a bale of cotton, which then goes missing on the streets of Harlem.

Coffin Ed Johnson, played by Raymond St Jacques, and Grave Digger Jones, played by Godfrey Cambridge, want the bale. So does O’Malley. So does everybody else who works out what is in it. Judy Pace plays Iris; Redd Foxx turns up as Uncle Bud, a junk man, and effectively steals the picture in a supporting part.

This is a MacGuffin comedy of the purest kind — an object everyone wants, moving through a city, gathering chaos. The forgotten ancestor is the screwball chase picture, the Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks tradition of overlapping dialogue and escalating farce, and Davis is working that machinery quite deliberately. The reason it matters is that the shape imposes a discipline the cycle later lost. In a farce, everybody has to want something concrete and the plot has to keep converging. There is no room for the hero to stop and be admired.

The craft: why the comedy carries the anger

Here is the thing worth studying. Cotton Comes to Harlem is furious about the same things that would animate every serious film in the cycle — the exploitation of Black communities, the theft of hope, the white power structure hovering at the edge of the frame — and it delivers all of it as jokes, without softening any of it.

The mechanism is the detectives. Cambridge and St Jacques play Ed and Digger as men who have seen everything and find most of it funny in a way that is one degree away from despair. Their comic timing is built on flatness: they react to grotesque violence with mild professional irritation. That register does something a straight drama cannot. It tells you these conditions are permanent. A tragedy implies a rupture, a bad thing that happened; the two detectives’ shrug implies Tuesday.

Davis also shoots Harlem on Harlem streets, with a loose, sunlit, crowded quality, and lets the crowd be a crowd. Galt MacDermot — of all people, the composer of Hair — wrote the score, and it is a lot better than that sentence suggests: brass-heavy, propulsive, comic without being cute. Davis wrote the lyrics for the theme “Ain’t Now But It’s Gonna Be”, which Melba Moore sings, and it is a genuinely double-edged piece of work, a promise of the future delivered in a film about a man selling exactly that promise as a fraud.

O’Malley is the film’s real subject and the reason it stings. The Back-to-Africa scam works because the need is real. Lockhart plays him as a man who is telling the truth about the problem and lying about the solution, and the film’s hardest joke is that everybody in Harlem knows the difference and buys in anyway, because what else is on offer.

Cambridge and St Jacques

The two leads deserve their own paragraph, because the film is unimaginable without the specific chemistry they bring and neither man was ever handed anything this good again.

Godfrey Cambridge came out of stand-up and improvisational theatre, one of the sharp, cerebral Black comedians who broke through in the early sixties alongside Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby, working rooms that had barely been integrated. He is heavy-set, soft-voiced and startlingly quick, and he plays Grave Digger Jones as a man doing arithmetic behind his eyes at all times. Raymond St Jacques was the trained stage actor of the pair, tall and clipped and faintly dangerous, and his Coffin Ed is all held-in violence. Put them in a car together and the film has an engine.

What they understood, and what makes the performances hold half a century on, is that Ed and Digger are compromised. They work for a white police department in a neighbourhood that has excellent reasons to distrust them. Himes never resolved that in the novels and Davis does not resolve it here. The two men bully witnesses, break rules, take shortcuts, and are quite plainly the only people in the story who care whether eighty-seven thousand dollars of Harlem’s money comes back. The film lets both readings sit there, unreconciled, which is more moral complexity than the cycle would manage again for years.

Cambridge died in 1976, at forty-three, on a film set. St Jacques worked steadily in character parts until his death in 1990. The pair of them made two features as Ed and Digger, and it should have been eight.

The case against

Davis’s direction is uneven. The film has a rhythm problem in its middle third, the tone lurches from farce to genuine brutality without always earning the transition, and some sequences are staged with a stage director’s blocking — actors arranged in a line, delivering. The chase material is competent rather than exciting.

There is also a fair complaint that the film’s treatment of women is thin even by 1970 standards, and that Iris exists to be handled by the plot.

The larger objection is that the comedy gave the audience an exit. Sweet Sweetback gives you nowhere to stand; you either take it or leave. Cotton Comes to Harlem lets a white 1970 audience laugh at Harlem’s misery and go home comfortable, and Davis — a serious, politically committed man — must have known the risk he was running. My answer is that the film keeps the anger fully loaded under the laugh and that Lockhart’s preacher is one of the most damning portraits of exploitation the cycle produced. The joke delivers the wound faster.

Spoilers below

The cotton bale passes through several hands before Uncle Bud gets to it, which is the film’s best structural joke — the junk man, the least significant person in the story, the man everyone walks past. O’Malley is exposed as the fraud he is and disposed of. Ed and Digger recover a sum and account for it in a way that satisfies the department and nobody else.

And Uncle Bud goes to Africa. The last movement of the film has Redd Foxx’s junk man arriving in Africa with the money, having achieved by theft the exact thing O’Malley was selling. It is a perfect and quite savage ending. The Back-to-Africa dream is real, it is achievable, and the only route to it in this economy runs through eighty-seven thousand stolen dollars and the wit of a man nobody looked at twice.

United Artists went back for Come Back, Charleston Blue in 1972, directed by Mark Warren, with Cambridge and St Jacques returning. It is thinner. Himes’s Harlem cycle got a much later, much better adaptation in Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem (1991), which is worth hunting down.

The verdict: the sharpest script in the entire cycle, carried by two performances that understood the assignment completely, in a film whose directorial technique never quite matches its writing. It is the funniest, angriest and most quietly radical thing on this shelf, and it got there first.

Where next: Shaft for the Harlem picture that took the credit a year later; Across 110th Street for the same streets played entirely for despair; and the blaxploitation canon for the full map. It is on disc and streams; the Himes novels are all in print and better still.