Steven Spielberg was originally interested in directing this boisterous comedy about a breakaway barnstorming Black baseball team in the 1930s. Motown boss Berry Gordy produced it, and the cast is headed up by Star Wars duo Billy Dee Williams (as pitcher Bingo Long, a cavalier showman who is fed up with the exploitive owners in the Negro League) and James Earl Jones (as catcher and homerun hitter Leon Carter, who encourages Bingo by quoting Karl Marx). They decide to go it alone and create a Harlem Globetrotters-style roster of clowns and show-boaters, taking on white teams when the League locks the out of Black games – and sharing the profits equally across the board.
Jaws DP Bill Butler is the cinematographer and indeed the production work is excellent throughout. Director John Badham grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and was familiar with segregated ball games, bringing some of that authenticity to an always engaging and entertaining picture about talented and resourceful Black sportsmen rewriting the rules of the game. As a bonus, we also get a juicy supporting turn from the young Richard Pryor.
Genial, slapdash, high-spirited and occasionally moving. For a comedy whose principal mission is to entertain, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars also manages to provoke a lot of more sober, subsidiary responses that, happily, never get in the way of the show.
Vincent Canby, New York Times
Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones are superb.
Variety
John Badham
Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor
USA
1976
English
Book Tickets
Sunday February 12
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Executive Producer
Berry Gordy
Producer
Rob Cohen
Screenwriter
Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins
Cinematography
Bill Butler
Editor
David Rawlins
Original Music
William Goldstein
Production Design
Lawrence G Paull
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Prince is Christopher Tracy, a gigolo on the French Riviera, determined to seduce $50 million heiress Kristin Scott Thomas (!). The pop star's directorial debut is a quirky, fun throwback to old school Hollywood glamour, with knobs on.
Dispatches
Dear Jackie (Free Screening)
Henri Pardo's film is a cinematic letter to Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in Major League Baseball and a civil rights activist who broke the colour barrier when he joined the minor-league Montreal Royals in 1946. For a short time, the impossible seemed possible in a segregated North America.
James Baldwin Abroad: Istanbul - Paris - London
These three short docs, from 1968 - 1973, offer sharp, piercing glimpses of Baldwin in private and public, sometimes in repose and relaxed but more often holding forth, embroiled in the thorny discourse of racial politics, identity and self expression.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 1)
Trailblazing artist and polymath Camille Billops and her partner James Hatch were courageous independent filmmakers who chronicled the ups and downs of their personal lives and family histories, and found in them the temperature of their times.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 2)
The second programme in our short selection of independent films by Camille Bishops and James Hatch includes what is probably their masterpiece, Finding Christa, a deeply personal film about Camille's relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption as a child.
