Crime,Comedy,Action
United States of America
Cotton Comes to Harlem is a 1970 crime comedy film directed by Ossie Davis and starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques as Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, respectively. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Chester Himes, who was known for his detective fiction stories featuring black characters.
In the film, Rev. Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart) is a charismatic leader who is able to rally the African-American community in Harlem to support his cause of buying land in Africa. He claims that by making small donations, people can become shareholders in the land project. However, it is soon revealed that O'Malley is actually running a scam, and the money is being used to fund his own luxurious lifestyle.
Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are two tough-as-nails detectives who are assigned to investigate O'Malley's activities. As they dig deeper into the case, they discover that the money is being smuggled out of the country hidden in a bale of cotton. However, when they attempt to intercept the cotton shipment, the money goes missing, and the detectives find themselves in a race against time to recover it before it is too late.
Along the way, Gravedigger and Coffin Ed encounter a wide range of colorful characters, including a corrupt cop, a group of militant Black Panthers, and a pair of bumbling white police officers. The film uses humor to explore issues of race and identity in a way that was groundbreaking for its time, and it has since become a cult classic in the genre of blaxploitation cinema.
