Calvin Lockhart Movies

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch's surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage's Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern's Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta's thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Coming to America casts comedian Eddie Murphy as pampered African prince Akeem, who rebels against an arranged marriage and heads to America to find a new bride. Murphy's regal father (James Earl Jones) agrees to allow the prince 40 days to roam the U.S., sending the prince's faithful retainer Semmi (Arsenio Hall) along to make sure nothing untoward happens. To avoid fortune hunters, Prince Akeem conceals his true identity and gets a "Joe job" at a fast-food restaurant. Murphy and Hall play multiple roles, and there are innumerable celebrity cameos peppered throughout the proceedings -- including the Duke Brothers (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) from Trading Places. Coming to America made further headlines when humorist Art Buchwald sued the film's producers for plagiarizing one of his works. Buchwald carried the case to trial, where he won a sizeable judgement against the film's producers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Evans family is showered with expensive gifts when their cousin Raymond (Calvin Lockhart) pays a visit. The most lavish present is offered to Florida (Esther Rolle): a new, luxurious apartment. But when Florida learns that Raymond's wealth has come from gambling, she wants no part of his generosity. Originally slated to air during Good Times' sixth season, this is one of three episodes that were never telecast by CBS, though all have been included in the series' syndication package. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A pair of blue-collar buddies use hypnosis to turn a wimpy boxer into a champ in this crime comedy, which reunites actor/director Sidney Poitier and comedian Bill Cosby, stars of the similarly themed Uptown Saturday Night. Clyde Williams (Poitier) and Billy Foster (Cosby) want to help raise funds to sustain the Sons and Daughters of Shaka Lodge, their local community group. Given that Clyde was trained as a hypnotist while in the military, the pair decide to con mobster Biggie Smalls (Calvin Lockhart) by placing a high-stakes bet on a boxing match and then using hocus-pocus to transform skinny underdog Bootney Farnsworth (Jimmie Walker) into a bruiser. When Biggie finds out about their ruse, he and his thugs move in to reclaim their money, setting the stage for further laughs and sleight-of-hand. With a supporting cast that includes Denise Nicholas and Lee Chamberlin as the protagonists' wives and Ossie Davis as an elder at their lodge, Let's Do It Again also reunited Good Times stars Walker and John Amos to the silver screen. Cosby and Poitier would return two years later with A Piece of the Action, though Lockhart, another veteran of Uptown Saturday Night, would sit out the final team-up. Hip-hop fans will note that Lockhart's character provided one of the aliases for slain '90s rap star Christopher Wallace, also known as the Notorious B.I.G. The soundtrack for Let's Do It Again featured Curtis Mayfield songs performed by the the Staple Singers. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Uptown Saturday Night is a delightful comedy directed by and starring Sidney Poitier. Steve Jackson (Sidney Poitier) is a factory worker. One evening, when boredom gets the best of him, Steve and his pal Wardell (Bill Cosby) decide to go to an underground gambling club to have some fun. While they are there the place is held-up and Steve's wallet is stolen. When Steve and Wardell learn that the wallet contains a winning lottery ticket, the friends go on a desperate search to find it. Shape Eye Washington (Richard Prior), an incompetent private eye, is enlisted to aid them in their search through the criminal underworld where they come up against Geechie Dan Beauford (Harry Belafonte) the mobster who runs the town. Belafonte, in a hilarious parody of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, steals the show. The movie was a huge success and led to two sequels, Let's Do It Again and A Piece of the Action, both also directed by Poitier. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

In this blaxploitation flick, a supercool deejay, stuck on himself, decides to get revenge after his girl friend is slaughtered in his apartment. He enlists the help of a friend to investigate the death. He then finds a tape that shows that implicates a mobster in the murder of a union leader. His girl died because she had the tape. Violence and martial arts action ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Gore Vidal's best-selling satiric novel gets an inarguably unique screen treatment in this off-center psycho-sexual farce. Fussy film buff Myron Breckinridge (Rex Reed) goes to Europe and gets a sex-change operation from a slovenly chain-smoking doctor (John Carradine) and returns to the United States as the glamorous and willful Myra Breckinridge (Raquel Welch). Myra appears at the door of former cowboy star-turned-acting school entrepreneur Buck Loner (John Huston), who also happened to be Myron's uncle; Myra insists she's Myron's widow and demands her fair share of Loner's inheritance to her late husband. Loner, suspicious of the appearance of Myron's bride, tries to find a way out of giving her any of his money, while giving Myra a job in his acting school to keep her busy. Myra's new career allows her to make the acquaintance of Leticia Van Allen (Mae West), an aging sexpot and talent agent who represents "leading men only." Through Leticia, Myra meets alpha-male aspiring star Rusty Godowsky (Roger Herren) and his naïve girlfriend Mary Ann Pringle (Farrah Fawcett); as part of her own bid to ferment sexual anarchy, Myra attempts to introduce Mary Ann to the pleasures of lesbianism, while forcibly expanding Rusty's sexual boundaries. In the midst of the action, director Michael Sarne uses clips from dozens of vintage Hollywood films of the 1930s and '40s as a comic counterpoint to the story. Both Gore Vidal and Rex Reed expressed their dissatisfaction with Myra Breckinridge after the film hit theaters, though Vidal has also claimed not have seen the finished product; the film has gone on to develop a devoted cult following, despite the fact the film's only authorized video release has been out of print since the late '70s. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Ossie Davis makes his directorial debut a smashing success in the trend-setting action crime comedy Cotton Comes To Harlem. Coffin Ed (Raymond St. Jacques) and Grave Digger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge), two plainclothesmen on the Harlem detail, are assigned to investigate the goings-on of suspicious local preacher Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart), whose "Back to Africa" political movement turns out to be a scam to bilk the community of their hard-earned cash, with the scam-money hidden in a bale of cotton. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Forgotten 20th Century Fox starlet Geneviève Waïte and forgotten "trendy" director Michael Sarne teamed for the eminently forgettable Joanna. Waïte stars as the title character, a swinging London art student who uses up men like other people use Kleenex. Her carefree lifestyle comes to an end when she is impregnated by Gordon (Calvin Lockhart) -- one of the first black-white relationships in a major motion picture. Joanna frequently becomes a musical, notably in the final sequence, in which the heroine joins in a chorus with the entire cast and production crew Donald Sutherland co-stars as one of Joanna's wealthy paramours. Director Michael Sarne went from Joanna to Myra Breckinridge, then disappeared from view. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Director Anthony Mann's final film (Mann died during the filming, and the production was completed by the film's star, Laurence Harvey) is a kitchen-sink espionage drama with Harvey as Eberlin, a Russian spy and double-agent, homesick and pining for the Russian steppes. It is in this risky mood that Eberlin falls in love with the emaciated Caroline (Mia Farrow). Complications arise when he is directed to kill a Russian spy -- but the Russian spy happens to be himself. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Two steadfast members of Frank Sinatra's self-styled "clan," Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr., are the stars of Salt and Pepper. The boys run a swinging nightclub in London's Soho district (which explains their awful "mod" wardrobe) and also reluctantly double as secret agents. Their current assignment is to put the kibosh on a half-baked military officer (John LeMesurier), who plans to hijack a nuclear sub and hold England captive. The film is securely locked into the 1960s, with weird camera angles and out-of-focus optical effects, plenty of compliant young miniskirted damsels, and Bondlike action highlights. Salt and Pepper was followed two years later by a sequel, imaginatively titled One More Time. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide