"Bingo Long's Traveling All Stars" review

Bingo Long's Traveling All Stars

Produced by Berry Gordy. Starring James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor.

Ethically there's something cheap about Bingo Long's Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. It's about the Negro National League baseball teams in the 1930s -- a pre-civil rights era phenomenon -- but it treats that subject in the manner of Amos 'n' Andy stereotype comedy and with plot turns and moldy jokes stolen from The Sting.

The history of blacks in America has not been sufficiently covered by the movies to the extent that any part of it can so soon be made the basis for a joke or easy turn-on entertainment. Bingo Long, which was written and directed by whites and produced by Berry Gordy, glosses over the historical facts and their political ramifications, demonstrating a gross insensitivity toward the struggles of black people.

Incredibly, the picture wants us to see how much fun it was for black athletes to he excluded from the mainstream; how jolly it was to travel across the country in the back of an automobile; the pleasure of escaping county lines just in time; the humor of not knowing where your next meal was coming from; and the elation of seeing less-talented ballplayers have life easier than you simply because they are not black.

An ironist might have been able to make true black comedy out of all this, but the people behind Bingo Long have not. Instead, here's Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones trying to fill Newman and Redford's shoes, and making us ache with the discomfort. And here's the subject of self-exploitation, just to get ahead in the white world (something Berry Gordy should know about), reduced to a 70's-style, buddy-buddy minstrel show.

Isn't it about tune that Berry Gordy starts making some serious movies, and isn't it time that he gives some black folks a chance in the 'creative' aspect of his films? Where is it going to get him, or us, if he keeps showing the black experience as a chocolate version of Hollywood clichés (which was also the crime of Mahogany and Lady Sings the Blues)? He's playing his audience cheap, and he's painting himself into a corner. Not that Berry Gordy would ever want to do anything but make frivolous entertainments, but if he did, what studio head would stand up tor him after he's persisted in the notion that sport and frivolous entertainment is all black people can do. And Bingo Long doesn't even qualify as entertainment.

The neglected musical Sparkle, which dealt with pop music, the ghetto and the influences of the outside white-business world, was the movie Gordy should have -- and that a lot of us probably thought he would -- come up with. But in none of the films he's produced has Gordy distilled any of his personal experience or any honesty (which is what makes art). Turning black struggles into situation comedy is a defamation. So even if Bingo Long had some wit (and Richard Pryor, in a supporting role, comes close to supplying some), it would still be a disreputable, unfunny movie.

-- Armand White