The third Maryland African American Film Festival opens at 7:30 p.m. today at the Heritage CinemaPlex (1045 Taylor Ave.) with Uptown Saturday Night, director Sidney Poitier's genial ensemble comedy starring Poitier, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor. It was the Barbershop of its day - a good-natured hit signaling (as film historian Donald Bogle has written) that "audiences enjoyed watching black actors working well with one another" in settings as un-hyped and familiar as a church picnic.
The festival's four-part tribute to Poitier also includes his directorial debut, the 1973 Western Buck and the Preacher, starring Poitier as the head of a wagon train for freed slaves and Belafonte as a scam-artist/preacher (Friday, 1 p.m.), and the 1951 drama Cry, the Beloved Country (Sunday, 1 p.m.), the first adaptation of Alan Paton's famous South African novel, with Poitier as a Johannesburg preacher and the great Canada Lee as a rural priest searching for his son in the city.
