Fried Chicken Romance

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CLAUDINE

Directed by JOHN BERRY

Screenplay by TINA and LESTER PINE

Claudine (Diahann Carroll) is a maid. Roop (James Earl Jones) is a garbage man. She is a blend of obnoxious stereotypes. The first is the libidinous black woman who cannot stop having children despite her poverty. The second is the stern, loving matriarch urging the middle-class success ethic on her brood. Roop is merely single-line stereotype, the stud who has fled his obligations to one family and is now doing his best to love and leave Claudine.

Promoted as, of all things, a comedy, and as an alternative to the sex-and-violence black exploitation films, Claudine is one of the year's most dismaying products. It is directed with staggering vulgarity, and it is embarrassingly misacted by its stars. Both are careful to convey the notion that this is a slumming expedition by a woman best known for playing the upwardly mobile Julia on TV, and by an actor whose bombastic style seems calculated less to make his portrayal of a sanitation worker believable than to remind us that he has done quite a bit of Shakespeare.

The supporting players, most of them Claudine's kids, are slightly less selfconscious, but they too are types of the most banal sort: the eldest boy flirting with the black revolutionary movement, the eldest girl suddenly getting pregnant at age 15. And so on. But then what can you expect of a movie about blacks in which the main love scene is preceded by a meal of fried chicken? Thank heavens they did not have watermelon for dessert, but that is about the only cliche of black life the film has avoided. Richard Schickel

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