I remember actually seeing "Let's Do It Again" in the theater with a friend when I was very young, and I also remember the audience (mostly kids) laughing like crazy. Sure enough, having just watched this film again for the first time in 30 years, it holds up as a decent enough comedy full of familiar TV and movie faces to anyone who was a 70's kid.Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby are fantastic and have great chemistry, no doubt about it. This leads to many funny scenes, such as them hiding behind the couch in the woman's apartment. Cosby, however, is a little more the star here, and gets to showboat on his own a bit more than Poitier. The dirty-talk scene in the restaurant with Cosby and his very hot wife is hilarious.There are even more hot girls to look at besides Cosby's wife, such as the one in the beginning at Cosby's work (with an amazing pair of legs), and the molls of both gangsters. Jimmy Walker is decent, and the film thankfully keeps his schtick at its useful minimum. His dad on Good Times, John Amos, is fine as a tough-guy gangster. Ozzie Davis, good as he is, bores the viewer with his character, which is a necessary character for a few scenes but who no one really wants to see. And Calvin Lockhart is always fun to watch in anything he does.I'm surprised that no one told Cosby that with that beard, he looks 55 years old. This won't be a film that you have repeat viewings with, but it's a good 70's comedy without a doubt.

Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier play working class men who want to get rich. They come up with $20,000 for a scheme, but $18,000 of that comes from their lodge's building fund. The men take their wives to New Orleans and, while there, they see an opportunity in an inept boxer, played by Jimmie Walker, who has the opportunity to win the middleweight title. Poitier hypnotizes the boxer and makes him very confident, and the men pose as New York millionaires and place bets with a bookie (well played by John Amos) who later figures out what they did and wants to take advantage of the situation, possibly bringing down rival Biggie Smalls.Cosby is his usual self, only hipper (especially when he dresses in wild outfits to pretend to be rich). It's a real pleasure to see Poitier in a role that you can laugh at, since most of his characters have been so sophisticated. The two men together are great, especially when they are trying to get out of jams. I especially enjoyed seeing Cosby pretend to be a big-time gangster while talking on the phone. Walker, of course, was one of the best buffoons in 1970s TV, and he doesn't disappoint here. Even when his character is confident and talented, he still has that cartoonish quality about him. Curtis Mayfield's music, with vocal performances by the Staples Singers, added a lot to the movie. It wasn't quite a family movie, but it was quite clean compared to similar movies being made today, with very little cursing and not much to really object to.I had a good time.

What is surprising is Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier didn't have an even more extensive directing career (at least 9 films to his credit) because "Let's Do It Again" is deftly crafted and funny. Believe it or not, that's quite impressive in an era (1970s so-called Blaxploitation films) hard pressed to find material suitable to African American actors and comedians. In fact by the mid 1970s a few "Let's Do It Again" cast members joined the NAACP in blasting Hollywood for the evident paucity of material and roles for talented blacks because much of what emerged was exploitive stereotypes and had the effect of mainstreaming distorted ethnic and racial images.In this movie, however, a bearded Bill Cosby (Billy Foster), clean-shaven Poitier (Clyde Williams) team up as do-good Atlanta fraternal order brothers who play the odds to "con" threatening criminal punks so they could cheerfully give gambling winnings to a pet charity. Of course, they have to impossibly hypnotize Jimmy Walker's reluctant and unlikely bone thin boxer (Bootney Farnsworth) enabling him to successfully fight heavier and craftier opponents; convince their beautiful but reluctant wives to go in on the con and, after pulling off a preposterous megabucks "sucker bet" caper, escape the played mobsters by hoofing it through a series of apartment buildings. In one of the cinema's longest and funniest foot chases ever, the duo dashes through an unlocked apartment door running smack into a dining room not quite interrupting a family dinner. The folks seated around the dining table are incredulous for a quick moment and, well, maybe we should leave a few surprises.The movie doesn't escape the "Mack" flamboyance of the decade, nor did it avoid the annoying 70s "wah-wah" disco soundtrack but it doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator evident in other movies whose stars were African American. On the other hand, performances by Denise Nicholas (Beth Foster), Calvin Lockhart, (Biggie Smalls) deliver a sense of dignity that would not have emerged under the hands of any lesser director in that era. In the pre-Huxtable Cosby universe, a comic actor shines. Of course, Cosby had resisted such notions during his successful run of the NBC-TV series, playing down and turning away Emmy nominations for Best Actor. In the younger Cosby's personna, there is none of the self-mocking. He's not playing a cuddly version of himself. He's perhaps funnier than anything he presented to the generation who grew up with the Huxtables and "Ghost Dad" (also directed by Sidney Poitier), which makes it plausible for younger viewers to dust off this more than quarter-century old relic and get a kick out of what Poitier was able to do with Timothy March and Richard Wesley's story and script.Aside from not descending into the group of movies that fall under the category of 70s "exploitation flicks", there is no social comment here. "Let's Do It Again" will give us a grittier maybe funnier Cosby than anything Generation Xers are likely to remember. If you want to escape, indulge in popcorn and have a laugh, this is a fun film.

Jimmy Walker has never been given the proper acclaim for his comedic talents. Watch this film for proof of the previous sentence. He is a treat as Bootney Farnsworth. I've seen this film 7-8 times and I still laugh out loud every time Walker is on screen. And to top it all off, you get on of the best performances of Bill Cosby's career and a great, though subtle, portrayal of a church elder/hypnotist.