Some Kind of Hero

A minor but infinitely more appealing comedy vehicle for Pryor than the earlier Stir Crazy. He plays a hapless PoW returning from Vietnam to find he can't draw his army pay, his wife has fallen for someone else, his business is bankrupt, and a stroke has left his mother with only one word in her vocabulary: 'Shit!' What follows could easily have been mawkish drivel, but Pryor is one of the great exponents of comic masochism, and is able to make even such ancient set pieces as the timid bank robber passably funny. Kidder pitches into the comparatively feeble role of a high-class hooker with her usual exuberance, and the result is an amiable but hardly memorable two-against-the-world farce that can't quite persuade you Pryor's talents are being properly used.