To All My Friends on Shore

I also spent $1 at Wal-Mart for this film. I thought it would be interesting to see early Cosby.

Wow, was I in for a delightful surprise. Cosby already showed his genius and sensitivity. His film is a masterpiece.

The movie may be viewed as a period piece of life in the projects in the early 1970's. However, as with Cosby's later work, universal themes come through so that the film skillfully portrays both its time and also transcends its period.

The film has all it needs to become a classic except for publicity. This film should be re-released and given the marketing it deserves to reach a wide audience.

The film was clearly made for $3, or the equivalent of $3 in movie finances. It's very slow at times, but it really picks up once we learn the sons diagnosis.

While certain things date the film, such as the camera, fashion, and the doctors hair, it's still timeless in a way.

The film covers poverty, sickle cell, the ghetto, and father and son dynamics. The kids a sweet kid with angst since his family is poor. I think even todays kids could relate to him. The film did what it could.

Bill Cosby stars in this very serious drama about a working class man,his wife and their young boy. Cosby's father character (nicknamed "Blue") is trying to get his family out of the ghetto & into a house.

The couple discover that their son has sickle-cell anemia, leaving Cosby's character with the difficult & harsh task of telling his son the truth about his chances & mortality.

This is a $1 DVD,the film is straight from a VHS copy,the sound is awful (turn up TV almost all the way) and almost all the color is gone.

It's so old looking,it almost looks like the old educational films I used to see in school in that decade. Still,if you pay attention,you can see the good in the movie's storyline.

Some of the dialog is a bit daunting and irrelevant but this and the fact that this should be cleaned up and put on a professional DVD,are my only complaints. Otherwise,it's a great look at an very realistic struggling African-American family in that era. (END)

I received this movie in the "50 all-star movie" collection box for $16.99, now avail as low as $10. (20 cents per movie!) A lot of little gems like this one, made for TV on TV budgets in the 1970's. Wonderful time-capsules to show our children and remember ourselves, that otherwise would be locked away.

We have a straightforward plot and characters, and Cosby's were very reminiscent of my grandparents that went through the depression and saved aluminum foil, rubber bands, and Christmas bows to reuse later. Good stories establish believable characters then have them resolve a conflict, but Cosby (the writer) may have pushed too hard in defining archetypes of the goal driven father, the status quo father, the torn mother, and frustrated son. I found the father's repeated gruffness irritating, but was guessing Cosby was playing a caricature of someone from memory. The son's illness may have been a little melodramatic, but the response and resolution in the last 30 minutes (which I won't spoil) was sweet without being saccharine and seemed to me somehow special yet reasonable for the man we had come to know.

This movie would not have won an Oscar, but I enjoyed it just the same.

Like many others, I, also, purchased this little gem of a movie for $1 at a Dollar Tree store, not expecting much in the way of production values or story. Wrong on both counts, this is a very sensitive portrayal of a 1980's nuclear family with tight money problems, faced with a dying child. Although Cosby has a few moments of levity, this is a dark drama of a tough, unyielding father trying to bring his small family out of the projects, no matter what it takes, in saving, scrimping, and denying normal activities. Gloria Foster plays the dual-employed maid/nurse-in-training, and displays great range in dealing with her single-minded husband and thwarted child. The lovely nautical settings on the East Coast are good additions to this tale of woe. This might have been a dedicated educational effort on Mr. Cosby's part, during the years he was pursuing Masters and PHD Degrees from Temple University in Philadelphia. It's certainly worth a look and has value far beyond $1.