Against all the odds, Sidney Poitier's last directorial venture, A Piece of the Action—a loose bundle of heist movie, sit-com and moral uplift—pulled itself through on sheer naivety and patent sincerity. Something of the same mix might be said to work for Stir Crazy, which displays an untoward delight in recoining comedy stereotypes. And the populist nerve that Poitier seemed to be playing towards in A Piece of the Action has been resoundingly hit—in box-office terms anyway—in Stir Crazy…. It begins none too promisingly, with a lame reversal of the out-of-towner joke as two Manhattanites, playwright Gene Wilder and actor Richard Pryor, decide to quit the city (despite a credit montage, and title song "Who Needs Hollywood?", which invokes the usual New York paranoia about out-there) for the inspirational spaces of the West. But the film thereafter remains convincingly split between optimistic naivety and...