The middle daughter is Delores, a good looking young woman whose beauty & strength are over-shadowed by the chips on her shoulder. Sparkle is 15 and never been kissed - until Stix (Philip Michael Thomas) steals a few while she’s getting the laundry off the roof. Sparkle, the quintessential good girl, adores her older sister. When we meet Sister, she’s being courted by the handsome but fast & criminal-element-attached Levi (Dorian Harewood). Waters (Beatrice Winde) is only too happy to warn the matriarch about. She’s gonna be trouble for single mom, Effie (Mary Alice) - something Effie’s friend & Harlem busy body, Mrs. The eldest, is Sister, “the prettiest girl in Harlem.” And she knows it. The movie tracks the lives of three young sisters - biological sisters - from Harlem: Sister (Lonette McKee), Delores ( Dwan Smith), and Sparkle (Irene Cara). Sparkle (1976) is approximately a twenty year old film which takes place approximately twenty years earlier, in 1958. So, even if Sparkle was a retro train wreck of a film - especially if it was a retro train wreck of a film - I had to watch! Thomas (later Philip Michael Thomas, the pretty one of Miami Vice fame), Irene Cara ( Fame), Lonette McKee (a beauty whose career credits include The Cotton Club, The Women of Brewster Place & Jungle Fever), Mary Alice (an actress I don’t think has ever been given proper attention or credit - save for, perhaps, at Stinky Lulu’s), Dorian Harewood (a man who has been in so much it’s ridiculous!), & Beatrice Winde (a great character actress you’ll recognize on the spot). But the list of names which accompanied the title on the cable’s info screen was intriguing… Maybe because in 1976 I was a white tween, getting my fill of film angst from The Bad News Bears (gawd I knew just what Jackie Earle Haley’s Kelly Leak wanted - and what Tatum O’Neal’s Amanda Whurlizer couldn’t give him!) I don’t know.
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