Claudine is not very far removed from a typical TV sitcom, at least stylistically. It’s a very pretty looking movie. The colors, even of refuse‐strewn Harlem streets, are as bright and cheerful as any you’d find in a Caribbean travel brochure. The title character is played by Diahann Carroll, a woman of unique beauty and the sort of chic that couldn’t easily be disguised with flour sacks. Her six children, the results of two marriages and two “consensual unions”, are never at a loss for words, which are occasionally blunt but quite of ten explosively funny in the way that real children would like to be but seldom are. All of this is true. Yet Claudine is a first‐rate American comedy that gives stature to a popular form. It is also the first major film about contemporary black life to consider the hopes, struggles, defeats and frustrations of blacks who aren’t ei- ther supercops, supermusicians, superstuds, superpimps or superpushers. […] Though it is a quite pretty, romantic looking physical world in which Clau- dine and Roop (James Earl Jones) carry on their hectic affair and courtship, the problems they face are undeniably real ones. Claudine’s oldest son teeters on the edge of militancy. Her oldest daughter, age 15, becomes pregnant, and seems to be starting the cycle that landed her mother with six children and no hus- band by the time she was 36. One of the younger children is so traumatized he refuses to speak, preferring instead to communicate with the world by cryptic notes written on a sketch pad… Claudine is the first film to be produced by Third World Cinema, a company set up five years ago to provide training facil- ities for blacks and Puerto Ricans who wanted to make films, and to produce films that would more accurately refleet the minority experience in America. 

Vincent Canby, Cheers for ‘Claudine’, “The New York Times”, 5 May 1974