This Month

February 19th and 20th / 12 Movies

Movie star myths and “origin stories” often begin with a child of modest background, growing up far from Hollywood, enchanted by film images that grow into an early and inextinguishable dream to one day be a part of the magic. For Sidney Poitier, who died January 6, 2022, at the age of 94, that moment happened after his Bahamian farmer parents moved from their rural island to the country’s capital, Nassau, when he was 10. There he saw his first motion picture, a Western; thinking what he witnessed on screen was a slice of reality, he decided he wanted to go to Hollywood to become a cowboy – not a movie cowboy but the real thing. 

It didn’t take Poitier long to realize what really went on in Hollywood and how being an actor would afford him the opportunity to “be” much more than a cowboy. By the time he was 16 and pursuing his dreams in New York theater, he was already wise to the difficult realities of making it as a Black actor. What he could not have known at the time was that his determination to fulfill this ambition would lead him to become a history maker and a symbol of Black pride in a society and industry mired in racial inequality. It would become his most indelible (if complicated) image, often overshadowing his artistic achievements.

TCM’s two-day tribute affords viewers the chance to revisit his acting talents, focusing on the most fertile and acclaimed period of Poitier’s acting career, the 1950s and 60s, before he turned his talents to directing – significantly with a Western, Buck and the Preacher (1972).

Even within the realm of Black theater, Poitier had an uphill struggle. Tone deaf and unable to sing, possessed of a thick Bahamian accent and challenged by a lack of fluency in reading scripts, he set about acquiring and improving his skills while working as a dishwasher. By 1946 he had landed a major Broadway role in the American Negro Theater’s production of “Lysistrata.” The show was short-lived but led to his casting in the critically praised hit “Anna Lucasta” the following year. He soon attracted enough attention to find himself in the enviable position of having to decide between leading stage roles and film offers that were unprecedented for Black actors at the time.

Fortunately for movie audiences, he chose the latter (although he would return to the stage for a Tony-nominated performance in “Raisin in the Sun” in 1959 and as director of the 1968 play “Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights”). The role he took in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out (1950), as a young doctor treating a rabid racist shot during a botched robbery, would establish a character type that would become his hallmark, “a kind of ultra-competent professional who is forced to turn the other cheek when confronted by racism and must wrestle with whether to suppress his own rage or act on it,” according to Colin Wessman,  writing for Collider.com.

That impressive debut was followed by an important role as a clergyman opposite actor and civil rights activist Canada Lee in Cry, the Beloved Country (1951). Alan Paton’s source novel was banned in South Africa for its views on the racist system that would become officially codified as apartheid. The film was only able to be shot entirely in that country because Hungarian-British director Zoltan Korda told authorities that Lee and Poitier were his indentured servants and not actors. Cry, the Beloved Country later served as the basis for the Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill musical “Lost in the Stars.”

Poitier’s fortunes continued to rise with several TV dramas and notable big screen roles. He got good notices as a rebellious and misunderstood high school student in the social drama Blackboard Jungle (1955) and followed that with a supporting role in the gentle coming-of-age drama Good-bye, My Lady (1956), whose major impact seems to have been a rise in popularity of the barkless Basenji canine breed. During production in Albany, Georgia, director William Wellman loudly protested Poitier’s segregation from the rest of the cast at dinner in a local restaurant.

1957 saw a major breakthrough for the actor with four releases. Two dramas dealt with the rise in anti-colonial movements in Africa, the British film The Mark of the Hawk, filmed partially in Kenya, and the higher profile Something of Value, filmed in Kenya where the story, based on Robert Ruark’s bestseller about the Mau Mau uprising, takes place. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times didn’t have many kind words to say about the film’s white stars, Rock Hudson and Dana Wynter, but praised Poitier for his “stirring, strong performance” as Hudson’s childhood friend torn between two sides of the conflict. Poitier was also third billed with Clark Gable and Yvonne De Carlo in Raoul Walsh’s drama of slavery in the antebellum South, Band of Angels. But it was his first release of 1957, a hard-hitting urban drama, that gave Poitier his most notable role of the year.

According to Judith E. Smith in her 2004 book “Visions of Belonging,” Robert Alan Aurthur wrote the teleplay for “A Man Is Ten Feet Tall” after seeing Poitier in Blackboard Jungle. The actor reminded Aurthur of a fellow longshoreman in the 1940s, the only Black man among a crew of 40, who had befriended the writer when he worked on the docks. The script was presented as the final program in the long-running anthology series Philco Television Playhouse in 1955 with Poitier in the role, but not before major conflict with NBC. The network’s legal department demanded that Poitier renounce his association with actor-activists Canada Lee and Paul Robeson and sign a loyalty oath. Poitier refused and, according to Smith, “Stormy and intensive negotiations were required in order to cast Poitier…in the title role that had been written for him.”

When the play was adapted to the screen as Edge of the City, Poitier was the only cast member to make the transition. With co-star John Cassavetes, Poitier depicted a strong interracial friendship that was unusual for the screen at the time. The downside of what reviewers called a “stirring and searching film,” was that true to the pattern for racially themed movies – one not entirely broken to this day – the noble Black character is sacrificed so that the conflicted white character can tap into his own strength and integrity and do the right thing. Nevertheless, Poitier was nominated for a Best Foreign Actor award by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and achieved leading man status shared at this time by only one other Black actor, Harry Belafonte.

Poitier’s next film once again had him paired with a white actor but this time in the story of two escaped convicts, chained to each other, who must overcome their mutual racial hatred to survive. Stanley Kramer was beginning to establish his credentials as an independent producer-director of liberal, if broadly overemphatic, message films, and The Defiant Ones (1958) certainly burnished that reputation. Poitier and Tony Curtis (a replacement for Marlon Brando who bowed out because of schedule conflicts) were both nominated for Academy Awards, a historic first for a Black male actor. (Hattie McDaniel, Ethel Waters and Dorothy Dandridge had all been previously nominated, with McDaniel winning Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind, 1939.)

Poitier was reunited with Edge of the City co-stars John Cassavetes and Ruby Dee but mostly wasted in Our Virgin Island (1958), and he was reluctant to take the lead in Samuel Goldwyn’s production of the classic George Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess (1959), finding it to be a stereotyped depiction of Black life. Belafonte had turned down the role for the same reason, but friends and colleagues convinced Poitier that refusing a high-profile Goldwyn production would be detrimental to his career. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967. 

He recreated his stage role for the film version of A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and was paired with Diahann Carroll, with whom he had begun a long affair after meeting on Porgy and Bess, in the jazz-inflected romance Paris Blues (1961), billed below Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Another Kramer picture, Pressure Point (1962), bore some similarities to No Way Out in its story of a Black psychiatrist treating a viciously paranoid American Nazi. 

Around this time, Poitier had become more publicly prominent in the growing civil rights movement, joining a campaign to raise defense funds for Martin Luther King Jr. and taking part in the 1963 March on Washington.

No one expected Poitier’s next picture to make much of an impact. Lilies of the Field (1963) was a gentle, unassuming drama about an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Arizona desert. Poitier’s Best Actor Oscar for the role made history as the first for a Black male and only the second (after McDaniel) awarded to a Black performer.

His success in that low-budget film positioned him for much bigger projects: a guest role in the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); two seafaring epics with his friend Richard Widmark (The Long Ships, 1964 and The Bedford Incident, 1965); and his chance to finally appear in a Western, Duel at Diablo (1966). He also continued to take on more intimate dramas, such as A Patch of Blue (1965) about a kind-hearted office worker helping an abused blind girl.

Poitier reached the height of his popularity in 1967, appearing in three of that year’s highest-grossing films: as a teacher breaking through to unruly working-class British students in To Sir, with Love, as a Northern cop helping crack a murder case in the Deep South in In the Heat of the Night and as a world-renowned doctor engaged to a white woman and testing the tolerance of her liberal parents Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. 

As groundbreaking and taboo-shattering as Poitier had been throughout his life and career, this last role, in particular, led to some reassessment of his contributions to the standing of Blacks in the U.S. Critics noted that Kramer stacked the deck in his plea for acceptance of interracial marriage by having Poitier’s character be not an ordinary Joe but a kind of Black Superman: handsome, elegant, articulate and well-off, a prominent physician working with the World Health Organization. The perception that Poitier’s roles sent a reassuring message to white audiences led to charges of Uncle Tom-ism by those advocating a more forceful and confrontational movement for equality. 

“If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional,” Poitier said in a 1967 interview. “But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.” 

After the high point of the late 1960s, Poitier’s acting career began to cool somewhat, although he would continue to play supporting roles in TV dramas and big budget action films for many years. He turned more of his talent and energy to directing with such films as the romance A Warm December (1973), once again playing a doctor. He also directed a string of comedies that, although not critically acclaimed, were popular with audiences, among them Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Stir Crazy (1980) and Hanky Panky (1982). These were all breezy, nonconfrontational crowd pleasers that carried no strong messages and dealt very little with societal issues.

“As for my part in all this,” Poitier later wrote in his memoirs, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”

February 19th & 20th

8:00 PM             In the Heat of the Night (1967)
10:00 PM          The Defiant Ones (1958)
12:00 AM          A Warm December (1972)
2:00 AM             Cry the Beloved Country (1952) 
4:00 AM             Something of Value (1957)
6:15 AM             Good-bye My Lady (1956)
8:15 AM             Edge of the City (1957)
10:00 AM          No Way Out (1950)
12:00 PM           Blackboard Jungle (1955)
2:00 PM             To Sir With Love (1967)
4:00 PM             Lilies of the Field (1963)
6:00 PM             A Patch of Blue (1965)