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<\/a><\/p>\nLike many other people, I\u2019ve been watching a lot of stuff online since the pandemic began one year ago. For me, this has meant watching a lot of films grouped around different actors or directors \u2014 and one of my very first projects consisted of an almost-complete marathon of the films of Sidney Poitier, the first black man to win the Oscar for best actor and also the first black man to direct a $100-million-grossing movie.<\/p>\n
At the time, I wrote short notes about all of these films on Facebook, noting how the films reflected some very pivotal decades in the history of race relations, both in the United States and around the world. (Poitier grew up in the Bahamas; his first film took place in the United States; his second film took place in South Africa; and in one of his most famous films, To Sir with Love<\/i>, he played a South American working in Europe.)<\/p>\n
I watched most of these films in April of last year, at a time when many of them were about to leave the Criterion Channel. Now, for Black History Month, I figured it might be a good idea to dust off my notes and post them to this blog. These notes are pretty informal, but they do cover nearly half a century of film, from Poitier\u2019s first credited role in 1950 to his final big-screen appearance in 1997. (He appeared in a few more TV productions after that, but I could not find most of those films online.)<\/p>\n
I will be posting these notes every weekday in February. Here is the first batch:<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Sidney Poitier marathon part 1 (1950):<\/b><\/p>\n
The Criterion Channel is going to be losing a whole bunch of Sidney Poitier movies at the end of the month, so I figured I might try to see as many as I can, in chronological order. But they don\u2019t have his first<\/i> film, No Way Out<\/i> (1950)<\/b> \u2014 so I tracked it down on YouTube and watched it today.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an interesting film. Poitier gets fourth billing or something like that, but he\u2019s actually the main character: a young doctor at the beginning of his career (Poitier was 23 when the film came out) who is accused of murdering a white patient by the patient\u2019s super-racist brother. Absolutely nobody at the hospital believes the racist \u2014 they all accept Poitier\u2019s claim that the patient died from a pre-existing condition \u2014 but Poitier wonders if he might<\/i> have made the wrong diagnosis because he was reacting to the brother\u2019s racism subconsciously<\/i>, and he wants to perform an autopsy to prove to everyone, including himself, that he made the right call. But Poitier can\u2019t perform an autopsy without the family\u2019s permission, and in this case \u201cfamily\u201d means the patient\u2019s racist brother, who rejects the autopsy while promising to whip up the equivalent of a lynch mob.<\/p>\n
(I can\u2019t recall if the film ever specifies which city it is set in, but I assume it couldn\u2019t have been in the South if a black doctor is so easily accepted at a non-black hospital. And that\u2019s one of the interesting things about the film: how there is no racism at all among the hospital staff, which seems a bit idealized \u2014 the doctors care only about science and whether a doctor can get the job done! \u2014 although one of the administrators does express concern about the effects that a racially-charged controversy might have on his fundraising efforts. And there\u2019s a black elevator operator who assumes that Poitier has been subjected to more racism than he lets on, and who whips up a mob of his own \u2014 against Poitier\u2019s protests \u2014 when he hears what the patient\u2019s racist brother is planning.)<\/p>\n
As always, I\u2019m curious to know what sort of reception this film got back in the day. In a video that accompanies the Criterion series, a film critic compares Poitier\u2019s significance as a movie star to that of Jackie Robinson as a baseball star; Robinson became the first black baseball player to play for a Major League Baseball team in 1947, just three years before this movie came out. (And then Robinson played himself in The Jackie Robinson Story<\/a><\/i>, which came out in 1950, the same year as No Way Out<\/i>.) No Way Out<\/i> was also produced by 20th Century Fox, which had tackled anti-Semitism in Gentleman\u2019s Agreement<\/i>, which also came out in 1947; so a film that addressed this other form of racism would seem to have been very much on-brand for that studio at that time.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not very familiar with Poitier\u2019s ouevre, but I have<\/i> seen the three classics that he made in 1967 \u2014 In the Heat of the Night<\/a><\/i>, Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner<\/a><\/i> and To Sir with Love<\/a><\/i> (I watched that last film many<\/i> times when I was a kid; it was one of the first movies my dad taped on our big bulky VCR in the late 1970s) \u2014 and Poitier has always seemed so authoritative<\/i> to me that it\u2019s kind of bracing to see how much verbal abuse he has to endure in this 1950 film. He\u2019s still very much in turn-the-other-cheek mode; neither he nor the wider culture have quite gotten to the point yet where he can slap a man back (as he very famously does in In the Heat of the Night<\/i>). But seeing how he gets from Point A to Point B is one of the reasons I\u2019m interested in going through his filmography. The question now is how far I\u2019ll get over the next not-quite-four weeks\u2026<\/p>\n \u2013<\/p>\n Sidney Poitier marathon part 2 (1951-1954):<\/b><\/p>\n Following his debut in No Way Out<\/i>, where he basically played the central character even if he only got fourth billing, Poitier went on to play supporting roles in a handful of films that offer an interesting window onto mid-20th-century history.<\/p>\n Cry, the Beloved Country<\/i> (1951)<\/b> is one of the few Poitier films that I had already seen, and I owe my familiarity with the film to two things: One, my father \u2014 who grew up in Zambia and was deported from South Africa after taking part in some anti-apartheid protests as a university student \u2014 loved the film and taped it off TV when I was a kid; and two, I watched this film (and read the 1948 novel on which it is based) as research before writing my review of the remake in 1995.<\/p>\n Cry<\/i> is the first film in the Criterion Channel\u2019s Poitier collection, but Poitier himself doesn\u2019t make much of an impression in it. The film\u2019s central character is an old black priest from the country who travels to the big city, Johannesburg, to find his sister and his son \u2014 and who discovers, among other things, that his sister has turned to prostitution and his son has murdered a white racial-justice activist who happened to be the son of a rich white man from their village. (The novel was published several months before apartheid became the law of the land, and the movie was made just a few years later, so apartheid is very much a part of the film\u2019s subtext even if it is not part of the text, per se<\/i>.) Poitier plays a priest from the city who helps the country priest find his way around, and there\u2019s not much more to his role than that. (When the script calls for a black priest to protest the division that exists even between white and black priests, it is another<\/i> character, not Poitier\u2019s, who makes this point.)<\/p>\n Poitier has an even smaller role in Red Ball Express<\/i> (1952)<\/b>, which is all about the truck convoys that brought supplies to the Allied troops in France after D-Day (which was only eight years before the movie was made!). Wikipedia says the real-life Red Ball Express was about 75% African-American, but the convoy we see in this film is a lot whiter than that. Still, there are<\/i> three black characters of note, and it\u2019s particularly interesting \u2014 given Poitier\u2019s reputation later on for playing perfect, flawless characters who made white audiences feel safe \u2014 that Poitier plays the one black character who has a significant chip on his shoulder: he gets into fights with a white soldier who jokes about \u201cminstrel shows\u201d, and he asks to be transferred from his unit because he assumes that the main reason his lieutenant doesn\u2019t want to chat with him on their long drives through France is because the lieutenant is racist. (\u201cHe outranks us the way we\u2019ve been outranked all our lives,\u201d says Poitier to the other black troops at one point.) It\u2019s the other<\/i> black soldiers who get along well with their white comrades, and who lead them in song as they load and unload the trucks, etc.<\/p>\n And then there is Go Man Go<\/i> (1954)<\/b>, a film about the origins of the Harlem Globetrotters, which focuses primarily on Jewish team manager Abe Saperstein but also includes Poitier as basketball player Inman Jackson, who, according to one online encyclopedia I found, was \u201csecond only to Abe Saperstein in creating the phenomenon known as the Harlem Globetrotters.\u201d Poitier\u2019s Jackson isn\u2019t the player we see walking side-by-side with Saperstein at the very end of the film, though! (Inman\u2019s wife Irma is played by Ruby Dee, who had previously appeared with Poitier in No Way Out<\/i> and had also played Jackie Robinson\u2019s wife in The Jackie Robinson Story<\/i>, both in 1950.)<\/p>\n Go Man Go<\/i> might be the first Poitier film in which race is not a significant theme, or at any rate is not addressed directly in the dialogue. The film is also noteworthy for being directed by legendary Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe; indeed, it may be the only non-documentary feature on which Wong Howe had the sole directorial credit. And the fact that he did<\/i> direct documentaries is reflected, I think, in the basketball-game scenes, which look almost like newsreel footage (and for all I know might be<\/i> newsreel footage; I do know that some of the Globetrotters played themselves in this film).<\/p>\n Anyway. Red Ball Express<\/i> and Go Man Go<\/i> are not<\/i> on the Criterion Channel, but they sounded interesting enough that I looked them up online. I can\u2019t promise I\u2019ll be this exhaustive with the rest of Poitier\u2019s filmography, though! (Poitier also appeared in a few TV shows during this period, but I certainly have no intention of tracking those<\/i> down.)<\/p>\n \u2013<\/p>\n The image at the top of this post shows Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier in <\/i>No Way Out.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sidney Poitier’s movie career got off to a strong start with an Oscar-nominated film about a black doctor and his patient’s racist brother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":68713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5351,5342,5339,5366,5348,5354,5336,5357,997,998,5363,5333,5345,5369,5360,4940,5371],"class_list":["post-68681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-abe-saperstein","tag-apartheid","tag-cry-the-beloved-country-1951","tag-gentlemans-agreement-1947","tag-go-man-go-1954","tag-harlem-globetrotters","tag-in-the-heat-of-the-night-1967","tag-inman-jackson","tag-jackie-robinson","tag-jackie-robinson-story","tag-james-wong-howe","tag-no-way-out-1950","tag-red-ball-express-1952","tag-richard-widmark","tag-ruby-dee","tag-sidney-poitier","tag-to-sir-with-love"],"yoast_head":"\n