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<\/a><\/p>\nThe latest in a month-long series of re-posts from my Facebook marathon in April 2020.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Sidney Poitier marathon part 7 (1961):<\/b><\/p>\n
If Sidney Poitier\u2019s filmography thins out a bit after that burst of activity in the mid- to late 1950s, it\u2019s partly because he was starring in a very successful play, A Raisin in the Sun<\/b>, that went on to become a film in 1961. The play was noteworthy for being the first Broadway production written by a black woman, as well as the first Broadway production directed by a black man, and the film brings back most of the nearly all-black cast from the stage production, including Poitier.<\/p>\n
Alas, while playwright Lorraine Hansberry got to adapt her own script, the directing job was given to Daniel Petrie, a white Canadian who had spent over a decade in television and had directed only one other film before this. (The only other film of his I have seen is 1988\u2019s Cocoon: The Return<\/i>.) Still, directing for the camera is different from directing for the stage, so you can understand why the producers might have wanted someone else to handle the screen adaptation.<\/p>\n
In any case, A Raisin in the Sun<\/i> is such an incredibly full meal of socially significant drama that I can\u2019t really tackle it all in a Facebook post such as this. Suffice it to say that the film deals with race (obviously), gender roles (Poitier\u2019s character lives with his wife, mother and sister, and he thinks his sister should train to become a nurse instead of a doctor), class issues (Poitier resents being a chauffeur \u2014 he wants to open a bar with his friends \u2014 but he also looks down on his sister\u2019s college-educated classmates), religion (Poitier\u2019s sister shocks their mother by declaring she\u2019s an atheist), abortion, the relationship between cold hard cash and intangible things like pride and heritage (Poitier\u2019s mother has been expecting a life-insurance payout ever since his father \u201cworked himself to death\u201d, and different members of the family have different ideas as to how that money should be used), and so on.<\/p>\n
The film does feel very much like a play that has been caught on film; when the characters go for a drive to an all-white neighbourhood about 82 minutes into the film, you really notice the fact that the camera is now outdoors. (There were a few outdoors shots earlier, too, but no real dialogue in them; just glimpses of Poitier\u2019s character doing his chauffeur thing.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, there is lots and lots of stuff to chew on here. A few other quick, and perhaps trivial, points:<\/p>\n
\u2014 This is the second film, following 1959\u2019s Porgy and Bess<\/a><\/i>, to give Poitier top billing. It also marks the fifth time that Poitier worked onscreen with Ruby Dee (who plays his wife, again). Future Oscar winner Louis Gossett, Jr. also makes his film debut in this movie as a guy who has been dating Poitier\u2019s sister.<\/p>\n \u2014 Poitier\u2019s character keeps saying that he is 35 years old, and that he is afraid that he is running out of time to make something of himself. Poitier was 32 when the play premiered in 1959 and 34 when the film came out in 1961. (He had played a high school student in Blackboard Jungle<\/a><\/i> only four years before starring in the play.)<\/p>\n \u2014 Poitier\u2019s sister dismisses jazz as a form of \u201cassimilationist junk\u201d, preferring the tribal music of Nigeria instead.<\/p>\n \u2014 When Poitier joins his sister in celebrating African culture, he has a line about \u201cmy man, you know, Kenyatta\u201d. Jomo Kenyatta was imprisoned and\/or exiled between 1952 and 1961 for allegedly masterminding the Mau Mau Uprising, which was the subject of an earlier Poitier film, 1957\u2019s Something of Value<\/a><\/i>. Kenyatta became the first president of Kenya after it gained its independence in 1964, three years after this film came out.<\/p>\n \u2014 Following up on those last two points: It bears mentioning, perhaps, that Nigeria is in west<\/i> Africa and Kenya is in east<\/i> Africa, and they should perhaps be seen as two different<\/i> cultures rather than as one single<\/i> culture. How, I wonder, would Nigerian and Kenyan characters respond to an American character who complains about \u201cassimilation\u201d at home but treats their countries as one and the same thing?<\/p>\n \u2014 The one white member of the cast is John Fiedler, who went on to provide the voice of Piglet in Disney\u2019s Winnie-the-Pooh<\/i> movies (from 1968 to his death in 2005) as well as play a man possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper in a 1967 episode of Star Trek<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n The other film Poitier made that year was Paris Blues<\/i> (1961)<\/b>, in which he and Paul Newman play jazz musicians living in Paris who spend a couple weeks hanging out and falling in love with a couple of female American tourists.<\/p>\n The film actually flirts, in its early scenes, with the possibility of interracial romance \u2014 or so it seemed to me, at any rate. The opening montage includes a shot of a white man and a black woman sitting together at the jazz club where Newman and Poitier are playing. Later, when Newman meets the female tourists, the first one he meets is played by Diahann Carroll, and he tells her she\u2019s pretty; when she tells him that the friend she\u2019s waiting for is white, he says dismissively that it\u2019ll be hard to pick her friend out of the crowd because white women all look alike. Later, after the women come to his jazz club, Newman assumes that Carroll was the one who wanted to see him, and it is only after he states this assumption that he is told it was actually her friend, played by Joanne Woodward, who wanted to see him \u2014 and from that point on, Newman and Woodward form one of the film\u2019s central couples while Poitier and Carroll form the other. For a moment, I wondered if the film might beat Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner?<\/a><\/i> to the punch by showing Poitier in a relationship with a white woman. But oh well.<\/p>\n Eventually, of course, the women have to go home to America, and the question that hangs over the film\u2019s final scenes is whether the men will go back with them. Newman\u2019s character is reluctant to do so because he has ambitions for his musical career, while Poitier\u2019s character has no interest in returning to the racist culture that he left behind five years ago; Paris, he says, has been so much better. (Carroll replies that America has gotten better too in five years, and she says America owes that improvement to the black people who stayed home, not the ones who went away.)<\/p>\n This film marks the second time that Poitier worked with Carroll (who co-starred with Poitier in Porgy and Bess<\/i>) and director Martin Ritt (who made his big-screen debut directing Poitier in 1957\u2019s Edge of the City<\/a><\/i>). But the film really belongs to real-life couple Newman and Woodward. Not only do they get top billing (this was their fourth movie together in as many years), they also have a genuine chemistry, or heat, that Poitier never quite finds with Carroll. Poitier doesn\u2019t sound all that convincing when he tells Carroll he loves her \u2014 indeed, he says he might love her enough to go back to America with her \u2014 and I wonder if he was really all that convinced by the dialogue himself.<\/p>\n The music is great, of course. The film is scored by Duke Ellington \u2014 I\u2019m happy to say that, while I don\u2019t know much about jazz, I actually recognized most of the tunes in this film \u2014 and Louis Armstrong plays a musician that Newman\u2019s character really looks up to named Wild Man Moore. (This is one of the few films in which Armstrong played someone other than himself or some sort of anonymous band leader.)<\/p>\n Incidentally, the posters advertising Wild Man Moore\u2019s concert are a recurring visual motif in this film, and I liked how, at the very end, as certain characters are saying their goodbyes, we can see the posters in the background being papered over by a new set of advertisements. It\u2019s yet another reminder that the special time these characters had together has come to an end, as all good things must. Life goes on, etc.<\/p>\n One quick trivia note: Poitier was nominated for Oscars twice \u2014 for 1958\u2019s The Defiant Ones<\/a><\/i> and 1963\u2019s Lilies of the Field<\/a><\/i> \u2014 and he competed against Newman both times. (Newman was nominated in those years for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/i> and Hud<\/i>, the latter of which was, like Paris Blues<\/i>, directed by Martin Ritt.) While Poitier won on his second try, Newman wouldn\u2019t win an Oscar until 1986\u2019s The Color of Money<\/i>, which was a sequel to The Hustler<\/i> \u2014 the other<\/i> film Newman made the year he starred in Paris Blues<\/i>.<\/p>\n \u2013<\/p>\n Sidney Poitier marathon part 8a (1962):<\/b><\/p>\n In Pressure Point<\/i> (1962)<\/b>, Sidney Poitier plays a psychiatrist, working in a federal penitentiary, who has to deal with an American Nazi inmate (played by Bobby Darin!) in the early 1940s.<\/p>\n In some ways, this film is a throwback to Poitier\u2019s very first movie, but in others, it marks the beginning of a new phase in his onscreen persona. On the one hand, the set-up is reminiscent of 1950\u2019s No Way Out<\/a><\/i>, in which Poitier played a doctor who had to deal with a racist patient in a hospital\u2019s emergency ward. But when Poitier expresses concern that Darin is a \u201cleader type\u201d among the inmates, you can\u2019t help thinking that this film also acts as a bridge of sorts between 1955\u2019s Blackboard Jungle<\/a><\/i> \u2014 in which Poitier was described as a \u201cleader\u201d among his classmates \u2014 and 1967\u2019s To Sir with Love<\/a><\/i>, in which Poitier becomes a different sort of authority figure to yet another class of rowdy students and juvenile delinquents.<\/p>\n Pressure Point<\/i> is largely about the Darin character\u2019s upbringing and the psychological factors that made him a Nazi. We don\u2019t get any equivalent insight into Poitier\u2019s character, though \u2014 I don\u2019t believe we ever see him at home or anywhere else besides his place of work \u2014 and, given that previous films of Poitier\u2019s like 1961\u2019s A Raisin in the Sun<\/a><\/i> had focused so heavily on the class struggles, educational opportunities and social-mobility issues faced by African-Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I kept wondering about the social hurdles that Poitier\u2019s character in this<\/i> film would have had to overcome to be an established psychiatrist by the early 1940s. Poitier was 35 when the movie came out, so if his character was the same age, he presumably began his college education in the 1920s. And psychiatrists generally need to get medical degrees first, right? What sort of hurdles did black students face when they pursued careers in medicine or psychiatry back then? What effect did the stock market crash in 1929 have on this character\u2019s education, or his ability to pay for it? Earlier Poitier films gave a nod to the fact that the U.S. military was still racially segregated during World War II; what was the situation like in prisons at that time? (Poitier\u2019s boss \u2014 the prison warden \u2014 does say at one point that he was fighting a \u201cnoble cause\u201d when he \u201cinsisted\u201d on hiring Poitier, and the Poitier character isn\u2019t entirely happy about the burden that\u2019s being placed on him, both as a representative of his race and as a test of the warden\u2019s cause. It\u2019s impossible to watch that scene and not<\/i> imagine how Poitier felt about the various filmmakers and studio chiefs he had dealt with over the years, many of whom presumably saw him not just (or even primarily) as a talented actor but as the face of their<\/i> causes, too.)<\/p>\n Anyway. The depiction of the Darin character\u2019s troubled past and racist indoctrination is conveyed through a number of techniques: straightforward dramatization, abstract theatrical setpieces (a few characters and props against a stark black background, that sort of thing), surreal dream imagery (a man trying to crawl out of a sink\u2019s drain), and actual documentary footage (including footage of a 1939 American Nazi rally at New York\u2019s Madison Square Garden, which was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary short<\/a> just two years ago). I also liked the split-screen effect that is used when Darin gets ready for a date; he\u2019s shaving on one side of the screen and doing something else on the other, but the two sides are facing each other so that it looks like he\u2019s looking in a mirror (which he is, actually, but the split-screen effect gives it a twist).<\/p>\n While the bulk of the story is set in the early 1940s, it is framed by scenes set in the present day (i.e. the early 1960s), when Poitier has become a boss of sorts and is telling his story to a younger, white psychiatrist (played by \u201cguest star\u201d Peter Falk) who is frustrated with a black patient that has been assigned to him. (Poitier has grey hair in these scenes, which is a first.) The movie ends with Falk accepting his assignment and suggesting that he will conduct his next session in blackface, to which Poitier replies, \u201cGood idea.\u201d Um, okay\u2026 (Poitier then says, \u201cOnly don\u2019t let me down because you\u2019re a white man.\u201d The first part of that sentence is what Poitier\u2019s own boss once said to him, and the second part of that sentence is a variation on what Poitier\u2019s boss did not<\/i> say but Poitier could feel him thinking it. So the implication here is that we have now progressed to a place where we can be more open about this stuff and, perhaps, defuse any potential tension with humour, I guess\u2026?)<\/p>\n Two other quick points about this film:<\/p>\n \u2014 Poitier shares top billing with Darin, but Poitier\u2019s name comes first. I believe that makes this the third time that Poitier\u2019s name came first in a movie\u2019s credits (following 1959\u2019s Porgy and Bess<\/a><\/i> and 1961\u2019s A Raisin in the Sun<\/i>), and the first time his name came first in a film that did not have an (almost) all-black cast.<\/p>\n \u2014 This film was produced by Stanley Kramer, who directed Poitier in 1958\u2019s The Defiant Ones<\/a><\/i> and would do so again in 1967\u2019s Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner<\/a><\/i>. Kramer reportedly directed the framing-device scenes too, though the rest of the film was directed by someone named Hubert Cornfield.<\/p>\n \u2013<\/p>\n The image above shows Claudia McNeil and Sidney Poitier in <\/i>A Raisin in the Sun.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which Poitier deals with American race and class issues, plays jazz music in France, and treats an American Nazi psychiatric patient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":68773,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5372,5550,5524,5539,5545,5556,5542,5533,5530,2088,5521,5548,5527,5413,5333,5536,2320,5553,5518,5360,4940,5472],"class_list":["post-68772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-blackboard-jungle-1955","tag-bobby-darin","tag-daniel-petrie","tag-diahann-carroll","tag-duke-ellington","tag-hubert-cornfield","tag-joanne-woodward","tag-john-fiedler","tag-jomo-kenyatta","tag-kenya","tag-lorraine-hansberry","tag-louis-armstrong","tag-louis-gossett-jr","tag-martin-ritt","tag-no-way-out-1950","tag-paul-newman","tag-peter-falk","tag-pressure-point-1962","tag-raisin-in-the-sun","tag-ruby-dee","tag-sidney-poitier","tag-stanley-kramer"],"yoast_head":"\n