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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 20 (1990-1991):<\/b><\/p>\n
The end of one era, and the beginning of another.<\/p>\n
Two years after he returned to the big screen as an actor, Sidney Poitier sat in the director\u2019s chair for one last film, and then he starred in a TV production for the first time in decades, thereby kicking off a new television-oriented phase in his career.<\/p>\n
The last film Poitier directed was Ghost Dad<\/i> (1990)<\/b>, which reunited him with Bill Cosby, who had co-starred with Poitier in three films between 1974\u2019s Uptown Saturday Night<\/a><\/i> and 1977\u2019s A Piece of the Action<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n In the earlier films, Cosby had played a hustler in his late 30s. But by this point in his career, Cosby was in his early 50s and had become known as \u201cAmerica\u2019s father\u201d, thanks to the success of The Cosby Show<\/i> (which premiered in 1984) and books like Fatherhood<\/i> (which came out in 1986). So it made sense that he would play a dad in this comedy.<\/p>\n Weirdly, though, the film has some elements that don\u2019t make it quite as family-friendly as one might have expected.<\/p>\n For one thing, there\u2019s the whole premise: The film is about a widower who gets along with his kids better after he dies, or at least after he is presumed dead. (It\u2019s a little like how 1993\u2019s Mrs Doubtfire<\/i> begins with a divorce. Both films are family comedies that start with children enduring some sort of family-disrupting trauma.)<\/p>\n The dad\u2019s \u201cdeath\u201d follows an encounter with a Satanist taxi driver.<\/p>\n The dad is having an affair with one of the family\u2019s neighbours, who invites him over for some \u201cafternoon delight\u201d and has sex with him even after he becomes a ghost (though she does not know that he is a ghost at that point in the story).<\/p>\n At one point a bus drives right through the ghost dad and his face heads straight for an old female passenger\u2019s crotch. A cop urinates by the side of the road, oblivious to the fact that the ghost dad is standing right in front of him.<\/p>\n When the dad tries to tell his kids that he\u2019s a ghost \u2014 before he has figured out how to speak audibly \u2014 one of them interprets his sign language to mean that he has a small penis, and another assumes that he is calling himself \u201ca big sissy\u201d, i.e. a gay stereotype.<\/p>\n And there are some crude gags involving the teenaged daughter\u2019s would-be boyfriend.<\/p>\n The weirdest thing about the film is how the dad\u2019s presumed death doesn\u2019t really seem to affect his life at all. He still worries about losing his job, for one thing! (I am vaguely reminded of how the title character in Bruce Almighty<\/a><\/i> is given the powers of God himself \u2014 and uses them to get a promotion.)<\/p>\n And the movie isn\u2019t even remotely consistent when it comes to the question of how physical or visible the dad is or isn\u2019t. You have to give movies like this some leeway when they show people falling through floors but not through the ground, etc., but they should at least aim for consistency in other areas, and in this<\/i> film, the ghost can\u2019t eat or drink because everything passes right through his body, but he can still wear clothes or, alternately, take them off and have sex with someone, and while an X-ray machine can\u2019t detect him at all, the doctor can still rest his hand on him and examine him. Etc., etc.<\/p>\n I also wonder if some of the visual effects looked as bad then as they do now. In some scenes, the dad simply \u201cblinks\u201d onscreen for some reason \u2014 he\u2019s visible for a few frames, then not visible, then visible again, etc. \u2014 and it\u2019s such a cheap visual effect that you keep thinking it would be done very, very differently in this computer-generated era. But did it look cheap at the time? I suspect<\/i> so, given that this movie came out the same year as Ghost<\/i>, which I haven\u2019t seen in 30 years but I remember it being state-of-the-art as far as the effects went; I imagine Ghost Dad<\/i> suffered by comparison with that film.<\/p>\n So, in a nutshell, this is not a very funny or family-appropriate film on the one hand, and not a particularly satisfying film on the aesthetic or world-building level on the other hand.<\/p>\n A few other quick points:<\/p>\n \u2014 Cosby tells the taxi driver, \u201cI am<\/i> Satan! I command you to stop this cab!\u201d Cosby had actually played the devil a few years earlier in a 1981 Disney movie, of all things, called The Devil and Max Devlin<\/i>.<\/p>\n \u2014 One of the kids in Cosby\u2019s neighbourhood brags about how expensive his bike is, and Cosby says, \u201cYou\u2019re a Republican, aren\u2019t you?\u201d This film came out nine years into the 12-year Reagan-Bush era, which was the longest uninterrupted Republican tenure in the White House since the beginning of the Great Depression in the early 1930s.<\/p>\n \u2014 Parts of this movie play less like a ghost movie and more like a riff on The Invisible Man<\/i>. Cosby has some<\/i> sort of physical presence, at least some<\/i> of the time, but he is only visible under dark lighting conditions, so when he\u2019s out and about in normal light he wears sunglasses as well as bandages or scarves around his face.<\/p>\n \u2014 This time in LGBT references: See the note above about the \u201cbig sissy\u201d stereotype. On a related note, there are repeated jokes about a man named Edith who insists he does not have a lady\u2019s name because he pronounces the first syllable the same way we pronounce the first syllable in Edward.<\/p>\n \u2014 Ghost Dad<\/i> grossed $24.7 million and ranked 52nd for the year at the North American box office. That was better than the grosses for Poitier\u2019s previous two directorial efforts (1982\u2019s Hanky Panky<\/a><\/i> and 1985\u2019s Fast Forward<\/a><\/i>) combined \u2014 it was also a lot better than the $4.6 million that Cosby\u2019s previous film, Leonard Part 6<\/i>, grossed in 1987 \u2014 but it was well, well behind the grosses for 1980\u2019s Stir Crazy<\/a><\/i>. (Box Office Mojo does not have figures for the films that Poitier directed in the 1970s.)<\/p>\n Poitier then launched the final phase of his career by starring in Separate but Equal<\/i> (1991)<\/b>, a TV miniseries about the Brown v Board of Education<\/i> case, which ended segregation in American public schools in the early 1950s.<\/p>\n Poitier plays Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued in favour of desegregation before the Supreme Court and was eventually appointed to the court himself. It was the first TV production that Poitier had starred in since 1955 \u2014 36 years earlier \u2014 but nearly everything he did after this was for television rather than the big screen.<\/p>\n Separate but Equal<\/i> is a pretty standard production of its sort, and I don\u2019t have a whole lot to say about it, except that I was intrigued by some of the tactical<\/i> debates that take place among the civil-rights lawyers, some of whom don\u2019t want to attack segregation itself lest they lose the case and set the cause back several decades. Instead, they feel it would be better to focus on enforcing the \u201cequal\u201d part of the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d laws, e.g. by making sure that black schools get the same funding that white schools have. And at least some state politicians are eager to play along with this by providing extra funding for black schools, if it will help to preserve the segregated system.<\/p>\n Marshall, of course, ends up going after segregation itself \u2014 and then the miniseries focuses on the debates within<\/i> the Supreme Court, as the justices argue amongst themselves over the merits of the case, while Marshall and his associates dig deep into the historical archives to see if they can find any evidence to prove that the legislators who passed the 14th Amendment in the 1860s would have argued against segregation as well.<\/p>\n It might not be the most dramatic<\/i> of films, but it all works well in a high-school-history-class sort of way. And I\u2019m sure some high-school teachers have<\/i> shown this miniseries in class.<\/p>\n A few other quick points:<\/p>\n \u2014 This miniseries marked the first time that Poitier had played a contemporary real-life character since playing one of the Harlem Globetrotters in 1954\u2019s Go Man Go<\/a><\/i>. (The real-life Marshall died in 1993, two years after the miniseries aired.) He would do it at least once more after this.<\/p>\n \u2014 The miniseries takes place between 1950 and 1954, when the real-life Marshall was 42 to 46 years old. Poitier was 64 when the miniseries aired. (The 2017 film Marshall<\/i> took place in 1940, when Marshall was 32, and starred Chadwick Boseman, who was around 40.)<\/p>\n \u2014 This was the last film in any medium to star Burt Lancaster. He plays John W. Davis, the lawyer who argued in defense of segregation. Davis was 81 when the Supreme Court rendered its verdict; Lancaster was 77 when the miniseries aired.<\/p>\n \u2014 Reunions: The miniseries was written and directed by George Stevens Jr., whose father had directed Poitier in 1965\u2019s The Greatest Story Ever Told<\/a><\/i>. Also, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren is played by Richard Kiley, who played a high-school teacher opposite Poitier\u2019s high-school student in 1955\u2019s Blackboard Jungle<\/a><\/i>. (Kiley was only five years older than Poitier in real life.)<\/p>\n \u2014 Other actors you may recognize: Marshall\u2019s wife is played by Gloria Foster, now best-known for playing the Oracle in 1999\u2019s The Matrix<\/a><\/i> and 2003\u2019s The Matrix Reloaded<\/a><\/i>. And members of the NAACP legal team are played by Cleavon Little (1974\u2019s Blazing Saddles<\/i>) and Jeffrey Wright (this was only his second onscreen acting credit!).<\/p>\n \u2013<\/p>\n The image above shows Burt Lancaster and Sidney Poitier in <\/i>Separate but Equal.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which Poitier sits in the director’s chair one last time, and then plays a civil-rights hero in his first TV production since the 1950s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":69530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5848,19,1379,5969,1839,5177,5954,5978,5975,5951,5942,5981,5957,2270,5972,5960,5966,1020,5948,5384,5945,4940,5963],"class_list":["post-69487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-bill-cosby","tag-box-office","tag-bruce-almighty","tag-burt-lancaster","tag-chadwick-boseman","tag-cleavon-little","tag-devil-and-max-devlin","tag-earl-warren","tag-george-stevens-jr","tag-ghost-1990","tag-ghost-dad","tag-gloria-foster","tag-invisible-man-1933","tag-jeffrey-wright","tag-john-w-davis","tag-leonard-part-6","tag-marshall-2017","tag-matrix","tag-mrs-doubtfire","tag-richard-kiley","tag-separate-but-equal-1991","tag-sidney-poitier","tag-thurgood-marshall"],"yoast_head":"\n