The ground-breaking star has left us at age 94. As with Jackie Robinson, he had to walk a fine, clean-cut line.
But like Robinson, he was a thunderbolt who blew open the doors.
Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.
“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “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. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”
At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.
“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”
Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him.
May God rest his soul.
I found him appealing in the films I saw him in (To Sir, with Love, Blackboard Jungle, A Warm December). I've heard more than once in obituaries that before Poitier, blacks played servants and clowns. I don't think that's a description of the roles played by Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, or Dorothy Dandridge. Robeson's first film role he landed in 1925, and he played a villain-clergyman. That was 25 years before Sidney Poitier's first screen credit.
ReplyDeleteWith romantic parts is you'd have had to cast him as part of an inter-racial couple (rare as hen's teeth in 1950 and a blank to the audience) or you have to have a romantic plot built around a black couple 'relatable' for general audiences (a challenge for screenwriters, though it had been done by 1950).
It has been forever since I watched one of his films. I need to remedy that.
ReplyDeleteHe was even good in cheesy projects like The Long Ships.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AETyNpe4LE
An actor's actor.