“It has been a long journey to this moment,” Sidney Poitier said
on the night of April 14, 1964 when clasping the Oscar he had
just won as best actor for Lilies of the Field, the first
time that an African-American had been honored for a starring
role. Thirty-eight years later, he returned to the podium to
accept an honorary Oscar in recognition “of his Remarkable
Accomplishments as an Artist and as a Human Being.” The color
line would be crossed more dramatically than ever that year when
Denzel Washington became the first
African-American since Poitier to be named best actor, and
Halle Barry made history as the
first black female to win in the leading actress category. In
his speech, Poitier explained how he “arrived in Hollywood at
the age of twenty-two in a time different than today’s, a time
in which the odds against my standing here tonight fifty-three
years later would not have fallen in my favor. Back then, no
route had been established for where I was hoping to go, no
pathway left in evidence for me to trace, no custom for me to
follow.”
It was Poitier who established the route that Washington and
Barry followed to success, and yet it was never his ambition to
be an actor. As he told CNN’s Larry King in 2008, “I became an
actor to prove a point.”
It was on February 20, 1927 while his Bahamian parents were
visiting Miami, Florida that Sidney Poitier was born. Less than
three pounds at birth, he was not expected to survive and his
father had a coffin prepared for his burial. A soothsayer told
his mother that he would not only survive, but one day "walk
with kings.” He lived and grew up with six siblings on Cat
Island where his family owned a tomato farm.
“It was magical,” he told NPR in 2009. “There was no
transportation unless you had a donkey or a horse. No
automobiles, no electric lights, no running water.” There
weren’t any mirrors either, and the
first time he saw the face that was destined for fame was in the
reflection on the water.
“The water was never quite still, so that I would look and what
I would see is a distorted face. Every time I moved, it would
move, and that’s how I got to be introduced to my shadow. And my
shadow and I became very good friends. We would race down the
beach against each other, and the winner was always determined
by the position of the sun. I remember dancing. I did all kinds
of things with my shadow.” Laughing at the memory, he said, “I’m
glad psychiatry wasn’t around then.
They probably would have put me away.”
Still, it wasn’t the Garden of
Eden. “My mother dressed me in flour sacks because she
couldn’t afford clothing,” he told
writer Aljean
Harmetz. His father “had no power, no influence except
with his children. I saw the humiliation of a well-intended,
hard-working honest man categorized as a surplus entity.”
When he was 10, the family moved to Nassau and it was there that
his imagination was touched by the magic of movies. With some
companions, he attended a Western and had “the biggest shock I
would ever have.” He was “absolutely fascinated,” and
went back to the theater after his friends had gone home to wait
at the exit where, he believed, all the people and animals he
had seen on screen would come out.
Opportunities for work were scarce in Nassau, and after a friend
had been sent to reform school for stealing a bicycle, Poitier’s
father was concerned that a similar fate might befall his son.
At the age of 15, he was sent to Florida where his older
brother, Cyril, had settled down with a wife and children.
It was in the Sunshine State that Poitier first experienced
racism. On Cat Island, he recalled to Oprah Winfrey, “There were
two whites on our island. One was a doctor, another a
shopkeeper’s daughter. And it never dawned on me that they were
anything but people. . . White didn’t
mean power, so I wasn’t prepared
for anything out there that would not be friendly.”
As he told NPR, “I think, essentially, that Florida said to me,
‘You are not who you think you are. We will determine what you
are.’ And I decided, no, I will determine who I am. And I wound
up in New York.” In his memoir, The Measure of a Man, he
remembers that New York City’s “mercilessness went about testing
me without regard of any kind.” With neither an education nor a
command of the English language, his opportunities were limited,
but his skin color was an even greater barrier. “Society had
created laws to keep me at a distance, or out of sight
altogether.” He believes he survived in the Big Apple “because
my mother taught me to be respectful of people. It kept me
alive. ‘Please,’ ‘thank you,’ and ‘excuse me for interrupting’ -
it’s amazing how far those words carried me.”
New York was as surprising in its way as Florida. Having come
from the tropics, he was unprepared for the brutality of a New
York winter. To escape the snow and bone-chilling cold, he
joined the Army where he was assured of three meals a day and a
warm bed to sleep in, but “I had no more tolerance for military
discipline than I did for southern Jim Crow.” After throwing a
chair at a senior officer, he found himself in the psychiatric
ward of a Long Island hospital. After it was determined that he
did not have a murderous intent, he was discharged, and back on
the streets of New York, looking for work.
One day while scanning the newspaper want ads and finding no
work for dishwashers, he came across an ad requesting actors for
the American Negro Theater. “‘What the hell,’ I thought, ‘I’ve
tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted - why
not try actors wanted?’”
After Poitier appeared at the theater, the man in charge,
hearing his thick Caribbean accent and the difficulty with which
he pronounced words with more than two syllables, grabbed the
script from his hands and showed him the door. “And just as he
threw me out, he ended with ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher
or something.’”
It was the moment that would change Sidney Poitier’s life. He
hadn’t told the man that he was a
dishwasher. “If he didn’t know,
what was it about me that implied to this stranger that
dishwashing would accurately sum
up my whole life’s worth?”
Poitier returned to dishwashing,
but he was no longer content to stay there. Determined to
improve his English, he read the newspaper during breaks,
“trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word.” A
Jewish waiter he worked with became his tutor and “we sat in the
same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant and he helped me
learn to read.” He was going to prove that he could be an actor,
not out of any great desire to be on stage, but to “prove to the
man at the American Negro Theatre
that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more in him than washing
dishes.”
When he returned to the theater, this time they let him in, but
only because there was a shortage of males in the acting class.
Once in, however, he found himself failing, and remained only
after agreeing to be the janitor in between his studies. Even
then, he showed little promise and would have been expelled if
not for several students who intervened on his behalf. “They
thought I was a little crazy guy,” he said during an interview
with the Academy of Achievement, “but they got to like me.” They
succeeded in convincing the school to keep him on as an
understudy for a somewhat more experienced novice named Harry
Belafonte.
“Now, she had no intentions of me ever playing that
part,” he said of the school’s director. As fate would have it,
Belafonte was unavailable on
opening night when a casting director was present to scout
talent for a Broadway production of Lysistrata. Poitier
“had to go on for him, and son of a gun, the casting director
liked what I did and called me.”
Now appearing on Broadway, Poitier was so nervous that he
botched his lines, gave the wrong cues, and had the audience
laughing. “I was so god-awful they thought I was good,” he
recalled in his memoir. “They said they admired my ‘fresh,
comedic gift.’” This led to his casting in a traveling company
of Anna Lucasta, and
finally, after a long, lean period of unemployment, to an
audition for a role in a film that Joseph L.
Mankiewicz was writing and
directing at 20th
Century Fox: No Way Out.
The 1950 film was a hard-hitting story of a white bigot, played
by Richard Widmark, out to avenge
his brother’s death which he blames on the black intern,
Poitier, who treated him in a hospital emergency room. “In the
script I had to say these terrible things to Sidney,”
Widmark recalled in 2002, “and
after each take I’d run up to him and apologize.” Unflinching in
its depiction of racial prejudice, the film won Poitier
excellent notices, with Bosley
Crowther in The New York Times
applauding his “fine, sensitive performance.” Poitier
credited director Mankiewicz as
one of the men who “had to say something about their time and
the question of race in this country,” and gave him the kind of
opportunities that had been denied Negro actors in the past, who
had been shunted aside in comedic, often demeaning supporting
roles.
Suddenly, more film offers were coming his way, and Poitier
traveled to South Africa where he was assigned the role of a
black priest in Cry, the Beloved Country. It was, as he
recalled in his autobiography, “heady stuff, and I
couldn’t escape the feeling that,
not only was I one lucky youngster, but something more had to be
at play here. I had grown up in a culture where unseen forces
lurked just out of view, where people looked to ‘the mysteries’
to explain both good fortune and bad.”
Despite these breaks, Poitier had to alternate acting
assignments with other jobs, and for a time he ran a restaurant
in Harlem. “I closed that restaurant four or five minutes before
the sheriff came to do the same job,” he told The New York
Times. “I just have no gift for the restaurant business.”
Struggling though he was, and now with a wife and daughter to
support, and a second child on the way, his principles made him
turn down roles he felt were demeaning to his sense of himself
as a man. He declined one role because the character “didn’t
fight for what mattered to him most. He
didn’t behave with dignity.” Years later, he would tell
Larry King that “I had set myself a standard. I knew what it was
to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching on the screen
images of myself - not me, but black people - that were
uncomfortable.” Such integrity negatively impacted his bank
account, but also impressed Marty Baum, a powerful agent, who
told his new client, “anybody as crazy as you, I want to handle
him.”
With Baum’s help, Poitier secured more roles in such films as
Red Ball Express, and Go, Man, Go, a showcase for the
basketball antics of the Harlem Globetrotters. Finally, in 1955,
there was Blackboard Jungle. Based on a novel by Evan
Hunter, the film was historic for its use of Bill Haley and the
Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” as a theme song, which
introduced rock ‘n’ roll to the mainstream a full year before
Elvis Presley hammered it into the forefront of popular culture.
It was also one of the first films to shine a light on a
generation of youth whose rebellion spread from the streets into
the classrooms. The film, directed by Richard Brooks, received
more ink in newspaper editorial pages than in the entertainment
section, generating controversy and ticket sales. Was the film’s
depiction of juvenile delinquency accurate, or was it an
incitement to the kind of behavior portrayed?
“It seizes a burning issue,” reported Time, “and lets the
sparks fall where they may.”
Revolution was in the air that year. On December 1, 1955 in
Montgomery, Alabama, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks
refused to relinquish her seat on a bus to a white passenger.
After her arrest, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, the pastor of a
local Baptist church, led a boycott of the city owned transit
system which would result in the desegregation of the city-owned
bus lines. The civil rights movement was born, and Sidney
Poitier, age 28, would soon become one of its most famous
symbols.
Edge of the City
was as gritty as its title would suggest with Poitier and John
Cassavettes as interracial
friends. Racial conflict was also at the heart of Something
of Value, another film for Richard Brooks in which he
provided support for ‘50's heartthrob Rock Hudson. The film
didn’t fare too well with critics,
but Poitier stood out for what The New York Times
recognized as a “stirring, strong performance as the black
friend.”
The “black friend” was not quite the role he had in 1958's
The Defiant Ones. As a black convict shackled to the wrist
of white Tony Curtis, both of them on the run from a posse,
Poitier saw his name above the title for the first time. The
work of Stanley Kramer, a producer-director who specialized in
films examining important social issues, the black-and-white
drama was harsh, powerful, and even divisive. Depending on each
other for their survival, the two men eventually establish a
brotherly bond. The climactic scene, in which Poitier extends
his hand to Curtis to help him aboard a train that represents
their final shot at freedom, then decides to jump off to join
him when he fails, raised the hackles of some black audiences.
They felt that Poitier’s character should have said “Screw that
guy,” and rode to freedom alone. But most viewers agreed with
Poitier that the film showed that most of our differences are
cosmetic and that “there’s more that joins us together than
separates us.”
Critics were impressed. “Mr. Poitier shows a deep and powerful
strain of underlying compassion,” reported The New York Times.
Like Curtis, Poitier would earn an Oscar nomination as best
actor, but it was David Niven who took home the prize for
Separate Tables.
Sidney Poitier was now a star, the only person of color in the
movies for whom studios were actively seeking projects. Still,
success meant compromise. Harry Belafonte
had turned down the film version of Porgy and Bess
because he felt George and Ira Gershwin’s folk opera reinforced
racial stereotypes. Poitier had similar misgivings, but once
producer Samuel Goldwyn publicly requested he take the role of
Porgy opposite Dorothy Dandridge’s
Bess, the pressure was on. Poitier knew his career could suffer,
and even end prematurely, if he defied such a powerful force in
Hollywood. In the judgment of The New York Times, he
played Porgy “as sensitive and strong as one could wish.”
In All the Young Men, he was a young Marine whose
minority status makes him an outsider who has to prove himself
to his comrades (which he does, heroically), but it’s the only
thing that distinguished the otherwise cliche-ridden drama.
Poitier took a break from movies to return to the stage. A
Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s
play that is now taught in schools, opened on Broadway on March
11, 1959. A rich drama exploring the hopes and dreams of a black
tenement family, it would win the Dramatic Critics Circle Award
for the best American play and prove a worthy showcase for
Poitier’s talents. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with
enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson
wrote in The New York Times. “He is as eloquent when he
has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak.” The
film version that appeared a year later was equally
well-received.
For Paris Blues, he joined Paul Newman as a pair of jazz
musicians whose devotion to music is a hurdle for the romantic
intentions of Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward. A flimsy
trifle at best, it did benefit from a Duke Ellington score and
an appearance by jazz great Louis Armstrong.
Much better was 1962's Pressure Point, produced by
Stanley Kramer and directed by Hubert Cornfield. “Filmed in
black . . . in white . . . in rage!” the poster’s
tagline screamed and there were
plenty of fireworks as Poitier’s patient prison psychiatrist
probed the troubled mind of a racist Nazi sympathizer played by
singer Bobby Darin.
Then came Lilies of the Field. “Sidney Poitier can’t
carry a picture by himself,” was the verdict of United Artists
executives when writer/director Ralph Nelson announced he wanted
to cast the actor as Homer Smith, an ex-GI handyman who builds a
chapel for a group of nuns who settle in Arizona after fleeing
their oppressive homeland. The UA
brass suggested Nelson change the title to something more
provocative, cast rugged Steve McQueen as Homer, and change the
story so that the lead character isn’t
merely helping some nuns build a church, but one of the nuns is
“a novice who never takes her final vows, see?”
Nelson, whom Poitier later praised as “a real humanitarian,”
resisted these efforts to commercialize the story, and the
result was the warm-hearted little movie that proved very
successful at the box-office and would lead to Poitier’s
historic Oscar win as best actor of 1963. “I guess I leaped six
feet from my seat when my name was called,” he said the night
after his triumph.
While Poitier was becoming Hollywood’s first black golden boy,
he was keenly aware that the world was exploding around him. In
addition to lobbying for the Civil Rights Act that was passed in
July 1963, he was among the celebrities in attendance at Martin
Luther King’s historic March on Washington a month later. He
also joined his friend and sometime rival Harry
Belafonte on a visit to
Greenville, Mississippi where they
met with Stokely Carmichael and
members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. But
the voice of a more militant breed of civil rights activist was
beginning to compete with King’s message of non-violent
resistance. For some of them, Poitier was an “Uncle Tom” and a
“million-dollar shoeshine boy” who had been “desexualized”
in films made by white men. As he reflected more than a quarter
century later, “I was carrying the hopes and aspirations of an
entire people. I had no control over content, no creative
leverage except to refuse to do a film, which I often did. I had
to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual
fans. It was a terrific burden.”
With success came other problems, including marital ones. The
marriage that produced four daughters would end in 1965.
Two months after winning the Oscar, Poitier was back on screen
in 1964's The Long Ships, a genial adventure film shot
along the coast of Yugoslavia under the direction of ace
cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Poitier was the villain, a
powerful Moorish prince who enlists Richard
Widmark’s Viking in the search for
a magical gold bell. He joined Widmark
again in 1965's The Bedford
Incident, but this time Poitier had a comparatively
insignificant role as a reporter aboard a submarine under
Widmark’s maniacal command.
As Simon of Cyrene, who helps
Christ carry His cross to Calvary, Poitier was one of many big
names (John Wayne and Charlton Heston were some of the others)
enlisted to help the box-office potential of George Stevens’
1965 biblical extravaganza, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Instead, the all-star cast only ensured that the visually
stunning but emotionally muted epic would be remembered two
decades later when the Medved
boys, Michael and Harry, handed out The Golden Turkey Awards
to Hollywood’s biggest disasters.
“I’m not always satisfied with my work in every scene in every
picture,” he said. “But in A Patch of Blue I was coming
from a different place, and the performance, by any measurement,
was absolutely on target; and I felt that all the way through.”
He credits his fellow actors for inspiring him to reach “for
something that I hadn’t even been
aware was in me.” In the M-G-M drama, Poitier befriends a blind
woman who is unaware that he is black. Time magazine’s
critic thought Poitier and co-star Elizabeth Hartman “conquer
the insipidity of the plot that reduces tangled human problems
to a case of the black leading the blind.”
Poitier began 1966 by starring in The
Slender Thread as a volunteer at a suicide prevention
center who tries to keep Anne Bancroft on the telephone line
after she has taken an overdose of barbiturates. That was
followed by Ralph Nelson’s Western, Duel at
Diablo, in which he was a
dandified ex-calvary sergeant
opposite James Garner.
Neither film was particularly successful, but his fortunes would
change in 1967 when he had three films in release, all
box-office hits that would in their own way become iconic. To
Sir, With Love is a “colorful, kicky movie in the mod mood!”
squealed the critic at Good Housekeeping magazine. As its
Lulu sung theme song soared to the top of the charts, the film,
released in July, would pack theaters in a summer otherwise
dominated by James Bond and the gritty heroics of The Dirty
Dozen. And it would continue to pack them in well into the
fall, becoming a runaway hit that surprised even Columbia
Pictures. The studio provided a budget that Poitier considered
“offensively meager,” and compensated for his low salary by
offering him a percentage of the profits that they
didn’t see coming. As an out of
work engineer who takes a job teaching a class of unruly
students in the slums of London, Poitier might have remembered
how, 12 years earlier, he was on the other side of the desk, as
one of the students who gave Glenn Ford a hard time in
Blackboard Jungle. He had come a long way, and, though
Time found the film’s blend of realism and idealism “an
unstable mixture,” they thought Poitier “invests his role with a
subtle warmth.” Tony Mastroianni
in The Cleveland Press considered it “a performance which
realizes all that is best in the script and makes the rest
better than it is.”
The success of To Sir, With Love was good news to United
Artists which had In the Heat of the Night ready for
release that August. Its story could be summarized in a few
words. An industrialist with plans to build a factory in an
economically depressed, racially divided town is bludgeoned to
death by a man in need of money to pay for his girlfriend’s
abortion. John Ball’s novel may have won an Edgar for best
mystery, but no one really cared about identifying the culprit.
Audiences were riveted by the dramatic, and sometimes hilarious,
interplay between Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), a black Philadelphia
detective picked up as a suspect while visiting Mississippi, and
the bigoted sheriff (Rod Steiger) with whom he sets about to
solve the crime. Under Norman Jewison’s careful direction, and
with Haskell Wexler’s superb cinematography, In the Heat of
the Night worked on many levels. Time hailed it as a
“subtle and meticulously observed study. . . immeasurably helped
by performances by Steiger and Poitier that break brilliantly
with black-white stereotypes.” Life magazine called it
“possibly the best (film) we have had from the U.S. this year.”
It was Virgil Tibbs more than any other role that probably led
the American Film Institute to describe Poitier’s signature
characters as “men of control, men who subdue volcanic rage with
reason and intellect. They're willing to be reasonable up to a
point, but when that anger simmers close to the surface, look
out.”
In the Heat of the Night’s
message of racial tolerance was subtly, and, therefore,
believably, handled, and the film gave Poitier what is, perhaps,
his most famous screen moment. “Virgil,” Steiger sneers. “That’s
a pretty funny name for a colored boy from Philadelphia. What do
they call you up there?”
“They call me MISTER Tibbs!” Poitier retorts in a scene that
still makes audiences cheer.
At Christmas, a third Poitier film reached theater screens.
Guess Whose Coming to Dinner reunited him with director
Stanley Kramer who called Poitier “the only actor I’ve ever
worked with who has the range of Marlon Brando - from pathos to
great power.” His co-stars, Hollywood legends Spencer Tracy and
Katherine Hepburn, played the parents of the white girl to whom
Poitier, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, proposes marriage. The
fathers of both parties oppose the interracial union while
everyone from the mother to the local monsignor cheerfully offer
their support. Audiences flocked to the film and made it a
massive hit, while Oscar voters honored it with an astounding 10
nominations. But in such politically divisive times, the film’s
deliberately provocative subject matter was a guarantee that it
would become, in Poitier’s words, “a football with the critics.”
In visiting college campuses to discuss the film with students,
director Kramer learned that the film didn’t go far enough for
them. “They didn’t want more love scenes between Sidney Poitier
and Katherine Houghton - they wanted them in bed, period.” One
of the film’s critics was Joanna Shimkus, Poitier’s co-star in
1969's The Lost
Man.
“That was a terrible film,” she said. “To think the guy had to
be a Nobel Prize winner - a genius - to get that stupid little
white girl to like him.” This disagreement didn’t deter their
relationship. They became romantically involved and married in
1976, a union that produced two daughters.
As the only black superstar in films, Poitier was in the
impossible position of having to please everyone. If he dared to
play a villain, as he did in The Long Ships, he was
presenting the Negro in a bad light. If he was the good guy,
well, does he have to be that good? “Why Does White
America Love Sidney Poitier So?” was the title of an essay that
appeared in the September 10, 1967 edition of The New York
Times. The article expressed the thesis that the characters
he played were “unreal,” and that he was always “a good nigger”
helping whitey solve whitey’s problems.
Although she meant to compliment him, Katherine Hepburn’s
observation that she didn’t think of Poitier as a Negro - “He’s
not black, he’s not white, he’s nothing at all as far as color
is concerned” - provided more ammunition for his critics. As a
white writer for the Los Angeles Times condescendingly
sneered, Poitier was a “Negro in white face.” When Poitier
responded to his critics publicly, he was tactful. “When a
person comes out of the theater after seeing one of my films, he
might have been given a one-dimensional picture, but my films do
exemplify some of the possibilities of man.” Privately, he was
furious. “How long do you think I’d last if I came on like
Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver?” he asked friends, while
referencing two outspoken black leaders with ties to the Black
Panther Party, whose approach to civil rights was more radical
than that of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bill Cosby, whose role on I Spy broke TV’s color line the
way that Poitier had in the movies, came to his defense, noting
that “when you belong to the minority group, you have to walk so
you don’t upset the people who are in a position to give you the
next step so you can eventually walk by yourself.”
Poitier was not a nominee at that year’s Oscars, which were
postponed by two days out of respect for the funeral of Martin
Luther King, Jr, whose own journey ended with an assassin’s
bullet on April 4, 1968. But Poitier’s presence was felt in the
Academy’s choices. In the Heat of the Night won best
picture, his co-star, Rod Steiger, was named best actor, and
Katherine Hepburn, of Guess Whose Coming to Dinner, was
chosen best actress. If 1967 represented an artistic triumph for
the star, it was also a commercial peak. At year’s end, theater
owners polled by the Independent Film Journal named him the
year’s top box-office draw, while a survey by the Gallup
Organization concluded that he was among a handful of stars,
including Elizabeth Taylor and Steve McQueen, whose name alone
could sell tickets.
The romantic comedy, For Love of Ivy, released in July
1968, was based on a story idea he passed on to screenwriter
Robert Alan Aurthur who had penned Edge of the City a
decade earlier. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby
stated that the film “will soothe the guilt-ridden fears of the
white middle class, whose values it confirms,” while confirming
“the worst suspicions of the black militants, whose values it
ignores.” It was another case of being damned if he did, and
damned if he didn’t. Poitier played a successful black
businessman whom a white family sets up to date their maid who
is threatening to leave their employ to attend secretarial
school. It was a comedy not unlike one that might have starred
Doris Day, but here the principles were black. A different
standard was applied in those racially charged times, and in his
review of the film, Roger Ebert suggested such carping “may even
be a sort of triple-reverse racism.” He concluded that For
Love of Ivy was “a warm and delightful comedy.”
In 1968, he continued his collaboration with Aurthur and also
returned to Broadway, but this time as the director of Carry
Me Back to
Morningside Heights.
“I have been extremely successful as an actor,” Poitier told the
press. “I have no idea if my gifts stop there. This will at
least answer that question, wouldn’t it?” The play was not a
success, but Poitier gave Aurthur another vote of confidence by
handing him the directorial reins for The Lost Man, which
Universal released in the summer of 1969.
This time, Poitier was on the wrong side of the law as the
mastermind behind a robbery that uses a civil rights
demonstration as a cover. In the process, he kills a cop and
spends the rest of the film on the lam, assisted by a white
social worker (Shimkus). Again, few critics reviewed the film on
its purely artistic merit or entertainment value. In The New
York Times, Vincent Canby expressed the belief that because
Poitier was black and a movie star, “his movies require social
interpretations that have nothing to do with cinema, which is
ironic since Poitier has never made a movie that revealed
anything as important about America than his success in it.”
Other than its star, producer Walter Mirisch, and a music score
by Quincy Jones, 1970's They Call Me MISTER Tibbs had
little in common with the Oscar winning In the Heat of the
Night except that Poitier was once again playing Virgil
Tibbs. When we first met Tibbs three years earlier, he was
unmarried and the number one homicide expert with the
Philadelphia Police Department. Now he has a wife, two pre-teen
children, and is pounding the beat in San Francisco. Such
inconsistencies might not have mattered if the sequel shared the
earlier film’s moody atmosphere and vivid characterizations.
Like a third Tibbs film, 1971's The Organization, it was
a routine crime drama, just another movie to fill screens in
need of product.
In the early ‘70s, what became known as the “black exploitation”
film was gaining a foothold in the cinema. Poitier’s success
helped open the door, but the kind of films that resulted, most
low-budget and with limited distribution, were controversial.
Author James Baldwin angrily dismissed them as “a desperate
effort to fit black faces into a national fantasy, and that
won’t work. How can you fit black faces into fantasies largely
based on their exclusion?”
In some ways, they were also anti-Poitier. In 1971, Melvin Van
Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadassssss Song, dedicated to
“all of the black brothers and sisters who have had enough of
The Man,” and, to a lesser but more conspicuous degree, Gordon
Parks’ private detective action pic, Shaft, featured
characters who spoke in urban slang, were both sexual and
violent, and openly cynical about notions of brotherhood. To
many of the talents behind such films, Poitier wasn’t “black
enough,” a phrase heard in the song that played over the opening
credits of 1970's Cotton Comes to Harlem, the film that
proved to Hollywood that there was a lucrative market for movies
with black casts and themes. Looking back in 2010, Pam Grier,
the undisputed queen of the genre through her title roles in
Coffy and Foxy Brown, felt such films were “important
for documenting what black people were doing,” but acknowledged
that, “At the time, some people were horrified.”
Poitier may not have been horrified, but what he saw did not
impress him. The message seemed to be that "to be accepted you
have to be appropriately hostile and obviously militant and
sufficiently anti-white."
That year, he moved, with Shimkus, to the Bahamas. He said he
preferred the simpler life that the country had to offer, but
admitted there were other reasons for the move. “I didn’t
particularly relish criticism for my work then as ‘too white.’
In fact, I hated it. I got a lot of bad vibes from my actor
friends, too.”
Some felt he was becoming irrelevant as black stars like Fred
Williamson and Jim Brown moved into the spotlight, often playing
roles to which their anger was well-suited. The more dignified
image that Poitier projected was beginning to look passe. But
Williamson and Brown were former athletes, and their talents
were still better suited to the football field than motion
pictures. Their films never crossed over to the mainstream
audience the way that Poitier’s films did, and never rose above
B level. Poitier remained the only black superstar in films,
although he was now contemplating a move to the other side of
the camera.
1972's Buck and the Preacher marked his debut as a
director. Poitier was Buck, a former Union calvary man who
guides a group of newly freed slaves as they flee the bounty
hunters on their trail. Harry Belafonte played the Preacher, his
partner, a con man who invests the film with some humor. “At
last, a black Western, and a good one at that,” cheered the
critic for Call and Post, an African-American newspaper.
His second directorial effort, 1973's A Warm December,
was his contribution to a genre that became very popular after
1970's Love Story, the romantic drama in which one of the
lovers is fated to die. In a contemporary twist, the doomed girl
whom Poitier woos is suffering from sickle cell anemia, the
blood disease whose victims are exclusively black. Poitier’s
character survived in the film, but Poitier, the star and
director, did not survive the critics. In The New York Times,
Roger Greenspun thought that watching the movie was like
“opening some impossibly typical, transcendentally awful issue
of Reader’s Digest.”
A Warm December
was his initial film for First Artists, a company he founded
with fellow superstars Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman in 1969.
They were soon joined by Steve McQueen, and later by Dustin
Hoffman. The superstar quintet were following in the footsteps
of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks who
started United Artists back in 1919 to wrest control of their
art away from the more business-minded moguls who ran Hollywood.
Like that earlier star-driven enterprise, First Artists
ultimately failed. Its superstar founders tended to accept
bigger offers elsewhere and used the company to fund quirky,
less commercial projects (like McQueen’s adaptation of Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People) that left it awash in red ink.
While UA later thrived under new management and distributed some
of Poitier’s most important films, First Artists disbanded
completely by the dawn of the next decade.
Poitier’s films for First Artists included a trio of comedies
that helped him win back many of his minority fans. Black
audiences were primarily responsible for making 1974's Uptown
Saturday Night a big hit. “(Poitier) himself can’t make
anybody laugh,” Vincent Canby observed in The New York Times,
“but he knows people who can.” With a cast that included such
superstar comedians as Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and
Flip Wilson, as well as Harry Belafonte, the Poitier-directed
film was, Canby reports, “an exuberant black joke that utilizes
many of the stereotypical attitudes that only black writers,
directors and actors can decently get away with.”
He was teamed with Cosby again in 1975's Let’s Do It Again
and 1977's A Piece of the Action. In The New York
Times, Lawrence Van Gilder described the latter as “a
candy-coated training film, four-square in favor of industry,
honesty, courtesy, matrimony and culture; dead-set against
wasted lives, ignorance, defeatism, sloth, senseless impudence,
drugs and organized crime.” That’s a lot to pack into a comedy,
but Poitier did it.
It was a new era in cinema with blockbusters like Jaws
and Star Wars pushing smaller scale human dramas to the
sidelines. Disappointed with the roles he was being offered, and
weary of “anybody who thinks I’m the carrier of his dreams,”
Poitier stayed behind the camera for most of the next decade. In
1980, he directed Stir Crazy, a box-office smash with
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. His first autobiography, This
Life, was a bestseller the same year. When Wilder asked him
to direct 1982's less successful Hanky Panky with Gilda
Radner, Poitier cast his old friend Richard Widmark as a
villain.
He returned to acting in a pair of thrillers released almost
back-to-back in the early months of 1988. In both Shoot to
Kill and Little Nikita, he played FBI agents. Of the
former, Roger Ebert wrote that Poitier “is probably not going to
win any awards for his performance, but it’s nice to have him
back.” Of the latter, he observed that Poitier stars with teen
actor River Phoenix “for no reason more compelling than their
combined marquee appeal.”
By then, he was no longer quite so alone. There were other
African-Americans becoming prominent in movies and television.
In 1982's 48 Hours, Eddie Murphy broke out of the cast of
TV’s Saturday Night Live to become a bonafide movie
superstar. Louis Gossett, Jr. had won the Oscar as supporting
actor, a feat that Denzel Washington would duplicate for his
role in 1989's Glory. Morgan Freeman was on the rise,
too, about to become the go-to guy for parts requiring, in his
word, “gravitas.” In 1992 , Poitier received the American Film
Institute Life Achievement Award where Hollywood’s elite, past
and present, sang his praises. “Some day people will realize
that I’m doing my part,” he told friends in the late ‘60s, and
now that day had come. Addressing Poitier, Denzel Washington
said, “I love you. I respect you. I imitate you.” Sidney Poitier
had transcended much in his lifetime, and now he had transcended
superstardom to become an icon, a legend.
He was also loyal, always remembering and honoring friends who
helped him on his journey. In 1990, Poitier went to New York to
present Richard Widmark, the first Hollywood star to welcome him
into his home, with a career achievement award from the National
Board of Review. “Sid, I can’t believe you came all the way from
California to do this for me,” Widmark was overheard to say.
“For you,” Poitier said, “I would have walked.”
His loyalty also influenced his decision to retire from acting.
For awhile, he continued to accept acting assignments. As
Thurgood Marshall in Separate But Equal, he earned an
Emmy nomination. In 1992, he joined Robert Redford, Dan Ackroyd,
and Ben Kingsley for Sneakers, an entertaining caper
comedy, and in 1997 he played an FBI agent on the trail of
The Jackal. There was also a made for TV sequel, To Sir,
With Love II, and another Emmy nomination for Mandela and
De Klerk. Then, after several more television roles, he
quietly stepped away from the cameras. As he explained to Larry
King, “I’ve made a great number of movies. The body of work of
which I was a part was the outgrowth of a goodly number of film
makers who are no longer here. And they I owe a great deal to.
And one of the things I owe them is to never work beneath my
level or theirs.”
He turned his hand to writing. The Measure of a Man: A
Spiritual Autobiography, appeared in 2000, and was followed
in 2008 by Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My
Great-Granddaughter. In one letter, he described himself as
“a loner, an outsider, a private person and one driven to walk
on the edges of life.”
He walked those edges without a net to catch him if he fell, and
the pressure he faced might have made a lesser man jump. But he
kept on walking. When accepting his life achievement honor from
the American Film Institute, he advised those following in his
path to “be true to yourself and be useful to the journey.” It
was a perfect description of how Sidney Poitier has always lived
his life, and could serve as his epitaph.
by
Brian
W. Fairbanks