Sidney Poitier: A Magnificent Performer, A Complicated Persona

Sidney Poitier’s first film was a 1950 thriller called No Way Out. It’s still worth watching today, for Poitier’s searing performance, and for a lot more, too. In 2017 I wrote an essay about the film to accompany a Blu-ray edition released in the U.K. by the label Masters of Cinema, and the movie made for quite interesting and indeed newly pertinent viewing at that moment in time. Produced by 20th Century Fox, it was one of that studio’s so-called “message films,” and the message of this one was a soft anti-racism. Not so soft, mind you, that the movie wasn’t banned in theaters below the Mason-Dixon line — it was.

But the movie, at the time, kind of got the ball rolling on the idea that Poitier, born in 1927 in the Bahamas and “discovered” by Fox head Daryl Zanuck in 1949 (Poitier seemed to have not needed much soul-searching to opt for cinema over theater early in his career), was employed by Hollywood to portray variations on a sort of sanctified Black character. In No Way Out he plays a highly competent physician who runs afoul of a racist maniac played by Richard Widmark. For the most part, Poitier’s character as written is practically saintly. But, in collaboration with director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who cowrote the script), Poitier injects volatile depth into the role. The decisive moment occurs near the end, when Poitier’s character sews up a sniveling Widmark. Looking at Widmark with a rage that could ignite a city block, he says, “Don’t cry, white boy. You’re gonna live.”

It’s a searing moment of complex humanity. As I wrote in my essay at the time, it represented a stark contrast to the then-new Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a movie that, I observed, “use[d] persons of color as moral-commentary props.” No matter what the material — as, for example, the almost relentlessly anodyne Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner — Poitier, who died today at age 94, used the power of both his physical presence and performing prowess to make sure he was never a prop.

One can understand how the short-sighted conventional wisdom got adopted, though. In the 1963 Lilies of the Field, the movie for which Poitier won his first and only Best Actor Academy Award, he played a handyman who cheerily helps out a flock of nuns. In 1965’s A Patch of Blue he teaches Real Love to a young white woman…who is blind! Get it? He absolutely excelled in pictures where social relevance walked hand in hand with art, like 1951’s Cry, the Beloved Country and 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun, adapted from the groundbreaking Lorraine Hansberry play. (It’s worth noting that with this piece, Poitier defined his role of the screen and the stage, portraying Walter Lee Younger in the 1959 Broadway production.) But those works didn’t reach white audiences as much as they ought to have. More familiar to such viewers were, say, the two films Poitier made with the one-time king of on-the-nose social consciousness, director Stanley Kramer. One was the 1958 The Defiant Ones, playing a Black escaped convict handcuffed — get it? — to white racist Tony Curtis. And the other was Dinner, in which he played a doctor again, one who happens to propose to a white woman whose parents are Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Poitier imbued the roles in these pictures with a charisma that was practically galactic, unique. He was not infrequently called upon to play it “cool” opposite purposefully “edgy” white performers. (See 1957’s Edge of the City with John Cassavetes, or 1962’s Pressure Point with Bobby Darin.) But more than a Black actor, he was a Black movie star, without apology. Going head to head with Paul Newman in the 1961 Paris Blues, an underseen and underrated jazz drama, he comes out on top (partially because Newman’s character is kind of a pain overall).

Some of the most perceptive writing about Poitier’s persona and work in the 1960s is in Mark Harris’ superb 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution, in part a chronicle of how pictures like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate made a contemporary work like Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner look anachronistic. “[H]e demonstrated a remarkable instinct for self-presentation,” Harris writes of his relationship to the press in the mid-’60s; “without anyone to emulate, he knew exactly how much he could say publicly without jeopardizing his status in either black or white America […] He wouldn’t let himself — couldn’t let himself — play villains. Hollywood would never allow him to play a character with real sexual passion. And the possibility that he might one day be able to compete with white actors for roles in which race could be factored out wasn’t even worth discussing.”

1967 was a pivotal year for Poitier. Aside from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he had two more major pictures that year. In To Sir With Love, he played a dreamy Secondary School (high school to us Yanks) teacher in London hassled by Michael Des Barres and eventually serenaded by Lulu. (In 1955 the then nearly 30 Poitier played a hassling high school student in the risible then-and-now The Blackboard Jungle.) And in In the Heat of the Night, he played an unusually assertive law enforcement officer solving a mystery among racist colleagues and suspects.

Here, as ever, Poitier made himself distinctive in ways that ran against the grain of liberal pieties. In The Devil Finds Work, his essential book about film, James Baldwin observes of the picture’s scenario: “The film is breathtaking, not to say vertiginous, in the speed with which it moves from one preposterous proposition to another. We are asked to believe that a grown black man who knows the South, and who, being a policeman, must know something about his colleagues, both South and North, would elect to change trains in a Southern backwater at that hour of the early morning and sit alone in the waiting room […]”

But he goes on: “Poitier’s presence gives the film its only real virility, and so emphatically indeed that the emotional climate of the film is that of a mysteriously choked and baffled — and yet compulsive — act of contrition.”

In a sense, his work in Heat was the end of a thread. He never did play an out-and-out bad guy. But in his acting he displayed a new assertiveness that you couldn’t help but notice. In two In the Heat of the Night sequels, They Call Me Mister Tibbs and The Organization, he did play the Virgil Tibbs role as if race wasn’t a factor.

And in 1969’s little-seen The Lost Man — adapted from Odd Man Out, with a Black Panther-like group standing in for the I.R.A. — Poitier actually played a militant Black radical. For his directorial debut, 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, in which he costarred with Harry Belafonte, Poitier made not only a Black Western but a Black Western comedy, and a pretty raucous one at that. He followed that effort with three collaborations with, gulp, Bill Cosby, each one a yes, raucous comedy, in which Poitier played straight man, more or less, to his voluble and, um, madcap costar.

These were movies that explicitly targeted Black audiences, and Poitier seemed delighted to be cutting loose for that demographic. (We shall not speak here of Poitier’s last directorial effort, the Cosby-starring Ghost Dad, which is mainly distinguished by being slightly less WTF than Cosby’s Leonard Part 6.)

Poitier took off from acting in the late ‘70s while continuing to direct — again, comedies. He supervised the second Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder team up, Stir Crazy in 1980 — the “that’s right, we bad” one — and worked again with Wilder and Gilda Radner for 1982’s Hanky Panky. The number of comedies in which Poitier was involved prior to Buck and the Preacher? Um, zero.

Upon his return to screens in 1988 in two films, Little Nikita (which put him against young River Phoenix) and Shoot to Kill, Poitier’s iconic status was more than fixed, and his pace leisurely — he appeared in a dozen pictures between 1988 and 2001. Whereas between 1950 and 1978 he was in over 40. (One of the post-1988 pictures was a made-for-TV sequel to To Sir With Love, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who died yesterday. Another was the cult heist picture nonpareil Sneakers.) He wrote books — including one sci-fi novel, published in 2013, called Montaro Caine. His “spiritual autobiography,” The Measure of a Man, was published in 2007 and rightly celebrated by Oprah Winfrey.

I once had the privilege of witnessing Sidney Poitier in a decidedly non-movie-star moment. It was in 2006, at the Cannes Film Festival. Poitier was there to receive the Commander of Arts and Letters Award from the French government. I was covering the festival for Premiere magazine, and I was staying at the rather deluxe Hotel Martinez. (Boy, the magazine economy back in the day — my stay there cost over ten grand.) I got up every morning at six, so I could get to the breakfast buffet before seven, have coffee, grub, and a couple of cigarettes and head for the 8:30. So I’m on my way to the elevator and I pass a partially open door, with a maid and a room service cart in the hall, and inside the room, Mr. Sidney Poitier, in a tuxedo shirt and boxer briefs shyly bringing in the cart and handing the maid a tip. While not a tall man (movie stars, while not uniformly short, are also not tall, as these things go) he was entirely magisterial. I did not say hello. It wasn’t the time.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.