Sidney Poitier

To Sir, with Love

A Patch of Blue

After memorializing Peter Bogdanovich last week, I’d be remiss to not pay tribute to another titan of the film industry, whom we lost the very same day. I knew my next set of double features had to be all about Sir Sidney Poitier, an actor, director, diplomat, knight, Bahamian, Pisces, who was the first black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. When he was 22, Sidney starred in the film No Way Out (1950), a film in which Sidney plays a doctor who must treat a bigoted white man, his career took off and, for the most part, each film stayed within the same narrative guidelines. From The Defiant Ones to In The Heat of the Night to Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner to tonight’s features, many of his best-known films, including the film that won him the Academy Award (Lilies of the Field), cast Sidney Poitier as a magical person of color—a tired trope that still exists today, with damaging results. In one way or another, these roles position Poitier as catalyst for change and a lesson for a white person to learn. I’m not sure I can say that Sidney Poitier popularized this archetype, but he certainly was, to white people at the time, the most palatable black man. Sidney was all too aware of his typecasting, and once said:

“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. Not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency.”

Not that anyone needs confirmation of this, but Sidney Poitier was, in every facet, good. He was good at acting, good at communicating, commanding a room and actually having something to say, and every character he got to be, including the man he was in real life, was just good. I had a tough time narrowing down my selections for tonight’s viewing, but I knew that if I placed the choice in the hands of my mom, a Sidney Poitier historian, I wouldn’t be disappointed. James Clavell’s 1967 film To Sir, with Love was a tender, whimsical, and, at times, a surprisingly hilarious experience, partly due to the fact that the theme song, of the same name, was played upwards of three times throughout the film. Sidney Poitier stars as Mark Thackeray, an engineer in England working as a teacher at a school of rejects and rebellious teens until he can get a proper job. It’s a tale as old as time: a hardened but hopeful teacher must rally and inspire a group of underprivileged, outcasted children who society has all but given up on. This story has been done, ad nauseam—Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, Coach Carter, Dead Poets Society, Lean On Me, Up the Down Staircase, Stand And Deliver—but To Sir, with Love felt like the most groovy of them all. Maybe it was the chav aesthetic of the kids or the fact that the worst things these rowdy students ever seemed to do were open their loud desks and dance in the hallways, but the stakes felt lower and the tone was funnier. Watching the dynamic between Sidney Poitier and his students evolve from ambivalent to tumultuous to familiar to familial was more fun than this formula normally allows for. The magic of the movies, and of Sidney Poitier, turned this story, which was based on the memoir of E.R. Braithwaite (who was NOT regarded as kind or caring in real life), into a much kinder, more light-hearted narrative. The film was a hit in the UK and an even bigger one in the US and the reason behind that is obvious: Sidney Poitier. His connection to his costars is as palpable as his connection to his audience, and people young and old responded well to his strong, warm screen presence. Such was the case in A Patch of Blue, another film where Poitier plays the role of a savior. The film follows Selina, a poverty-stricken, neglected blind girl who befriends Sidney Poitier’s Gordon, an open-hearted, patient man who stumbles upon her in the park one day. Similarly to To Sir, with Love, the book A Patch of Blue is based on is much harsher and darker than the film adaptation. The set up of this story is painful and stressful enough, I’m so glad the film didn't include any gratuitous suffering. It was hard enough watching Elizabeth Hartman’s character endure abuse from her family, from society, and each time Sidney Poitier showed up, I felt the same amount of relief that she did. Their love story, no matter how ill-fated or unbalanced, felt genuine and incorrupt. Ironically, despite this bleak story, this was one of Poitier’s funniest, most jovial roles. His smile seems brighter, his laugh is goofier, and while he’s often the steely voice of reason, here he seems lighter and looser than I’ve ever seen him. He’s charming in every role, not just because he often played likable characters, but because his likability carried over from the person he was off screen. He often played serious roles tasked with dealing with issues of race and class, but as time went on Poitier began to make and star in comedies (like the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder hit Stir Crazy)—quite a far departure from the staples of his early career. We’ve come a long way in terms of the representation and range of roles offered to people of color, but even a brief perusal of somewhat recent films will show you that this trope of the upstanding black savior is still very much present. Nevertheless, Sidney Poitier continuously made history, changed opinions, broke stereotypes, and challenged archaic Hollywood standards throughout the course of his illustrious and inspiring career. He lead with kindness, with a strong, clear voice that was impossible to ignore. Cheers to Sir Sidney Poitier, a man whose greatness could never be summed up in a singular blog post, so I’ll end with a quote from the late, great giant:

“I think about death, but I’m not fearful of it. I’ve reduced the concept of my existence by saying, ‘I truly, truly try to be better tomorrow than I was today.’ And I mean ‘better’ as simply a better human being, not a better actor, not a better anything, but just a better human being. That will please me well. And when I die, I will not be afraid of having lived.”