SIDNEY POITIER REMEMBERED

BLACK ACTOR TOOK ON WHITE AUTHORITY ROLES WITH SOCIAL PURPOSE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Leading black actor Sidney Poitier starred in a series of movies about racial tensions that helped break down social barriers for black Americans.

Poitier took part in a dialogue about race at a time when blacks were still being lynched in the Deep South.

In The Defiant Ones (1958), directed by Stanley Kramer, Toni Curtis co-starrs with Poitier, as a white criminal, and Poitier, as a black criminal, chained together at the wrists by prison irons. The film about racial intolerance is compelled forward by dialogue about racial hatred and social bigotry.

The two criminals, John and Noah, escape on foot when the prison bus overturns, but they are still chained together. The narrative follows the inescapable flight of the two convicts as they are chased by US Marshalls and tracking dogs.

The script takes Curtis and Poitier through a number of object lessons in surviving life, such as falling into a mud pit during a downpour. Curtis is only able to climb and claw his way out of the slippery mud pit because the two escapees decide to cooperate out of sheer necessity.

Curtis gives the orders throughout the movie, but when the two characters are unchained, Poitier still stays behind when a wounded Curtis cannot run fast enough to hop a train for a sure escape.

The characters exhibit animus toward each other during most of the narrative only to finally find common ground to their mutual detriment in the final scenes.

Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that’s been grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes, the more humane it becomes; the more it can see its own humanity, the more it sees the ways in which its humanity has been behaving inhumanly. Poitier, p. 128.

The characters personify race relations in the United States in which whites and blacks live together, whether they like living together or not, but finding that the only way to survive a cruel life is by working together to solve mutual social and economic problems. The Inner Cities have been in a gradual decline since the 1950s.

The Defiant Ones won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Script. Poitier won his first of two Silver Bears from the Berlin Film Festival for his performance.

Five years later, Poitier would be the first black actor to win the Best Actor Oscar in a Leading Role for his performance in Lilies of the Field (1963). Poitier also won his second Silver Bear for the performance.

Poitier portrays a carpenter working from town to town when he comes across a group of immigrant East German nuns who need help mending the roof of their home. Before Homer Smith is willing to, he finds himself fixing the roof in exchange for room and board.

Poitier shows irreverence, with an honest heart motivated by Christian values. Soon the character moves on after finishing the roof to building a church for the nuns with such zeal that he refuses to accept help because he wants all the credit for the good deed.

In the Heat of The Night (1967) is another film in a series of movies in which Poitier challenges white notions of authority and social, political norms. Poitier plays a Philadelphia police officer caught in a murder mystery when passing through a small Mississippi town while on vacation in the Deep South.

Virgil Tibbs is at first considered the murder suspect, seemingly caught at the train station waiting to escape small town justice by the white small town deputy sheriff. The sheriff finds Tibbs innocent, though, only after Tibbs explains to him who he is and what he does for a living.

Tibbs wants to continue on with his journey back to Philadelphia, but he eventually, reluctantly allows himself to be recruited by the sheriff department to help solve the crime, him being a big shot city detective and all.

Tibbs’ investigation is interrupted time and time again by a white sheriff reluctant to be outdone by the black city cop. The Klux Klux Klan also interferes with the black man’s mere presence in the community until the Klan eventually start to hunt Tibbs down with the intent of lynching him. 

When these people come along, their anger, their rage, their resentment, their frustration… ultimately mature by will of their own discipline into a positive energy that can be used to fuel their positive healthy excursions in life, Poitier, p. 124

In the end, the movie shows how the white rural people are less moral than the black urban person, and that the colour of a person’s skin has little to do with anything.

Ray Charles sings the score created by composer Quincy Jones for the movie. And In the Heat of the Night won the Oscar for Best Picture. 

Rod Steiger again performs brilliantly in his role as town sheriff, having also played opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) and Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago (1965). Steiger portrays an unscrupulous lawyer in both previous roles, eventually winning the Best Actor Oscar in a Leading Role for his performance as town sheriff opposite Poitier.

Steiger had this trademark way of begrudgingly accepted the way things were turning out for his character, often ending up on the wrong side of the moral divide. In the Heat of The Night, the sheriff keeps talking down to Tibbs and calling him by his first name as a sign of disrespect, even though the sheriff has asked him to help solve the murder. This creates a lot of tension in the film, until Poitier finally retorts: “They call me Mr Tibbs.”

Poitier was famous and much admired by white audiences and black audiences alike during a time of social unrest in the United States. Civil rights leaders attempted to raise the Inner Cities by promoted black empowerment, which caused tensions with white established authority.

Poitier’s performances of dignified, personable black characters in positions of authority pierced the stereotypes of black anger and hatred for white society.

Blacks in the Inner Cities were rioting, Martin Luther King Jr. was marching, and Sidney Poitier was providing outstanding performances in films that were compelled forward through the narrative by poignant social commentaries on race relations.

Poitier’s peaceful black demonstration on cinema screens dignified black audiences and outlasted all the protest songs, demonstrations and assassinations that ultimately slowed the civil rights movement.

Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man, a spiritual autobiography, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.