A reminder, from Deadline:
TCM: Good-bye, My Lady (1956), 6:15 a.m. [a dog story!]
TCM: Edge of the City (1957), 8:15 a.m.
TCM: No Way Out (1950), 10 a.m.
TCM: Blackboard Jungle (1955), noon
TCM: To Sir, With Love (1967), 2 p.m.
TCM: Lilies of the Field (1963), 4 p.m.
TCM: A Patch of Blue (1965), 6 p.m
"He was truly my brother and partner in trying to make this world a little better. He certainly made mine a whole lot better." Harry Belafonte is among a host of actors, statesmen and celebrities honoring Oscar winner Sidney Poitier, who has died at 94. https://t.co/IsIWxAewOY
— The Associated Press (@AP) January 8, 2022
Sidney Poitier was an icon of racial reassurance. But his genius lay in his rage. https://t.co/HnPb2Rx2uj
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 9, 2022
My introduction to Poitier came during a parochial school field trip to the Grand Concourse movie house to see Lilies of the Field. (We were also taken to see To Sir, With Love in due course.) So this felt correct to me:
Those five words electrified audiences in 1967, when, in the crime procedural “In the Heat of the Night,” Sidney Poitier’s Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs schooled a Mississippi police chief, played by Rod Steiger, who had just casually called him by a racial epithet…
Throughout that decade, Poitier, who died Thursday at 94, cultivated a persona of quiet, self-confident authority and classic style. He became the first Black man to win an Oscar for best actor, for his portrayal of an easygoing handyman who befriends a group of nuns in 1963’s “Lilies of the Field”; months later, Martin Luther King Jr. would accept the Nobel Peace Prize, making them twin symbols of Black excellence…
Something else is going on in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which animates Poitier’s genius in all of his best work: a ripple of tension, a “Call me Mister Tibbs” anger that can be detected just under the surface of even his most benign encounters. It’s there when he’s being called “the problem” by a benevolent Catholic priest or when he’s being condescended to by his future father-in-law. Decades before we had words and phrases such as “microaggression,” “unconscious bias” and “White fragility,” Poitier was eloquently conveying the psychic toll on Black people, not just from the most visible and egregious structures of racism, but also from constantly having to manage White anxieties, expectations and self-protecting ignorance.
He expressed that reality — the frustration, the anger, the bone-deep weariness — not just by way of subtle facial reactions, but also through a tightly coiled physicality suggesting that, no matter how tactfully his characters were navigating a racist society, its depredations were not going unnoticed. They were being registered, one by one, on a body that moved with a dancer’s grace and a boxer’s defensive skill…
Sidney Poitier was a giant on and off the screen. Here he is with Harry Belafonte in 1966 after bailing John Lewis, Jim Forman, and other SNCC members out of jail. They had been arrested protesting apartheid at the South African consulate in NYC. pic.twitter.com/Svo2SdNQos
— Andrew Aydin (@andrewaydin) January 7, 2022
Saturday Night Movies Open Thread: Appreciations of Sidney PoitierPost + Comments (35)