To Sir, With Love

Any actor would be proud to play a police detective, a fiancé, or a foreign-exchange teacher in movies that deal with race and racial tension.  Sidney Poitier played all three of those roles in three different films, all of which came out in the same year, 1967.  In that year, the year of Sgt. Pepper, only the Beatles as as much influence on popular culture, but then there were four of them, while there was only one Poitier.   In In the Heat of the Night, his character Virgil Tibbs found himself down in Mississippi handling a murder case in a racially charged atmosphere.  Guess Who's Coming To Dinner featured him as Dr. John Prentice, a black man engaged to a white woman fourteen years his junior who meets and surprises her parents (played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in their last collaboration), while, in To Sir, With Love, his character Mark Thackeray was a Guyanese immigrant in London trying to handle disruptive white working-class East End students not unlike the very sort of character he'd played in The Blackboard Jungle.  All three roles showed Poitier's characters handing racial and social tensions that could overwhelm anyone in such a situation with toughness and dignity, making Poitier one of the most respected actors of his time, and the most respected black actor of his time.

Poitier, who died this past Thursday, had already broken ground with his emotionally charged performances in movies like The Defiant Ones, in which he played an escaped black convict handcuffed to a white convict (played by Tony Curtis), A Raisin In the Sun, about a black family trying to buy a house in a white neighborhood, and Lilies of The Field, in which he played a handyman helping German nuns build a chapel in Arizona, the latter earning him an Oscar and making him the first black man to receive such an honor.  His movies of the late sixties and early seventies would go on to make black movie stars mainstream, and Poitier would play every role from the serious to the less-than serious, from an enigmatic man whose returns in his hometown precede deaths in his family in Brother John to the trio of comedies he directed and starred in with Bill Cosby.  Some of his best work was as a director, such as Stir Crazy, the second movie to star both Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.

Even in today's times, where racial tension seems worse than ever, you only need to look at how more black actors and filmmakers prosper and how none of this would have been likely, or maybe even possible, without Poitier blazing the trail.  Some of the social situations in Poitier's early movies that seemed so unrealistic back in the day are commonplace now; there are so many interracial couples in America that you could theoretically make a movie with an interracial couple and not even focus on that as an angle.  This country and the world at large are all the better because of what Sidney Poitier accomplished as an actor.  RIP. 😢