There are two significant films in the career of Sidney Poitier, an actor who died this Friday at the age of 94. He did both in 1967. In one, Stanley Kramer’s “Guess Who’s Coming Tonight,” played the African-American boyfriend of a well-off white girl whose parents, played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, are liberal-looking but They are shocked when their daughter introduces them to a ‘colored’ boyfriend. In the other, Norman Jewison’s thriller “In the Heat of the Night,” Poitier took on the role of a police inspector who must solve a murder case in a racist southern town. In that year of glory for the actor, he also starred in another of his most outstanding films, ‘Rebellion in the classroom’, by James Clavell, in which the racial tension was transferred to a high school in London’s East End: Poitier was here the black teacher who must earn the respect of an essentially white and rebellious student body.
Three years earlier, for ‘The Lilies of the Valley’, Poitier had won the Oscar; He was the first black actor to do it, and it would be nearly four decades before another African-American performer, the Denzel Washington of ‘Training day,’ did it again. It is an illustrative detail of segregationism in Hollywood, but also revealing of what Poitier had achieved in the 1960s: being practically the only black actor accepted by white audiences. In fact, the idea that was being communicated with ‘Guess who’s coming tonight’ is that Poitier was one of the few blacks that white parents could accept as a future son-in-law.
Quite the opposite
Poitier was integrated into the Hollywood industry with some ease because represented the complete opposite that, in 1967, could represent the most radical struggles for civil rights, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, the cinema ‘blaxploitation’, the music of Sly & The Family Stone, the funk soundtracks, the links of African-American activism with Islam or the refusal of Muhammad Ali to enlist during the war of Vietnam. It was his choice. He believed in peaceful integration and did well, becoming the most popular black actor in the 1960s and ’70s.
In any case, it must be valued for its interpretations. And the one he did as cop Virgil Tibbs from ‘In the Heat of the Night’, with a hot Quincy Jones soundtrack, is very good. So much so that he played the character in two other films, ‘Now they call me Mr. Tibbs’ (1970) and ‘Inspector Tibbs against the organization’ (1971), in which the focus stopped being the racial issue to shift to drug trafficking, prostitution and corruption of the system.
Although a native of the Bahamas, Poitier was born in 1927 in Miami during a brief stay of his parents in the city of Florida. He made his film debut in the late 1940s and had his first major role in Richard Brooks’s ‘Seed of Evil’ (1955), another story about the tensions between teachers and students in a troubled high school, with Poitier situated on the other side of the barrier: here is a taciturn and intelligent student. His assignments in ‘Where the city ends’ (1957), ‘Blood on earth’ (1957), ‘The free slave’ (1957) and ‘Fugitives’ (1958) – where he played the prisoner who escapes chained to a convict Blanco, Tony Curtis-, and the role of Porgy in the adaptation of ‘Porgy and Bess’ directed by Otto Preminger in 1959, raised him to stardom and he went on to participate in blockbusters such as ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ (1965), in which he gave life to Simon de Cyrene, one of the men who helped Jesus Christ to climb Golgotha with the cross.
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The actor returned to his “Classroom Rebellion” character in a 1996 sequel directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who passed away Thursday. He won other awards for best actor, at the Berlin festival for ‘Los lirios del valle’ and at the 1968 San Sebastián festival for ‘A man for Ivy’, made from his plot. He directed nine more or less light-hearted feature films, including ‘Two lucky cheats’ (1975) and ‘Hany Panky: a very crazy escape’ (1982). He retired from film in 2001, a year before he was awarded the honorary Oscar.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com