[This coming weekend marks the 60th anniversary of Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Poitier performances, leading up to a special post on a handful of 21C actors carrying his legacy forward!]
On standout
speeches and sweet sendoffs in Poitier’s pair of 1967 releases.
By 1967
Sidney Poitier had starred in 24 films, including the 1963 release that won him
the Academy Award 60 years ago this week (and on which I’ll focus in tomorrow’s
post); in early 1967 he would star in another, the English educational drama To Sir, with Love. Which
is to say, he was by this time already very well-established, if not indeed
America’s most beloved screen actor. But having said all of that, I would still
make the case that it was his second and third 1967 releases which hold up the
best among all of Poitier’s films, and which not coincidentally happen to
comprise (at the time and ever since) two of the most powerful depictions of
race in America ever put on the silver screen: the police procedural In the Heat of the Night,
which co-starred Rod Steiger and debuted in August 1967; and the domestic melodrama
(with plenty of comic moments) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, which
co-starred Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (in his final performance, as he
passed away in June) and debuted in December 1967.
While
Poitier’s character is far more central to Heat
than to Guess (where for much of the
film he takes an understandable backseat to the powerhouse couple of Hepburn and
Tracy), both films offer him the chance to deliver standout, stirring speeches
about race in America (among other topics). In Heat those speeches tend to be brief, to the point, and righteously
enraged, as in the film’s two most famous moments: “They call me Mr.
Tibbs!” and the slap
heard ‘round the world. In Guess
Poitier’s most extended speech and scene is far more slow-building, emotionally
nuanced, and multilayered: a frustrated yet loving
conversation with his father (the great character actor Roy E. Glenn, Sr.) about
their respective generations and perspectives. But what all these speeches and
scenes share is a profound degree of emotional truth, the authentic humanity
that Poitier brought to every performance and that makes both of these characters
far more than just statements about race or civil rights (although they are
both that as well).
Although
full of more fraught and painful moments, both of these films end on sweet
notes, and interestingly ones that are given to Poitier’s white male co-stars
(while they are addressed to his characters). Spencer Tracy’s long final
monologue in Guess is justifiably
famous, not least because it is clearly addressed to his actual romantic partner Hepburn (hence
her very real tears throughout) as well as to the characters by Poitier and his
fiancé (Tracy’s character’s daughter). Rob Steiger’s final line
in Heat is as brief and to the point as
Poitier’s explosions earlier in the film, but it is no less moving than Tracy’s
monologue (and just as important to the film’s arc and themes), and it elicits one
of Poitier’s most beautiful smiles in all his film performances. And while both
of these endings are performed by other actors, I would argue that both moments
have been created largely (if not, in Heat
at least, entirely) by the presence and influence of Poitier’s characters, and
specifically by that combination of emotional humanity and civic inspiration
about which I wrote above.
Last
Poitier post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Poitier films you’d highlight?
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