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Friday, April 12, 2024

April 12, 2024: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Lillies of the Field

[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 what was unquestionably historic about Poitier’s Oscar, what wasn’t quite, and what’s importantly outside of that framing.

I started this week’s series by highlighting the work of my favorite FilmStudier, Vaughn Joy, so it’s only appropriate that I end the series by doing the same: for a delightful and engaging but also thoroughly thoughtful and analytical take on the history of the Academy Awards, including questions of diversity and representation therein, I highly recommend this episode of Liam Heffernan’s America: A History Podcast featuring Vaughn. As they get into at length, the Oscars have been frustratingly bad when it comes to racial/ethnic representation—which also means that we have to recognize the genuine (if frustratingly slow and haphazard) significance of historical steps in that direction. Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black man to win an Academy Award, and the first Black performer to win in the Best Actor or Actress categories, in 1964 for his performance in Lillies of the Field (1963) was such a historic step; the fact that it was long overdue, and the not-unrelated fact that it would be nearly 40 years before another such Best Actor or Actress win (2001, when both Halle Berry and Denzel Washington took home Oscars in those categories), are important contexts but do not diminish Poitier’s achievement in the slightest.

I can’t lie, though—it’s also a bit frustrating, and at least somewhat telling, that it was Lillies for which Poitier won his one Oscar. Don’t get me wrong, Poitier is great as always in Lillies, playing itinerant laborer Homer Smith who finds himself trapped in a convent doing the Lord’s work (or rather the nuns’ work, but in a pointed running joke the head nun Mother Maria [Shirley Booth] keeps thanking the Lord instead of him). And I’m not going to suggest that his character is anywhere near as limited nor stereotyped as the one for which the only prior African American Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, took home her trophy. But nonetheless, of the couple dozen films that Poitier starred in across the 1950s and 60s (as I discussed in yesterday’s post), Homer is to my mind one of the least nuanced or interesting characters, a relatively straightforward comic role, one that uses the character more to make symbolic religious points than to offer the kinds of emotional and human truths that were at the heart of Poitier’s consistently, complicatedly compelling performances. And I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that this one, rather than all those others, was the role which won him the Oscar.

On the other hand, the Academy Awards are of course far from the only way to measure either a performance or a film’s significance. On the first note, Sidney Poitier gave many of the best film performances of the 1950s and 60s (and over the next few decades after), whatever happened in awards season. And on the second, I do think there’s at least one really important element of Lillies of the Field—that it features a Black man living in a convent with a group of largely white nuns for months, and the situation is presented as both humorous and symbolically resonant but never, not even for a second, as fraught. Considering that one of the first historic American films featured the racist myth of Black rapists as a central plot element, and that none other than the film which won Hattie McDaniel her Oscar used that same myth as a driving force in the plot of its second half as well, it’s not at all insignificant to note the absence of even the slightest intimation of those racist narratives in Lillies of the Field. That doesn’t make this one of Poitier’s most important or interesting performances, but it does make it yet another way he and his films profoundly affected Americana culture and society.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Poitier films you’d highlight?

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