[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 two
very similar characters, and one important distinction.
Five years
after his debut performance as the lead of the film I highlighted yesterday, 1950’s No Way Out, Sidney Poitier took on a more supporting but still
very significant role in The Blackboard Jungle (1955).
Based on Evan
Hunter’s semi-autobiographical 1954 novel, The Blackboard Jungle is
the story of a young WWII veteran turned high school English teacher, Glenn Ford’s Richard Dadier,
who seeks to get through to the troubled students at an urban, integrated trade
school. While the story seems initially focused on Dadier and his adult
relationships, including with his pregnant wife (played by Anne Francis) and
two fellow teachers (Richard Kiley and Margaret Hayes), it is gradually
dominated by Poitier’s star-making performance as Gregory Miller, a rebellious leader
of the students and apparent adversary to Dadier’s authority. But when he
recognizes Miller’s intelligence and talents (including as a musician) and
treats him with respect, Dadier is able to make Miller an ally instead, and
(having pledged not to quit as long as the other doesn’t either) together they
help turn the classroom around.
If that
teacher-student dynamic seems familiar to modern audiences unfamiliar with Blackboard Jungle, I’d argue a main
reason might be that it closely parallels the evolving central relationship in
another, more recent film set in an urban high school: between Los Angeles high
school math teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) and troubled but
talented student Angel
Guzman (Lou Diamond Phillips) in Stand and Deliver
(1988). Like Guzman in Stand and Deliver,
Poitier’s Miller is at least loosely connected to a gang, which in Blackboard is led by class bully Artie West (Vic Morrow).
But as that hyperlinked scene reflects for the relationship between Miller and
West, in both of these stories the potential student leader is far less violent
and far more open to the teacher’s positive influences than is the gang leader
character. Indeed, just as Poitier’s Miller is revealed to have musical talents
that could take him very far if he gets the chance to pursue them, Phillips’
Guzman turns out to be one of the best and smartest students in Escalanate’s class,
scoring a perfect 5 on the AP Calculus exam.
So there
are clear and compelling similarities between these two youthful characters and
their roles in their respective films. But there’s also a significant
difference, and it’s one that I’d argue reflects the films’ respective time
periods and historical contexts: Blackboard’s
two central characters are distinct in race/ethnicity (Ford’s Dadier is white,
while of course Poitier’s Miller is African American), while Stand’s are both Mexican American. In a pivotal scene in Stand, Escalante is accused of
helping his students cheat on the AP exam, and rightly sees the accusation as
racist stereotyping of himself as well as his students, attitudes which also
seem connected to 1970s-80s
attacks on affirmative action. Blackboard,
on the other hand, is quite specifically a story about integration in public education,
one not coincidentally released just a year after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision
in Brown
v. Board of Education (1954). As we’ll see throughout this week’s
series, Poitier was consistently part of such Civil Rights-era films and
themes, and despite its familiar overall genre Blackboard Jungle can’t be separated from those contexts.
Next
Poitier post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Poitier films you’d highlight?
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