A Patch of Blue: Sidney Poitier, Representation, and The Virtue of Choice

 

    Way, way back (about this time last year), I premiered my piece on the responsibility that younger viewers have to engage with older cinema--specifically the films of old Hollywood. There was a lot of ground that I wanted to cover in that essay--literally an entire era of filmmaking--so most of my talking points had to be concise, which is not how most writers prefer to discuss a thing for which they have passion enough to design and maintain their own blog. There is a bounty of discussion when it comes to film history and the people who made it.

    Today I'd like to take the opportunity to dig a little deeper into one such island: that of legendary actor and trailblazer, Sidney Poitier.

    Dwandalyn Reece, curator of the performing arts at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, described Poitier,

“He fully inhabits both sides of that personality, or those tensions, of being a Black person in America … But he also demonstrated this simmering anger and a demand for respect. The performance was loud and quiet at the same time.”

King Kong (1933)

         Prior to Poitier, black representation, and general POC presence, was minimal to non-existent. Little pockets of representation did surface here and there. 1943, for example, saw two musicals with a completely Black cast, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, but films like these were made to fight for oxygen in a racially stratified ecosystem and received little attention from larger America. Generally, non-white characters were at best ornamental within a white cast, and such depictions were subject to heavy caricature and distortion, and that’s when they could sneak in at all. The best that non-white audiences could typically hope for was “Sam,” Humphrey Bogart’s pianist with like four lines in Casablanca. 

         To say that Poitier swooped in and fixed all that would diminish contributions by other activists and also imagine that there aren’t still lingering issues that require continued addressing. But at the same time, Sidney Poitier was a pivotal steppingstone in advancing that conversation. As one of the hottest stars of the 1960s, he was the first Black actor to have any real say over his star image, which he consciously used to recast the role of Black people in the American story in the middle of the Civil Rights movement.

         During his Hollywood heyday, the Poitier discussion tended to be spread fairly evenly across his larger filmography. But the modern discourse usually fixates on three major films: Lilies of the Field, his historic win for Best Leading Actor; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, his treatise on interracial marriage; and In the Heat of the Night, his Best Picture winning vehicle. Today, I’d like to bring up one of his lesser discussed works, Guy Green’s 1965 masterpiece, A Patch of Blue.

    The movie is based on the 1961 book by Elizabeth Kata, originally titled Be Ready with Bells and Drums, which examined the state of racial relationships in the midst of the Civil Rights movement through the lens of a blind white girl whose life is changed by the kindness and decency of a Black man. I have always adored the movie as both an item of anti-racist film specifically as well as simply a strong case for film as a means of understanding ourselves and understanding each other.

    I’ll point out some blind spots and limitations, but overall I see this as a space to draw some overdue adoration to a valuable text within the discussion. I’ll also own up to my own inherent limitations here as a white writer speaking about Black issues. My hope is to help advance Black visibility and representation with this piece, but I also acknowledge and accept the irony of a white dude talking about race. 

That all on the table … 

 

Sidney Poitier

Born while his Bahamian parents were on business in America, Sidney Poitier came into the world February 20, 1927. He was two months early and not expected to live, but his parents nursed him dutifully, and Poitier would live a fruitful life of nearly 95 years. Poitier would jump over to the Americas when he was sixteen to live with his brother in Florida, but he found it impossible to live under the Jim Crow laws of the time. And so he moved up to New York to pursue his dreams of becoming an actor.

A Raisin in the Sun (1961)

    Poitier initially faced tremendous difficulty getting cast in large part due to his thick Bahamian accent. Poitier ridded himself of this by studying American sounding voices on the radio until he had perfected the voice, but he was still fighting for legitimacy in a world that did not make room for people of all races. The expectation of Black performers at the time was bar singing, but Poitier was dreadfully tone deaf. (Literally, he had to be dubbed for his “Amens” when singing in Lilies of the Field.) In one of his memoirs, he recalled working as a dishwasher and being told by his boss that a man like him would never amount to anything. He recalled,

“Why me? Why did I become an actor … a kid with practically no education; a kid whose vocabulary was exceedingly limited when he quit school at twelve and a half; a kid who was well into his twenties before he even read a book; a kid who couldn’t spell (and who is still not terrific at it) and had no concept of the rules of grammar or the demarcations so widely known as essential elements in speaking, reading, writing …

“I decided then and there in that pivotal moment to be an actor, if only to show this man and myself that I could.”

         Poitier initially found success on the stage before jumping more into film. His first movie role came in 1950’s No Way Out, which saw him playing a young Black doctor at a hospital who treats a white supremacist. Worth noting, though the Black doctor is sort of the focal point of the film, in practice he isn’t really the main character. Many of the posters at the time billed him third or fourth, if at all. There are some other peripheral Black characters, including the family of Poitier’s character, but this racial conflict is seen largely through the lens of the white characters observing it.

Yet even here, we also see the seeds of what would eventually become Poitier’s signature type: a man of unimpeachable moral character whose unwavering virtue put white America to shame. Near the end, the white supremacist makes an attempt on the life of Poitier’s character and ends up injuring himself greatly in the process. The leading lady just wants to let this sucker die, but Poitier insists that they save him, saying, “Yes, he’s crazy, he’s sick. This man is all those things you say, but I can’t let a man die just because I hate him.”

        Poitier would continue to land such roles in films such as Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) and Blackboard Jungle (1955). But it was around the late ‘50s that his presence really started to gain traction. 1958 saw him headlining a film opposite Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, a film following two escaped convicts, one black and one white, who are chained together and must learn to get along if they are going to survive. The film was a moderate success in the U.S., such that studios were curious enough to keep Poitier around. It was also here that Poitier earned his first Oscar nomination, making him the first black actor to be nominated in this category.

         Then came Poitier’s major breakthrough role in 1963 with Lilies of the Field. Here, Poitier plays a drifting handyman who helps a group of immigrant nuns build a chapel for the impoverished townsfolk, and it is for this role that Poitier would make history as the first Black man to win an Oscar. And just like that, Poitier became the first Black actor in Hollywood to have real bargaining power.

    Again, the Poitier canon tends to settle around his three main hits in the mid-60s, and it is between these three films that his star image is most clearly crafted. The Poitier persona on display with these films was defined by being genteel, articulate, and soft-spoken. In the Heat of the Night, for example, sees Poitier playing a black police detective assisting with a murder investigation in Mississippi—his partner, played by Rod Steiger, standing-in for the racism inherent in the American South. The film has more or less the same tension as The Defiant Ones—can a Black man and a racist white man learn to work together? And of course, the answer to that question is … eventually.

         Poitier directly addressed an America that was for the first time really considering what it meant that all men were created equal. Poitier was there to instruct white America on how to respect other Black Americans. The way he did this was generally by rising above his circumstances, including the expectations of the other main characters, and proving them wrong in their assumptions that he was lesser because of his race. With some exceptions, Poitier was the sole Black character within a mostly white fabric, and his function here wasn’t really to have his own revelations or moments of growth so much as to get the other white characters to confront the errors of their ways. In the end, Poitier’s own character arc played second string next to that of his white, often bigoted co-leads.

         And this is where things get a little complicated.

Sidney Poitier and Black Excellence

    Janice Gassam Asare wrote for Forbes in 2021 on the topic of black excellence, saying,

Nothing But a Man (1964)

    "The idea that being exceptional will somehow shield Black people from discrimination and racism is a fallacy ... Black exceptionalism plays into the idea of respectability politics—that if Black people act the 'right way', they are deserving of decency and respect. Our obsession with Black exceptionalism does not allow Black people to just be. Black excellence does not allow Black children to be children. Striving for big goals and aiming to improve one’s performance in any domain is admirable. This is not a criticism of that. This is, rather, an interrogation of our society’s obsession with Black exceptionalism. Black exceptionalism encourages Black people to sacrifice their health, mental wellbeing and welfare for the sake of greatness. Black excellence is an unreachable peak—nothing is ever good enough."

         Much of Sidney Poitier's legacy on film can be understood within the framework of Black excellence, both its aspirations and its limitations. For all Poitier's trailblazing, the world in which Poitier worked still found ways to weaponize his achievements against the larger Black population. For one thing, the reception that white America had to Poitier did carry some overtones of “see how Black folks can be just as good as white people? And all they have to do is act, talk, and dress exactly like the whites?” From a certain perspective, it looked like Poitier had to sort of buy his place at the table by distancing himself from the traits and signifiers of Black and African-American culture—again, he had to train himself out of his natural accent before America would listen to what he had to say.

    Moreover, Poitier’s signature style seemed to set a certain expectation for how Black people were supposed to behave before white America would ever deign its respect. The way Poitier’s character won over his white girlfriend’s parents or his racist police partner was by exhibiting every imaginable virtue and leaving no room for human error. It almost seemed like Poitier was setting an impossible bar for other Black Americans to clear before white Americans could be expected to recognize their innate humanity.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

    You can also see the way that later films attempting to replicate the Poitier effect borrowed many of the signposts of his movies while neglecting their ambition. Progress on how racism is represented in mainstream film sort of stagnated after Poitier’s days, and for a long time, every Hollywood film about racism stuck an impossibly perfect Black person next to an irritable white person and put it on the marginalized groups to cure white America of their character flaws, and always without complaining. Poitier got Black America’s foot in the door, and America just sort of kept it wedged there for a while, and so I can understand why there are voices within the Black community that have some mixed feelings about the legacy Poitier left.

Now, Poitier had it in him to believably play a variety of roles (e.g. the frustrated Walter Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, which he portrayed in its original stage run and its 1961 film adaptation) but the image Poitier crafted was deliberate. He was building a model of the kinds of traits he saw as useful based on the things he valued and what he thought contemporary images were lacking. Poitier said in a 1967 interview with Joan Barthel,

Pressure Point (1962)

“If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game. Not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency, when there are thousands of actors in films …”

         Poitier saw what was on the table, and he made a deliberate gameplan on what he could do to pave the roads necessary for future generations. But he still faced criticism for his very tailored presentation of Black life in America. Perhaps the most infamous exhibit of this came in September 1967, when Clifford Mason asked in his piece for The New York Times, “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”

“Because he’s a good actor? Partly. Because he’s worked hard to get where he is? Maybe. Because he stands for a proud black image, something all of us who are non-white have needed in this country for a long time? Noooooo …

“Now there are those who will say there’s nothing else he can do. They won’t let him make anything else. I used to console myself with the fact that that was probably true. And may very well be true. But truer is the fact that he thinks these films have really been helping to change stereotypes that black actors are subjected to. In essence, they are merely contrivances, completely lacking in any real artistic merit …”

I want to afford Mr. Mason a modicum of grace here. People are allowed to be dissatisfied with the state of the world, and they’re allowed to write about it. Moreover, there were parts of the conversation that Poitier couldn’t cover, and that’s something that needs to be brought up. But at the same time, telling someone who has dedicated their entire career to opening doors and championing visibility that his life’s work was all for nothing … It’s kind of uncool. This piece reportedly had a deep effect on Poitier specifically (seriously, do journalists not think that the subjects of their work will ever read about themselves, or do they just not care?), and he essentially moved out of Hollywood for a season.

The Slender Thread (1965)

    And moreover, Poitier’s film did challenge stereotypes. He was not “pretending” to push boundaries. Black men were not allowed to be portrayed as dignified or intelligent onscreen until Poitier made his mark. I think even if Poitier had taken on more varied roles in his apex years, it would still be asking a lot to expect him to speak for every Black person’s experience in America. That’s a lot to put on a single person, and it is unfortunate the way that the people who are working the hardest to reform them often end up taking the brunt of the blame when the world isn't moving fast enough.

So while I acknowledge that there are valid critiques to be made of his filmography, I think it’s unfortunate that this often comes at the cost of Poitier himself, who wasn’t really doing anything wrong. It’s not like he could really help if white audiences are choosing to weaponize his own image against the Black community. That is a problem in the society he existed in, not in Poitier himself. It is worth putting it out into the universe one more time that this was not a failure of Poitier as an artist or a human being. (And I'd clarify that my intention in highlighting Poitier here is not to try to elevate one method of activism as innately better than another. I'm just doing what I know how to do to fix the world one wrinkle at a time, starting with an artist whose work I happen to have studied a lot.)

         This is also another one of the reasons why I want to give attention to his larger body of work. I want to highlight the intricacies of the Poitier canon. A Patch of Blue isn’t what I’d call a subversive entry in the Poitier library, but it does help put a face to a lot of what really made his efforts so revolutionary.

A Patch of Blue

    A Patch of Blue can be imagined as a sort of Cinderella story set in the then contemporary 1960s. In this film, Cinderella is named Selina (Elizabeth Hartman), a blind white girl whose callous mother, Roseanne (Shelley Winters), keeps her tethered to this house where she is consistently demeaned and humiliated. Selina’s only reprieves are the afternoons where Roseanne’s drunkard father drops her off in the park where she can string beaded necklaces for Roseanne to sell. It is on one such afternoon that Selina happens upon a considerate and affluent Gordon Ralph (Sidney Poitier), who takes pity on her and resolves to help her. He does this first in small ways (helping her string her beads), but as he becomes more aware of her depraved homelife, Gordon takes larger steps to help her experience a rich and meaningful life.

    At first, Selina does not realize that Gordon is Black, something Gordon chooses not to disclose to her, imagining that she has perhaps inherited her mother's bigotry. But when Selina learns from Roseanne that the man who has been helping her is Black, she is quick to defend him.

By the end of the film, Gordon is successful in getting Selina out from under Roseanne’s domain and transferring her to a residential school for the blind. In the final scene as she’s waiting in Gordon’s apartment for the bus, Selina asks Gordon if he will marry her, but Gordon politely turns it down, thinking that she would not love him if she knew he was Black. When Selina tells him that she knows and that she thinks he is beautiful, Gordon responds, “Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite,” Selina returns. “That’s just because they don’t know you.” The bus takes Selina away to her new life, leaving Gordon to reflect.

Director Guy Green was exposed to the story after his wife recommended the book to him, and he thought the story would make for a good movie. MGM wasn’t keen to make the film and afforded the film only a small budget, Poitier reportedly being the biggest purchase and the casting that Green fought the hardest for. (Hayley Mills was reportedly the original choice for Selina.) In the end, the film was a moderate success, and would accrue five Oscar nominations, including a win for Shelley Winters as Roseanne (though none for Best Picture and none for Poitier). Green admitted that while the majority of the feedback on the film was enthusiastic, he did receive some backlash for the film, particularly the scene where Poitier and Hartman kiss. (This was two years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and the nationwide legalization of interracial marriage.)

    If Gone with the Wind or Titanic are these 12,000 piece orchestras, A Patch of Blue’s emotional tenure can be described in the recurring piano sonata that plays during the opening credits and recurs throughout the film. The movie is very intimate, very delicate. As always, Poitier brings his whole self to the role, and the payoffs are great. Literally every moment Gordon enters the scene, the screen gets ever so slightly brighter, and it’s hard not to smile just a little. 

         Within the Poitier canon, this film is probably most comparable to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Both films center on the possibility of romance between a Black man and a white woman, but where GWCtD winds up being one elongated soapbox, the drama in A Patch of Blue emerges much more organically.

    There is an obvious message underlying this all, to be certain, but so much of what makes you fall in love with the story is just seeing how at home the two characters feel with each other: this feels like a relationship, not a political statement. I don’t pretend to be the ultimate arbiter on when a movie should or shouldn’t be overt in its messaging, but this movie certainly proves that an argument sometimes speaks louder when the story speaks for itself. When Selina does finally deliver the film’s message at the end, it lands really well because this thesis has already been proven. And this is a real strength of the movie both as a form of activism and as simply a piece of media. Entertainment journalist, Kelley L Carter, said of the film,

“This was one of those films that for me felt like activism … the line that she says to him, ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ I don’t feel she was saying that to Sidney Poitier. I think she was saying to black folks. That was a little thing, but to me it was activism.”

 

“Love is Colorblind”

    The myth of “colorblindness” generally elicits an eyeroll within POC communities, in large part owing to how ill-intending individuals have weaponized these talking points to obscure the reality of racism, but the film has specific devices that make this idea applicable to the characters within it. re: Selina literally cannot see that Gordon is Black and does not learn this until she has gotten to know who he is on the inside. (There is, of course, also a discussion to be had with this movie on the topic of disability within film, but we’ll save that for another day.) One of the reasons why I wanted to spotlight this movie is that, on the whole, the racial politics haven’t aged all that poorly.

Again, that's not to say there aren't blindspots. This is still a film about race as told by a mostly white cast and crew. There's also little to no discussion on things like public reform beyond just being nicer. But it's almost like the film itself could see around the corner and guess at a lot of the limitations trapped in Poitier's other works and found small, clever ways to sidestep them, allowing for a fuller exploration of racial politics, one that stands favorably next to a lot of modern efforts.

    Gordon is ultimately the single factor that saves Selina from her life of abuse and neglect. So the film almost positions Poitier as the salvific figure to the white protagonist. But I don't know if I'd classify him as a “magical negro,” a term popularized by film director Spike Lee, at least not in the same vein as like Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. Gordon has his own rich interior life, which is on display throughout the entirety of his screentime. We get little glimpses of Gordon in his workplace and his apartment that hint at a fuller life that extended far beyond his involvement with Selina. You don’t get the idea that he just popped out from behind a rose bush one day to serve the white protagonist.

With some Roseanne-specific exceptions, most of the displays of racism against Gordon are under-the-table microaggressions. There's that acknowledgment that racism can manifest in a number of small, undetectable ways, which can be exhausting for people who must bear their effect. As one example, there’s a moment where Gordon is leading Selina across the park and a pair of old ladies glare at him. It is at this point that Gordon explains the idea of “tolerance” to Selina. “It means you don’t knock your neighbor just because he looks or acts different.” When Selina remarks that Gordon must be full of tolerance, he replies, “Not by a long shot.”

    It's worth bringing up that the film takes it as a given that, despite being raised in 1960s America by a vulgar racist, Selina herself has not inherited Roseanne’s bigotry. She has no trouble accepting the revelation that her guardian angel belongs to a group she has been raised to hate. Though in-universe, there is already a basis for Selina sort of repelling Roseanne’s larger toxicity. Selina’s general brightness and goodness has cut across not just Roseanne’s racism, but her standing nastiness, and in that way, we aren’t meant to be surprised that Selina would be so tolerant. Just so, I’m choosing to look at this as a deliberate artistic choice because the novel ends in such a way that speaks more grimly to the realities of society at the day.

In the book, Selina never gets that moment where she learns from Roseanne that Gordon is Black. (The book is also told from Selina’s first-person perspective, and so the reader is not given this information either.) The final chapter of the book sees Selina and Gordon waiting in the park for the bus to take Selina away when she falls into a rosebush and gets scraped up pretty badly, causing her to cry. The other pedestrians then see this Black guy handling this bloodied-up white girl and start making vile remarks toward him. It is here that Selina realizes that Gordon is Black, and her initial reaction is not one of benevolence or understanding: she recoils from Gordon as he is chased away by the mob. In the aftermath of this, Selina unpacks her not-exemplary reaction to the man who has helped her out, and she starts to cry out of shame, and that’s the end of the story.

The first draft of the script actually followed the ending of the book, but this ending was rewritten in part owing to Poitier’s dissatisfaction with it. I haven’t tracked down his specific stated reason for this, but the situation kind of reminds me of Jordan Peele’s reasons for changing the ending to his own movie, Get Out.

Said horror-comedy sees a black man visiting his white girlfriend’s family for the first time in what reads like a deliberate rebuttal of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The lingering unease our protagonist feels here builds to something terrifying once he realizes that his girlfriend’s family runs a mad science scheme that implants the souls of white patrons into the bodies of Black people, whom his girlfriend lures for the express purpose of giving her family fresh crop to work with.

    Director Jordan Peele originally shot an ending where our hero landed in jail for the murder of his girlfriend’s family. This was very in line with the movie’s larger thesis on the realities of systemic racism, that a lot of heroes in real life are denied their happy ending specifically because of the way society punishes Black people. But Peele decided to reshoot the ending to let him get away, thinking that giving his Black audiences catharsis and validation was a better pay-off than ending with yet another gut punch. In his words, “It was very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie.”

        Again, I haven’t been able to find Poitier’s specific motivations for asking for a more pleasant ending for A Patch of Blue, but we can imagine it may have been something along these lines, carving out a space for Black audiences to experience that moment of much-deserved reprieve.

    As for whose story this is … well, it’s complicated. On the surface, this is the story of Selina breaking free of her prison and how Sidney Poitier enables this for her. So, Selina is the one whose external circumstances change the most, but who’s the character who gets their worldviews tested? The one who experiences internal growth? Honestly, I don’t think it’s Selina. Again, she has not really absorbed Roseanne’s racism. Finding out that her guardian angel is Black never bothers her. Her standing up for Gordon doesn’t mark a change in her attitude. Gordon is the one who at the start believes certain things (“Despite our friendship, this person would hate me if they found out I was Black”) that end up not being true–which turns out to be a pleasant surprise for him. This film winds up finding that special overlap where Poitier is allowed to be that moral pillar while himself experiencing something like revelation.

Anyways, while this film lands on a very happy ending, it does not end with Gordon and Selina as a definitive romantic pair, and there’s a lot to unpack there as well.

 

Do They End Up Together? And Should They?

I myself have gone back and forth on whether or not Selina and Gordon will get together, even more than with a couple like “Eternal Sunshine’s” Joel and Clementine, and I have a slightly different read of their relationship each time I watch the film. One reason why I bring this up here is that another part of what gives this film and its central relationship so much vitality is how, like any couple not living in a political melodrama, Selina and Gordon have to navigate multiple threads within the system they are occupying. They are allowed to be individuals within an ecosystem whose purpose does not rest on validating the entire notion of interracial love on their own.

    One thread this relationship feeds into is the question of a power dynamic. Selina is 18 during the course of the film (Elizabeth Hartman was 22), but she is still typed as a sort of child figure, reacting to most every situation like a child visiting the North Pole. In the book, Gordon’s age is specified as 30 (Poitier was 38 when the movie was made), which gives him a little more mobility than her, reinforced both by Selina’s disability and her sequestered upbringing. And so a part of Selina’s infatuation with Gordon lies in this sort of angelic role he plays in her life–the first time Selina tells Gordon she loves him comes after he rescues her from the storm. Selina is functionally a caged little bird who perches on the first human who holds his finger out for her. Would Gordon be doing the right thing in keeping that little bird glued to his finger?

And yet the film does not leave us or Gordon comfortable with the assurance that the power gap is the real thing standing in the way of a romantic relationship. The two share a very charged kiss midway through the film in a moment that reveals that Gordon absolutely has the capacity to feel romantically for Selina. And while Gordon helps arrange for Selina to be taken out from under the claws of Roseanne, Selina is also able to directly defy Roseanne and orchestrate her own escape, revealing that she has acquired some degree of independence by this point. And so the film also imagines that a part of that gap is also imagined, self-imposed by Gordon as a sort of coping mechanism. 

  The real anchor is that bit where Selina recounts to Gordon the story of Roseanne forbidding her to play with a black girl when she was young, at the end of which Selina muses out loud, “It’s a pity that girl was colored.” Gordon elects not to say anything, but he comes to the conclusion that Selina has been raised under Roseanne’s racist indoctrination and would hate him if she could see that he is black. So it’s not just the question of a power imbalance, it’s not even just about their race, it’s about Gordon’s insecurity.

Following this, Gordon puts distance between him and Selina. That is his way of guarding himself. He has to recast her as this poor little child who does not know any better, and that’s why she would say such thoughtless things. You see the almost professorial tone that he takes when explaining why he doesn’t think a relationship would work out between them. And you also see that dissolve once he realizes that this divide between him and Selina wasn’t really there.

The film ends without them really committing to any kind of long-term action. Gordon’s whole treatise on why they shouldn’t be together is kind of derailed when Selina reveals that she already knows that Gordon is black, and he doesn’t really get to find his bearings before the bus comes to take her away. It’s just as the bus is driving off that Gordon realizes that she has accidentally left behind the music box he gifted her. He runs down the stairs to try to deliver it, but the bus is gone before he can make it, and he is left holding it. The film makes no promises on what will happen to them long-term, only that he is going to have to find her again to return the music box. Whatever happens after that is up to them.

    That the happy ending does not hinge on the consummated union of these two actually opens up whole avenues of dimension to the film’s discussion on race, romance, and how the two can intersect. It's sort of similar to how in Meet Me in St. Louis, the fact that Judy Garland and her boyfriend could end up together matters more than any guarantee at the moment. Possibility and choice can be powerful things on their own.

 

The Virtue of Choice

         As with the larger body of Poitier’s work, the main issue critics would take with the film was not understanding why, oh why! Poitier’s character acted the way that he did. Where did that overwhelming goodness come from? Like benevolence was some aberrant state of being that needed to be approved by TSA before being allowed to board. It couldn’t be just taken for granted that Gordon was a nice person.

         And I get what attitudes this kind of critique is trying to safeguard against. It doesn’t want larger audiences to imagine that a minority, in this case, Black people, are somehow uniformly gifted with preternatural kindness and are always so happy to display it specially for the viewing of the white folk--which is how a lot of mainstream film has historically played marginalized groups. But in this specific story, I feel like this quip discounts a couple of things.

       For one, the rarity of Gordon’s kindness here is sort of the bedrock of the story. Selina had been the recipient of charity before, like her neighbor that sometimes takes her to the park, but Gordon was the first person to help her escape from her station. Gordon at first chooses to leave Selina in the park after he’s helped her recover from her caterpillar attack, but upon reflecting on just how difficult her life must be, Gordon chooses to return and see what else he can do for her. That fleeting glimpse of kindness is what makes this kind of story worth telling. It’s also worth bringing up that this arrangement marks a chance for a Black character to act as a partitioner of mercy and not just its grateful recipient. The fact that Gordon is in a position to help Selina itself plays into a sort of fantasy for Black audiences in the 1960s, being financially and socially stable enough to choose to extend such assistance. 

The film is walking a lot of fine lines here. Portraying its Black lead as being in a position of autonomy and authority to extend a helping hand to someone else, without imagining that he isn’t himself underserved and penalized by the society in which he lives. But I don’t think the film is ignorant of these fences. 

I want to talk for a spell about a character who has a relatively short amount of screentime: Gordon’s brother, Mark, played by Ivan Dixon. The first time we see him, he’s in a white button-up shirt with a tie, having just gotten off a shift from the hospital. Based on our very initial impressions, we see that he occupies a very similar space as Gordon as a man who has kept his head up in the professional world. Understanding he is a Black man in a country that is still in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, we can assume that he has attained this position through a lot of opposition. (Something else worth remarking upon is that, according to Green, both Poitier and Dixon were allowed to reword their dialogue to make it sound more in line with how they felt Black people actually talked. Their dialogue in the books veers a little into caricature, how white people might imagine Black people spoke to one another.)

    We see Mark pop up a couple of times throughout the story, dropping by Gordon’s apartment in moments where he sees that his brother is spending a lot of time with this white girl, and he has some feelings about that. Mark gets to voice the counterpoints to Gordon’s rationale. He calls out the discrepancy between what Gordon is doing and how their society is constructed: the two of them have had to pry their own positions of security from a nation that did nothing to help them: what is Gordon doing just tossing that all on the first white girl he sees who can’t string her own beads?

The film positions Gordon and Mark as opposing points of view, but it doesn’t really commit to proving Mark wrong or pretending that he doesn’t have legitimate reasons for believing the things that he does. What it does do is reinforce that Gordon is not necessarily behaving as some emissary for how all Black individuals would respond in this situation. He is behaving as an autonomous human being. There are multiple points in which Gordon could have just bowed out and left her alone in the park, but he sees a situation in which he can make someone’s life better and decides to make the world a little brighter because that’s just who he is. It’s a situation that reveals his personhood.

         Why does Gordon do the things that he does? Because that’s simply who he was.

    There is a period of the film where Gordon does not realize that Selina knows that he is Black and is acting under the assumption that if this girl knew this part of him, she would not want to be around him. This thought is dispelled in the final scene Selina reveals that she has known about him and tells him, “I think you’re beautiful.” Gordon is allowed that moment where he gets to be surprised at how his act of altruism came back to him, and that even this rotten world still offers glimpses of beauty to those who bother to try making it better. Here we see Poitier’s nobility and virtue as not just something that betters the lives of his white associates, but something that comes back to him personally.

 

"True to Yourself"

Following Poitier’s little vacation from the spotlight, he returned to Hollywood in the early 1970s, this time operating largely behind the camera. Poitier helped form the First Artists Production Company, alongside actors like Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman, that helped actors produce their own projects independent of studio involvement. In 1972, he directed a western film, Buck and the Preacher, following a Black man and a con-man who help runaway slaves escape out west. He would go on to direct other films as well, but much of his work would also see him act in the office of a diplomat or ambassador. Following his death in January 2022, multiple influential members of society, especially within the black community, sounded off their respects to a life well lived, with Barack Obama calling him "a singular talent who epitomized dignity and grace.” 

Moonlight (2016)

         Hollywood’s long overdue elevation of Black life in America would start to find its way into the mainstream owing to things like the blaxploitation movement of the 1970s and with filmmakers like Spike Lee. This would help recenter the conversation on race and help allow Black storytellers to shape their own narratives onscreen, which represents a huge portion of the conversation today. The road that Poitier left has allowed many other Black performers to leave their own marks and build the images they wished to see onscreen.

    Denzel Washington was the first actor after Poitier to win this award in 2002 (that’s a 38-year gap for those keeping track …) in a role that was entirely unlike those that Poitier himself played--an honor bestowed at the same ceremony in which Poitier was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his contribution to cinema. Washington said in his acceptance speech, “I’ll always be chasing you, Sidney. I’ll always be following in your footsteps.”

    When I think of the legacy of Sidney Poitier, what I really come back to is this idea of choice. I think of how he chose to flex his autonomy and create his own destiny, and in how he made it easier for future Black artists to do the same. I think of him choosing to carve an image of black manhood that defied what larger audiences imagined was possible. I think of Gordon Ralfe choosing to help this little blind girl reach for a better life when it would have been easier to keep walking. I think of how the fact that he and Selina could have ended up together somehow matters more than whether or not they actually do. When I think about what Sidney Poitier left to the world, what I think about is choice. 

Accepting a life achievement award from the American Film Institute in 1992, he spoke to a new generation, saying. “To the young African American filmmakers who have arrived on the playing field, I am filled with pride that you are here. I am sure, like me, you have discovered it was never impossible, it was just harder … Those of us who go before you glance back with satisfaction and leave you with a simple trust: Be true to yourselves and be useful to the journey.”

         --The Professor