Sidney Poitier, S/D

I haven't seen all of his starring vehicles -- not even To Sir with Love -- but I would identify A Raisin in the Sun, Edge of the City and The Defiant Ones as my favorite performances (In the Heat of the Night not that far behind).

Anyway, here is Quentin Tarantino speaking at the Lincoln Center gala for Poitier a couple weeks ago:

http://www.movieline.com/2011/05/he-was-my-favorite-actor-quentin-tarantino-all-star-line-up-honor-sidney-poitier.php

Best performances: opposite Richard Widmark in No Way Out. It took a viewing of this to convince me that he had a power that those late sixties films neutered.

plenty of power in Raisin in the Sun imo

To Sir With Love is a great film. very english though.

Hoberman on the Bluray releases of two films I haven't seen:

“Sidney Poitier has been one of the best reasons for going to the movies these last two decades,” Pauline Kael noted in a 1969 review of “The Reivers.” Her comment, made parenthetically while discussing a film in which Mr. Poitier did not appear, suggests that the actor’s existence alone improved American movies, specifically and in general....

Mr. Poitier is best remembered and often disparaged for his conciliatory roles in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which he won an Oscar, and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), a success that helped make him the top box office attraction of the year. But as an actor he is more complicated when called upon to do something other than placate the audience, as can be seen in two relatively obscure features, out from Kino Lorber on Blu-ray and DVD: “Paris Blues” (1961) and “Duel at Diablo” (1966). In both, Mr. Poitier dramatizes a self-awareness greater than that of his white co-star, Paul Newman in “Paris” and James Garner in “Duel.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/movies/homevideo/sidney-poitier-in-paris-blues-and-duel-at-diablo.html

The deep readings James Baldwin gives both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? in "The Devil Finds Work" are extraordinary... His bluntness is even more amazing when you consider that he and Poitier were friends.

Over the weekend I watched Buck and the Preacher, a '72 western star Poitier (as a virtuous wagonmaster guiding ex-slaves/sharecroppers) took over directing when he was dissatisfied with Joseph Sargent. Not bad, but most interesting for Harry Belafonte uglying up as a rascally snake-oil Preacher, and Ruby Dee having one good monologue and appearing to do a lot of her badass horse riding along with the two men. (It was an original script by Ernest Kinoy, a fairly prominent Jewish liberal 'message' film/TV writer of the era, in the Rod Serling mold. He'd been a POW sent by the Germans to the Berga slave labor camp.)

oh, it has a soundtrack by Benny Carter; Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee play on it.

Was Blackboard Jungle viewed as a good film in 1955, or just a very topical one? (So topical it comes with one of those dreary Hollywood warnings up front, like an FBI-related film from the '40s.) The best, maybe the only reason, to see it today is Poitier, specifically in tandem with To Sir with Love. Some of the rest of the cast is interesting: Paul Mazursky (I had to check afterwards to clarify who he was--his role is fairly prominent), Richard Kiley (who I'd just seen chewing up ample scenery in Richard Brooks' Looking Mr. Goodbar--he's much more reined in here), Vic Morrow (I thought his Brando imitation was hopelessly affected; I can see where he might work for someone else), Emile Meyer from Sweet Smell of Success, Louis Calhern from The Asphalt Jungle. As I posted in the Worst Actor thread, Glenn Ford does his usual array of agonized grimaces (and at one point basically says to his wife, "You've got the looks, I've got the brains, let's have a successful marriage"). As ludicrous as some of it is, though, there actually is some relevance to teaching: the helpless feeling that can take over when you're really up against it, the almost vindictive wish that you had "good students" who "want to learn," and the constant challenge of figuring out some way to connect. (Which in Blackboard Jungle seems to be a Jack and the Beanstalk cartoon.) The record collector in me found one big scene traumatizing.

I think topical translated to good for a lot of opinion-makers invested in social responsibility? Don't know if this is just received wisdom on my part tho.

Yeah, in '55, I think the two were interchangeable for a lot of daily critics--cf. Stanley Kramer.

Some people say that about the present! I don't really agree, but you can see how history would be unkind in that way.

Not anywhere near Blackboard Jungle stylistically--one's hysterical, the other is the complete opposite--but I'm tempted to say that topical and good are confused when it comes to all the praise for The Assistant. (I didn't watch it under ideal circumstances and should see it again.) Even if you disagree there, though, yes, I think it still happens.

btw I enjoyed Ford in 3:10 to Yuma. I haven't seen Jubal but wouldn't be surprised if westerns were his most appropriate genre

Whether Glenn Ford was a solid actor or a dull one occasionally well-used (Gilda, The Big Heat) I can't answer. It probably doesn't matter.

A very reductive, received wisdom narrative would go like: 1950's and earlier critics/opinion-makers conflate social good and quality; backlash from the 1960's through to and including the 1990's seeks to divorce these two, often to the point of championing anything transgressive or antisocial as Great Art by definition; backlash to that leads to another era of the socially progressive being seen as a sign of quality.

But surely the reason a lot of old school melodramatic topical films don't hold up now isn't because they wanted to be topical and progressive, but rather that they were bad at it - not insightful about the topics they chose. It's been far too long since I've seen Blackboard Jungle to list it as an example, but the films of Martin Ritt for instance haven't aged badly for purely aesthetic reasons; they've aged badly because their take on "the race question" was mealy mouthed and compromised in the first place. Same with Kramer - the most memorable criticism of The Defiant Ones isn't someone pointing out that Kramer was bad at directing, but James Baldwin pointing out how that movie fails in talking about race.

I don't know if you could say something equivalent for The Assistant; obviously not the best person to speak on this but it felt pretty authentic to me. But there's certainly no dearth of movies out who want to be complimented on their progressiveness but fail miserably at actually being progressive, that's yer modern Oscar bait and biopics in a nutshell.

Glenn Ford enjoyable in The Undercover Man, a Joseph H. Lewis procedural that is clearly about Capone even though the code doesn't allow it to say so. Not a film likely to leave anyone speechless but good at being what it is, even though no one actually goes undercover.

I love Ritt's Hud and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, though, where he stays clear of topicality...well, Cold War, so not quite, but filtered through an aging spy's self-loathing.

Martin Ritt's got a good record on left-liberal causes as filmmaker.

I plug this film book sometimes, William Bayer's The Great Movies, one of the first film books I ever bought (came out in '73--I probably picked it up around 1980). I don't know how well it holds up today. Anyway, he splits 60 films into 12 categories, one of which is "The Concerned Cinema": The Bicycle Thief, The 400 Blows, On the Waterfront, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, The Battle of Algiers. I struggled through the Resnais film the one time I saw it back then, but the other four are fine choices.

Was Blackboard Jungle viewed as a good film in 1955, or just a very topical one?

1955 Academy Award Nominations for Blackboard Jungle:

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Best Cinematography, Black-and-White
Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White
Best Film Editing

None of the Big Category nominations (Best Film, Director, Actor, Actress), but a good number of middle tier nominations. Draw your own conclusion.

That's a good barometer, I should have looked that up. It was too early for Kael and Sarris and the great '60s critics, too late for Agee (I think) and the early influences. Manny Farber was around, but nothing on Blackboard Jungle in Movies. No idea what they saw in the cinematography...the film was photographed, I can verify that.

Kael's review: https://www.google.com/books/edition/5001_Nights_at_the_Movies/w4LzeUZ03vQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=blackboard

Thanks, I must have forgotten that. "Glenn Ford seethes all the time, but he's fairly competent"; talk about damning with faint praise--not even an unequivocal "competent."

I've seen To Sir with Love at least 20 times in my life, but I saw it for the first time in a theatre today. (The first viewing almost certainly would have been at a drive-in in the late '60s.) There are five or six moments that overwhelm me every time. Admittedly, it skirts camp at least a couple of times ("What Sir said about life--it is scary, isn't it"), and probably not a good idea to watch the SCTV parody first. Poitier's performance is as good as it gets.

Haven’t seen since I was a kid but my interest is piqued.

It really gets overshadowed by his two other big '67 films (for reasons good and bad--it's not like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is remembered as anything but crassly topical), but I think it's a better film than In the Heat of the Night.

What about his debut, No Way Out?

Only two pre-'67 films I've seen are Blackboard Jungle (see above--its inversion of To Sir with Love was, for me, the most interesting thing about it) and Patch of Blue.

No Way Out is awesome, his last scene w/Widmark is particularly raw for the early '50s.

Looks like Linda Darnell is in it too

Judy Geeson (73), Lulu (73), and Suzy Kendall (85) are all still alive.

and Michael Des Barres (74)

He's funny in that--Poitier is always removing his sunglasses. Tough-guy Christian Roberts (74) is still alive too, as is Christopher Chittell (73), who plays Potter. The four main students are all still alive; they didn't want to let down Sir.

"No Way Out" praise seconded, rewatched just after he died.

Also rewatched "Lilies", and was distracted by Poitier's obviously-dubbed singing of "Amen" throughout - turns out the actual singing voice was that of Jester Hairston, who played the rich guy's butler in "Heat"'s slapping scene; he also co-wrote the song itself with Jerry Goldsmith.

Thirding NWO.

A couple more movie-music Zoomcasts, one of my favourite films ever and one I've come to like a lot:

To Sir with Love: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaVPpczn45c
Up the Junction: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuWUKkbmZ_o

The usual factual errors.

You know what was surprisingly good? The third Mr. Tibbs film, The Organization. A fairly downbeat precursor to the '70s paranoid thriller with Tibbs going up against the mafia heroin trade in San Francisco.

(They Call Me MISTER Tibbs, otoh, is not actually very good.)

I really want to see the recent documentary on Poitier (which I didn't know about till last week), but on Apple TV at the moment, which I don't get. Curious what they say about To Sir with Love, if it gets much attention at all.

Birthday: last few seconds here more dramatic for me than Gary Cooper throwing down his badge in High Noon (complete opposite but related).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXaEf4ktpPA

Curious what they say about To Sir with Love, if it gets much attention at all.

Finally had a chance to watch Sidney, and it does--almost as much as In the Heat of the Night. (They even tracked down Lulu for an interview!) And the film does a really good job of conveying what Mark Harris's book did, how absolutely central Poitier was to 1967; I doubt any actor or actress ever had a year where their work and culture and politics ever intersected to such a degree. Poitier himself is the best interviewee--just before he died, but he's extremely animated and engaging--and they obviously had no trouble enlisting a who's who of Black film artists who worship Poitier. A lot of Greg Tate and Nelson George, too. I guess I could have done without Lenny Kravitz (Diahann Carroll's nephew, so the connection is legitimate), but I guess he was alright. And too much Dick Cavett, as always. Nice Obama clip from some other universe.

It took two "I guess"es to convey my complete indifference to Lenny Kravitz.

One thing that seemed awkward was the presence of Bill Cosby in three of the most successful films Poitier directed. Talk of how funny these films were (never seen them), and he flashed by in a still, but no mention of him by name. It was touching, and a little painful, to see Poitier speak openly (and seemingly without rancor, although I'm sure he had lots hidden behind his words) about the widespread view, post-1967, of him as an Uncle Tom. They even excerpted a long New York Times piece on that.

Watched Paris Blues off YouTube--I think it was Greg Tate in the documentary who enthuses about how awesome Poitier and Diahann Carroll look walking through Paris in trench coats...Pretty good; at times, from the standpoint of Paul Newman's performance, basically The Hustler (same year) with jazz in place of pool. Odd watching Louis Armstrong play Louis Armstrong but named somebody else (like watching Dylan in Masked and Anonymous--certain people are just too big to be contained by the pretense they're playing someone fictional), ditto that Newman and Poitier's band plays famous Duke Ellington songs that are never named as such. When the four principals first meet, it's made very clear that Newman is more attracted to Carroll than Joanne Woodward; they drop that idea quickly. (Race is front and center in conversations between Poitier and Carroll--Martin Ritt directed.) At times early in the film it felt like a blueprint for Mo' Better Blues. Found the ending a bit of a letdown (and somewhat pat); wish Poitier had gone off with Carroll and Woodward.