Sidney at TIFF ... By Andrew Terry Pasieka

Like many movie goers of the Baby Boomer and Generation X eras, I became aware of Sidney Poitier in 1967 the way many had become aware of Beatlemania in 1964: all of a sudden. In 1967 alone he made To Sir, With Love; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; and In the Heat of the Night, groundbreaking films all of them. Consider the bare plot lines:

• A black man is a high school teacher to all white teenagers in the underbelly of London, England. • A black man is engaged to a beautiful young rich white ingénue. • A black man who is a police officer from the north slaps a plantation owner from the south after he is himself slapped.

Consider also this ’black man’ was playing in a leading role in all three films. Yet because they all were released in the same year, his exploding popularity even among his peers was his own undoing. Competing against himself in three major motion pictures, he failed to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

Even as I followed his career from a distance, I would come to learn that 1967 was not the measure of a man, only three snapshots of his greatness.

Sidney Poitier was one of the most gifted and charismatic actors the cinema has known. But acting was not the sum of his parts. The actor stopped acting, became a director, then stopped directing and became a producer. He played three mutually exclusive roles as stages of his artistic life.

Director Reginald Hudlin and Producer Oprah Winfrey provide a definitive portrait of this legendary actor. It includes extensive interviews with the man himself prior to his death at age 94 in January of this year. This sweeping documentary surveys Poitier’s films as a backdrop to his life story, and a litany of accomplishments as an artist and activist who forever changed what it means to be Black in America.

He was born two months premature while his Bahamian family was visiting Miami. Poitier’s own words provide the narration, getting a glimpse of rare footage from his life beyond Hollywood, of a boy born to tomato farmers. What was little known but not surprising given the times was that everyone attending the birth said that Sidney was not expected to survive. His father left the house early the following morning and returned later with a shoe box, where “they were prepared to tuck me away.”

Moving to the U.S. at age 15, he quickly learned the brutal realities of the Jim Crow era. Poitier speaks of his early experiences with racism, but also found his passion for acting, first to the theater in New York, and eventually the movies. Director Hudlin weaves together a rich mix of archive footage and contemporary interviews with a stellar group of subjects — Halle Berry, Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey herself. Both of

Sidney

At TIFF 2022

Sidney Poitier was one of the most gifted and charismatic actors the cinema has known. But acting was not the sum of his parts. The actor stopped acting, became a director, then stopped directing and became a producer.

Poitier’s wives and some of his children also speak. Poitier’s contemporaries and the holders of his legacy detail just how extraordinary his rise was.

An early threshold was achieved at the expense of Harry Belafonte, who became a lifelong friend. Actors at the American Negro Theatre had day jobs besides what little they could earn on stage. In one production Belafonte had a major part and Poitier was his understudy. One day Sidney had to fill in for Harry because Belafonte was a garbage man and was called in for a shift at the last minute. A Broadway producer was in the audience for that performance and cast Poitier in his upcoming production. Belafonte always liked to say that Sidney Poitier’s ticket to Broadway was built on garbage.

Early success in New York and Hollywood was tempered by a deeply personal struggle that came from the values of life as a man, husband, and father as taught to him by his father while married to his first wife. He made a film in 1962 called Paris Blues with the charismatic real-life husband-and-wife team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, a terrific cameo from Satchmo himself, Louie Armstrong, and a young black woman who was his love interest in the film, Diahann Carroll. During the filming Sidney felt an intense connection with Carroll and by the time the picture wrapped, the love interest became real.

Poitier’s dilemma was not immediately acted upon, because his rise to stardom occurred in tandem with his commitment to social change. He marched for civil rights in Washington, D.C. in August 1963 with Martin Luther King Jr. alongside Harry Belafonte and movie stars like Newman and Marlon Brando. He said, “I became interested in the civil rights movement out of a necessity to survive.”

Still, 1963 provided Poitier a watershed moment in Hollywood. He was the first Black actor to be nominated for a leading role Oscar and the first to win one, for Lillies of the Field. Ironically, the role of Homer Smith illustrated juxtaposition again with Belafonte. Harry turned down the part because he felt the character ‘didn’t have a connection to the real world.’ After receiving the Best Actor statuette, Sidney exclaimed, “It has been a long journey to this moment…”

By the Academy Awards of 1968, Sidney Poitier is feeling the heat of his own fame, especially with headlines like one that appeared in the New York Times, “Why do white people love Sidney Poitier so?”

The heat was turned up more just a couple of month later with the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Poitier and Belafonte had a falling out which lasted a few years due to a disagreement on making a statement after the funeral. Another personal break-up was his separation from his first wife, but before the divorce was long finalized his rebound to Diahann Carroll failed as well, since they both realized it was doomed to be nothing more than a good friendship.

There were two very pleasant seconds in Sidney’s life, his second marriage to Canadian/French actress Joanna Shimkus, and memorable footage when Washington became the second Black Best Actor winner on the same night that Poitier received an honorary Oscar. They both saluted each other.

Poitier’s reinvented himself in later years in the other stages of his artistic life alluded to earlier. He became a director of studio comedies, which peaked with the 1980 Gene Wilder/ Richard Pryor comedy classic Stir Crazy. He then became a producer when he, Newman, and Barbra Streisand formed First Artists. Poitier ensured that hundreds of blacks found work in the industry behind the camera. When asked why he gave up a lucrative acting career when the others were initially risky, his illuminating reply was, “Success has a way of insulating you.”

In a world that so desperately needed the integrity that Poitier brought the world on a daily basis, Sidney never loses sight of what a beacon of hope he was. His iconic status remains firm because icons just will themselves to a different level…

(TIFF commentaries on Sidney from David Voigt and Stephen Silver) SMJ MAGAZINE FALL 2022