The many faces of Sidney Poitier

In May 1968, Sidney Poitier received an unexpected guest. The actor was in the midst of filming a new romantic comedy when he was told that the Black American author James Baldwin would be visiting him on set. Baldwin had been commissioned by LOOK magazine to write a profile of Poitier; a rare photograph shows the pair chatting in-between takes. They are seated precariously amongst the studio-props and camera equipment, rapt in conversation, their gazes intense, thoughtful, and intimate.

The article this encounter produced offers a complex portrait of Poitier, describing a man torn between his personal values and professional obligations. Baldwin recalls meeting the actor for the first time in an airport: “He didn’t know me but I admired him very much, and I told him so.” Their paths would continue to cross throughout their lives and, from a distance, Baldwin observed both Poitier’s meteoric rise and the backlash it precipitated. Many saw Poitier as a commercial sell-out, embodying the fantasies of white audiences. Baldwin saw things differently, recognising an individual caught “in the terrifying position of being part of a system that you know you have to change.” As he describes, “I trembled for Sidney”.

Throughout January the BFI have also been exploring Poitier’s fraught legacy with a special programme of his films. Its title “Sidney Poitier: His Own Person” is taken from Baldwin’s profile. In many respects, the season marks a natural progression from the BFI’s land-mark 2016 retrospective ‘Black Star’, which tracked the history of the Black movie star. Poitier was without doubt the first “Black Star” and his filmography rightfully demands its own attention: an important part of the history of race on-screen.

Poitier was born in 1927, at the end of a decade marked by the flourishing of Black creativity in cities across America. He was raised in the Bahamas but moved to Miami when he was fifteen to live with his brother. A year later – professionally dissatisfied, and scared of the racism that defined the Jim Crow South – he paid $11 for a bus fare to New York City. He settled in Harlem and it was here that he auditioned for the American Negro Theatre. On his second attempt, he was invited to join the company. This was something Poitier had never expected: he was an actor now.

Poitier’s big break came during an understudy performance for Harry Belafonte. Much to Belafonte’s ire, Poitier was scouted by a Hollywood producer and from there followed a slew of roles. His star was in rapid ascendancy and by 1958, Poitier had become the first Black male actor to be nominated for an Academy Award. The film for which Poitier was nominated was Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones. The movie follows the friendship of two men who escape the chain-gang but remain cuffed together. It is a clumsy and sentimental metaphor for American race relations, and ends with Poitier’s character jumping from a train which would take him across state-lines, surrendering himself to be re-incarcerated – all for the sake of his newfound friend.

Whilst easy to dismiss, The Defiant Ones is an important film for understanding the trajectory of Poitier’s career. In an attempt to engage with the Civil Rights Movement – and entice a new audience of racially-concerned white liberals – Hollywood Studios made a number of similar “race flicks” throughout the 1960s. These films provide the source-code for modern white-saviour narratives such as The Blind Side, The Help, or Green Book. They depict racism as an easily surmountable problem, particularly with the help of well-meaning Whites. Often, as in Green Book, even prejudiced Whites are shown capable of redemption. In these cases, Black characters function as ambassadors of their race, primed to offer their peers an education on race. Poitier was the poster-boy for this kind of role, embodying the straight-laced, sophisticated, and sexless Black Man that white America wanted most.

Indeed, by the end of the 1960s, Poitier had become the most prolific and celebrated Black actor in the English-speaking world. In 1967 – a banner year for the actor – he released his two most famous films, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In The Heat of the Night. In the first he portrays a celebrated Black doctor who meets the parents of his White fiancé. In the second, he plays Virgil Tibbs, a Black detective who becomes embroiled in a murder case in a small town in Mississippi. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Poitier slaps the actor Larry Gates around the face. This display of self-defence from a Black man was a groundbreaking moment for depictions of race onscreen and was dubbed “the slap heard around the world”.

Whilst these films mark the highpoint of Poitier’s career, however, the end of the 1960s had also ushered in a new wave of critics. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X coincided with the rise of Black nationalism. A new and more radical race politics was in vogue and, in this context, younger black audiences viewed Poitier as a bland conservative committed to outdated principles of integration.

This critique was summarised by a now-infamous article in the New York Times, entitled “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?” The author, Clifford Mason, dismisses Poitier’s films as “merely contrivances, completely lacking in artistic merit’ and accuses the actor of playing ‘essentially the same role, the antiseptic, one-dimensional hero’. For Mason, Poitier is simply “the Negro movie star that all white America loves”. In his own memoir, the actor recalls the article as “the most devastating and unfair piece of journalism I had ever seen”.

In the wake of such criticism, Poitier’s career never fully recovered. The Virgil Tibbs character was resurrected for two further films that made a nod to Blaxploitation films, but neither achieved the same level of success as the original. Nor was there much critical or commercial love for The Lost Man, a timid attempt to capture the imagination of Black radicals, in which Poitier stars as a young revolutionary. As demand for his appearance dwindled, Poitier carved out space for himself as a director, but by the turn of the century he had mostly retired from Hollywood. The Poitier brand never regained the appeal it commanded throughout the 1960s.

Looking back at Poitier’s filmography in 2024, it is hard to deny many of the criticisms the actor has sustained, and yet, such blanket dismissal seems somehow unfair. There can be no doubt that Poitier’s success created opportunities for other young Black performers, and made way for movie-stars we recognise today such as Denzel Washington or, more recently, Daniel Kaluuya. The film critic Frank Rich has even described Poitier’s visibility as a necessary precursor to that of another American Icon: Barack Obama. He notes that Poitier’s Fiancé in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner claims that all their biracial children will “be president of the United States and they’ll all have colorful administrations.” In retrospect, it is an uncanny moment.

In my mind, it is Baldwin who is best at squaring the significance of Poitier’s success with the problematic characters he portrayed. In his article for LOOK, he places emphasis on the actor’s ability to “escape the framework” of the films in which he features. As he writes, “I didn’t think Blackboard Jungle was much of a movie but I thought Sidney was beautiful, vivid and truthful in it…Nor was I overwhelmed by Cry, the Beloved Country, but Sidney’s portrait, brief as it was, of the young priest was a moving miracle of indignation.”

It is possible, Baldwin argues, to receive the humanity of Poitier’s performances without accepting the ideology they are in service to. The author is in no doubt about the limitations of Hollywood. But he still wonders whether Poitier’s talent might allow a white viewer – finally – to consider “the reality, the presence, the simple human fact of black people.” Baldwin knew that Poitier was forced to wear many faces but, at his best, the actor spoke for and represented the feeling of many dissatisfied with Hollywood and America: “a moving miracle of indignation”.