If someone asked me who the greatest American movie star is, my answer would never change. And it will never change because the answer is simple. The biggest American movie star is Sidney Poitier. You mean the biggest black film star? Not me. Am I controversial? Confronting? contrarian? New. I’m just telling the truth.
Who did more with less? Who expected less, but more? Who had more eyes and more daggers, more hopes and fears and intentions directed his way, upon his person, his skill and, by extension, his people? Race shouldn’t matter here. But it has to, since Hollywood made its race the business. Movie after movie insisted he would be the Black man for white America, which he was fine with, of course. He was black. But Sidney Poitier’s radical shock was the emphasis his stardom placed on “the human being.” HuMan.
Let’s say Mr. Poitier had a good 20-year career as a star, starting in 1958, when “The Defiant Ones” came out until 1978, when the last of his hit trilogy with Bill Cosby left theaters. He made about one film a year, many unmemorable. On the one hand, that’s stardom. One of the others: Mr Poitier achieved his greatness partly as a matter of “despite”. He accomplished everything he did, despite knowing what he couldn’t do. I mean, he could have… done it – could have played Cool Hand Luke, could have been the Graduate, could have done “Bullitt”, could have been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. There may be a dozen scrolls, keystones, that no one Mr. Poitier allegedly offered because he would not have been suitable for the role.
I believe with all my heart that Mr. Poitier was as pivotal in the odyssey of freedom and equality for black Americans—for personality—as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as Martin Luther King Jr. An obvious descendant of Douglass’ rhetorical brilliance, he spoke the words of whites, but out of his own mouth. His projected image spawned what is now a galaxy of other black actors, acting as diverse and layered as a shopping mall.
Black artists in this country carry the curious, hilarious burden of history. Their work must progress; answer, ask questions, sit there and not knowing. Take a risk, take a risk. Not only to do more, but often the most. It should also counter and dispel; it must unto do. Mr. Poitier was the great undone of American art.
In the movies, black characters were cheerful sculptures—lifting luggage, serving food, caring for children—meant to adorn a white American’s dream. Acting could be a carceral affair. mr. Poitier arrived at the dawn of the civil rights movement, in time to leapfrog the black picture from the antebellum and minstrel-era prison. He was hardly the first to try. He simply led more people further down the road than any other artist. What followed instead was, of course, complicated: some sort of prisoner swap.
This undoing is difficult. The one who undoes must be both historical and a vessel of history. So Mr. Poitier was accused of being Uncle Tom of all kinds, because the task of undoing often required collaboration with white people. It is what they did or what was done in their name that must be undone. The act of cooperation opened all sides to the shame of their respective people. On September 10, 1967, at Mr. Poitier’s height, this newspaper published a scathing piece by Clifford Mason that asked, “Why does white America love Poitier so much?”
Mr Poitier’s best friend was Harry Belafonte; even he had his concerns. “Sidney radiated a truly sacred calm and dignity,” wrote Mr. Belafonte in his memoir, “My Song.” “I didn’t want to tone down my sexuality either. Sidney did that in every role he played. I don’t want to put the full rap on race. Sidney is an amazing actor and he mesmerized the audience with all his performances. But he knows as well as I do that these nuances were fundamental to his success.” That holiness was the extraordinarily bitter joke of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation”—that one surefire way for a con man to enter the hearts and homes of Manhattan’s white elite was to pose as Mr. Poitier, father of four daughters.
Mr Poitier’s gallery of highly educated, polished, seductively pleasing characters had to be suitable for entering the homes of white people, but also attractive to black people who feared he would find himself too good to eat at their place. . That was as puzzling as it was in 1958, say, half a century later, when the country conducted an experiment to discover the measure of blackness fit for a president. Like Barack Obama, Mr. Poitier was culturally punctual. He became the star he did because he was the star we needed him so badly. And even then he couldn’t satisfy all of us.
One has to imagine how much bigger the largest could have been. No romances – none where the woman wasn’t literally blind, as she was in “A Patch of Blue”, none where the problem wasn’t the romance itself, where the romance wasn’t in trouble because of him. Nothing with Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe or Doris Day. No one dared to use him in a love story to make previous stars of Cicely Tyson or Ruby Dee, or a bigger one of Diahann Carroll, the love of his life off screen. The Movie Romance He and Mrs. Carroll Had, in “Paris Blues” from 1961, was a timeshare with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. mr. Poitier was not given chances that we will never be able to prove he was denied.
However, we can reasonably conclude that he could have been bigger than he was. But he also managed to grow as big as he got, which is a wow in itself. He had the best 1967 and ’68 of everyone. Three blockbusters – “To Sir, With Love”, “In the Heat of the Night”, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, two of them compete against the Oscar nominees for Best Picture (“Heat”), Oscars for two of his co-stars.
Years ago, when the movies were essentially still the nation’s dominant art form, the American Film Institute released a countdown of the all-time greatest stars who made their debut before or in 1950. The No. 1 in the male category wasn’t Sidney. Poitier, who arrived exactly on the deadline of the list. (That was Humphrey Bogart.) He wasn’t even number 10. (Charlie Chaplin.) No, the Great American Movie Star was number 22, just ahead of Robert Mitchum and behind three of the Marx Brothers.
But let’s apply some cynical pressure here. What do the people who brought Poitier to 22 on that greatest actors list think justify his being even that high? There were 49 other people on it, evenly split between women and men. He is the only non-white. Even now, I suspect, Mr Poitier’s legacy has really been reduced to his first. And that’s not nothing. He was summoned to single-handedly symbolize Black America; to receive the congratulations of his white colleagues when they make him the first black man to accept their Oscar (for building a church for German nuns in “Lilies of the Field”). And so the milestone is the achievement.
Mr. Poitier’s firstness will get him to the top of all homepages and front pages on the day he dies. But what does he do? leave? Well well! – that is which makes him the greatest. Like every major star before him—Clark Gable, Bette Davis, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Mae West—Poitier made being in a movie look the way he was born. His least inspired line readings retain a spark of passion. Every word—words that could sometimes be the dregs of the English language (“the torments, the torments, the humiliations … these are all the natural elements from which the key is forged,” said Mr. Poitier, as the confused to enslaved insurgent Rau-Ru, in 1957’s unspeakable “Band of Angels”) — seemed to have originated in his head.
His most daring work turned out to be a sustained performance of himself. I know: this is a star’s only orbit. But Mr. Poitier’s was a self he forged, sculpted, and refined, a self that, though it only bore the scent of an island education, had a touch of exotic mystery in it. Even when they dressed him up as a pimp in space in “The Long Ships,” he wasn’t just a movie negro persona, like the ancestral caricatures that made him necessitate and the cartload of badasses that blossomed in his wake – the Sweetbacks, Assen and priests, the hammers and dolemites. No one had experienced anyone like him before. Just listen to the meter of his song, the melody of it. When he spoke, you heard a symphony. His placelessness gave him the same advantageous allure of other placeless stars.
The acting he did required every inch of his tall body – for exuberance, rapture, prudence, solemnity and fury. In no conventional sense has a Sidney Poitier character ever danced with any success. (If he’s cutting a rug, keep a tourniquet handy.) Still, all of his characters work with grace and poise. Part of that is training; he was our most famous Black Method actor. The rest is just him. The clenched fists and the hinges in the center of the promenade, the embracing and wide-open arms—it was all his own ballet. These were signature movements, a star making exclamation punctuation of its being and carrying itself in italics. The signature of what this country has always sworn to be.