[The new Oprah Winfrey–produced Sidney Poitier documentary,
Sidney, is a gushing tribute film, not a fully rounded portrait of a
human being who had weaknesses to go along with his many strengths.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SIDNEY POITIER WAS AN ICON. BUT OPRAH WINFREY’S DOCUMENTARY SIDNEY
IS TOO WORSHIPFUL A TRIBUTE.  
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Eileen Jones
September 29, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The new Oprah Winfrey–produced Sidney Poitier documentary,
Sidney, is a gushing tribute film, not a fully rounded portrait of a
human being who had weaknesses to go along with his many strengths. _

Sidney Poitier in the film To Sir, With Love, 1967., (Columbia
Pictures / Getty Images)

 

_Sidney [[link removed]]_ is an
entirely conventional but handsome Apple TV+ documentary about
actor-director Sidney Poitier, directed by Reginald Hudlin (_House
Party_,_ Boomerang_, _Marshall_) and produced by Oprah Winfrey’s
Harpo Productions. It’s inevitably loaded with Winfrey’s interview
commentary and film footage, as well as her worshipful attitude toward
Poitier, whom she called “the great black hope for me.” She tells
the story of Poitier attending her forty-second birthday party, for
example, and taking her aside to counsel her about how to handle
criticism from fellow black people for being too “white-friendly.”
The self-serving way Winfrey aligns her own narrative of achievement
and suffering with his is uncomfortable because Poitier’s life story
is what she’s celebrating as a kind of profile in courage. And
whatever Winfrey’s accomplishments, she wasn’t trying to forge a
film career back in the 1950s, when a black person playing anything
but a servant role on-screen was still groundbreaking.

Much of Poitier’s life and career is well known, especially since
his death in January 2022, which led to an outpouring of lengthy
tributes to his many trailblazing achievements. He’d also written
several autobiographies, 1980’s _This Life
[[link removed]]_,
2000’s _The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography
[[link removed]]_,
and 2008’s _Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter
[[link removed]]_ —
the second one named an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2007. Poitier
also recorded interviews with Winfrey in 2012 that are included in the
documentary, another indication that he intended to have a thorough
say about his own life. But even if you know a lot about him in broad
strokes, some of the details of his life, especially his early years,
are eye opening.

The self-serving way Winfrey aligns her own narrative of achievement
and suffering with his is uncomfortable because Poitier’s life story
is what she’s celebrating.

Like the way Poitier, the son of tomato farmers in the Bahamas, grew
up in such poverty that he’d never seen a mirror in the first ten
years of his life. Or the time shortly after he immigrated to the
United States, when the Ku Klux Klan visited his brother’s house in
Florida, hunting for him, because fifteen-year-old delivery worker
Poitier brought a package to the front door of a white person’s
house instead of the back door. Accustomed to the majority-black
population of the Bahamas, Poitier was completely unprepared for
virulent American racism. Once the KKK paid a visit, Poitier tried to
leave town, but he was detained by police at the deserted bus station
late at night. A gun was placed against his forehead, and he was told
that if he walked all the way home without looking back, they
wouldn’t shoot him. The cop car followed him to his brother’s
house, while the terrified Poitier, not daring to look back, glanced
sideways into the reflecting windows he passed to see that the car was
still crawling along after him.

Though it nearly got him killed, Poitier always regarded his
upbringing in the Caribbean, outside the cauldron of racist fury that
was (and is) the United States, as one of the keys to his breakthrough
as the first black leading man. His friend Harry Belafonte, raised in
Jamaica, felt the same, always saying they had an advantage over young
black American performers who had been crushed by their
internalization of Jim Crow–era racism.

A cursory read-through of Poitier’s life suggests he dealt with
tremendous early hardship but broke through to success and major
stardom early. But the complicated ways that the hardships continued
even after tremendous success, addressed in _Sidney,_ might not be
as well known. After he’d scored the lead role opposite Richard
Widmark in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film noir _No Way Out
[[link removed]]_ (1950), about a black doctor
facing the violent racism of his own patients, Poitier went right back
to one of his many laboring jobs, still struggling to support his
young family.

Poitier, the son of tomato farmers in the Bahamas, grew up in such
poverty that he’d never seen a mirror in the first ten years of his
life.

Poitier stood up against the Hollywood blacklist in a remarkable way
when he refused to sign a loyalty oath, which was required of the
actors in _Blackboard Jungle
[[link removed]]_ (1955). This documentary
doesn’t make it quite clear how he got away with that. And there’s
almost no explanation of how this, plus his strong record of
participation in the left-wing theatrical events and organizations,
such as the one he helped found in the late 1940s, Committee for the
Negro in the Arts (CNA), or his friendships with blacklisted actors
Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, didn’t manage to end his film career
before it started.

Poitier was being tracked by the government, mainly, he claimed,
because of his friendship with Robeson. And Spike Lee adds vaguely
that the blackballing of Robeson in the United States created a
“road map” indicating how Poitier could move forward himself. But
it’s all very elliptical.

Harry Belafonte (left) with Sidney Poitier (right) at the New York
premiere of director George Stevens’s film The Greatest Story Ever
Told, in which Poitier starred, New York City, circa 1965. (Hulton
Archive / Getty Images)

In _Sidney_, tough moments in Poitier’s career are repeatedly
glossed over. In an interview, James Baldwin was quoted to him as
saying, in angry response to _The Defiant Ones
[[link removed]]_ (1958), “Get back on that
train, you fool!” after watching Poitier’s runaway convict
character sacrifice his own hope of freedom for the sake of his white
friend, played by Tony Curtis. “What’s your response to that?”
the interviewer asked Poitier. “I have no response to that,” said
Poitier, asserting that the film was “revolutionary.”

Poitier seems more tormented, in this documentary, by his infidelity,
as he conducted a nine-year affair with actor Diahann Carroll, than
with his increasingly controversial political position as the 1960s
rocked on.

Poitier’s first wife, Juanita Hardy, had to persuade him to take the
lead role in 1963’s _Lilies of the Field
[[link removed]]_, which was a low-budget,
independently produced film that offered very little compensation.
(It’s the film that won him his landmark Academy Award for Best
Actor.) Harry Belafonte had turned down the part of handyman Homer
Smith, who builds a church for some very demanding East German nuns,
because he was appalled by what he considered a demeaning role. But
Denzel Washington offers the scornful comment that Belafonte was doing
very well “Day-O-ing,” and that “if you can afford the house
payment, you can afford to turn down roles like that.” After seeing
Poitier’s dynamic performance, even Belafonte had to admit that
“he was wonderful in that picture.”

Poitier stood up against the Hollywood blacklist in a remarkable way
when he refused to sign a loyalty oath.

There’s a very powerful story told by the Reverend Willie Blue, a
civil rights activist, about Belafonte and Poitier risking their lives
to deliver funds to the student organizers in Mississippi in 1964. The
film stars had been assured they’d have federal protection, which
never appeared. They were immediately pursued by the KKK. Blue, who
was driving the car behind the vehicle carrying Poitier and Belafonte,
with the KKK ramming into him the whole way, felt his job was to make
sure they didn’t get by him, “even though this is the way I have
to die.” When the caravan finally shook off their pursuers and got
where they were going, the student organizers lining the route, some
sitting in the branches of the trees, broke out in a spontaneous
chorus of “Amen,” Homer Smith’s song in _Lilies of the Field_.
Blue weeps while recalling it.

Given all this, it’s ironic that a serious breakdown in the long
Belafonte-Poitier friendship was over Belafonte’s greater political
radicalism. When Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968,
Belafonte wanted to hold a rally, presumably to build on the outrage
over King’s murder to advocate for the increasingly socialistic
changes he was killed for. But Poitier felt that it was not the time
for it — that the attention should remain on mourning King’s death
and celebrating his life and achievements. Poitier’s approach was
the one taken, and the documentary presents it as wiser than
Belafonte’s “Don’t Mourn, Organize” style.

The #TeamPoitier documentary glosses over the details of his hotter
political youth and increasingly moderate liberalism that impaired his
career in the tumultuous late 1960s, with the sudden shift in cultural
expectations after his astonishing career peak in 1967 with three hit
films, _In the Heat of the Night_;_ To Sir, With Love_; and _Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner_. Poitier noted bitterly that, even as he hit
this peak, his appeal for white audiences meant that “black people,
my people, think that I’m an Uncle Tom.” This sent him into a
short but successful directing career in the 1970s. And, as is typical
of accounts of Poitier’s life, the remainder is summed up in vague
montages of happy family life with second wife Joanna Shimkus and his
six daughters, as well as awards and honors received from various film
and arts organizations and governments, including the honorary Knight
Commander of the Order of the British Empire, conferred by Queen
Elizabeth II in 1974, and the Medal of Freedom from President Barack
Obama in 2009.

Dissenting voices in general concerning Poitier are given no hearing
in this documentary. If some of the people interviewed, such as Denzel
Washington, Halle Berry, Spike Lee, Barbra Streisand, Morgan Freeman,
and Lenny Kravitz, had any real criticism to offer, they kept it to
themselves, or else it was edited out. But in fact, there were those
who weren’t so enamored of Poitier. Eartha Kitt, for example, found
him pompous and self-righteous, as she made clear
[[link removed]] in
her 1989 autobiography, _Confessions of a Sex Kitten_: “Sidney was
giving his grandiose speeches as usual,” she wrote of one formal
dinner. “If Sidney had not become an actor, I am sure he would have
been a preacher; he was always practicing on anyone who would
listen.”

In short, this is a gushing tribute film, not a fully rounded portrait
of a human being who had weaknesses to go along with his many
strengths. The very areas you might most like fresh details about
Poitier are the areas skimmed over. Still, it’s undeniable that
Poitier was a fascinating film star with an epic life, and it’s nice
to watch some rarely seen footage and hear some new anecdotes about
him.

 

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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