TCM Schedule for Friday, August 14 -- Summer Under the Stars--Sidney Poitier

[Staph]

Today's star is Presidential Medal of Freedom recepient Sidney Poitier, and we have a bunch of good films starring Sir Sidney, KBE. Enjoy!


6:00am -- The Long Ships (1964)
Viking seamen battle a Moorish prince for possession of a golden bell.
Cast: Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, Rosanna Schiaffino, Russ Tamblyn
Dir: Jack Cardiff
C-126 mins, TV-PG

Film known for a torture contraption called the "Mare of Steel" depicted as a huge curved blade as large as a Trojan Horse, which unlucky prisoners were forced to climb and ride down on their exposed bellies, hands tied, splaying them open at it's base and impaling them on a bed of two foot steel spikes. Yuck!


8:07am -- Short Film: The Gay Parisian (1941)
In a Paris nightclub setting, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performs to the music of Jacques Offenbach.
Cast: Léonide Massine, Milada Mladova, Frederic Franklin
Dir: Jean Negulesco
C-20 mins

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Subject, Two-reel

An article in The New York Times of 2 December 1941 states: "An invited audience of newspaper and magazine writers and others will attend the world premiere today of two Warner featurettes starring the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at Fefe's Monte Carlo. The films to be screened are "The Gay Parisian" with Léonide Massine, Milada Mladova and Frederic Franklin, and "Spanish Fiesta" with Massine, Tamara Toumanova and Franklin." It is doubtful there were any paying customers; the film was scheduled for release in 1942.


8:30am -- Paris Blues (1961)
Two jazz musicians deal with romantic problems in Paris.
Cast: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, Louis Armstrong
Dir: Martin Ritt
C-99 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Duke Ellington

1961 -- Sidney Poitier stars with Butch Cassidy. Thirty years later, he's in a film with the Sundance Kid, in Sneakers (1992).


10:30am -- Pressure Point (1962)
A black psychiatrist tries to help a racist convict deal with his mental demons.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Bobby Darin, Peter Falk, Carl Benton Reid
Dir: Hubert Cornfield
BW-89 mins, TV-PG

In 1996 Barry Gordon (who plays a boy patient in this film), a Democrat, ran for the Burbank-Glendale based congressional seat being vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Carlos Moorhead. He lost the primary to fellow Democrat Doug Kahn, who went on to lose to then assemblyman James Rogan (R-Glendale). In 1998 Gordon ran again and this time won the primary. He narrowly lost to Rogan 51%-46%, however.


12:00pm -- Something Of Value (1957)
Childhood friends end up on opposite sides of a bloody African uprising.
Cast: Rock Hudson, Dana Wynter, Wendy Hiller, Juano Hernandez
Dir: Richard Brooks
BW-114 mins, TV-PG

Rock Hudson himself drove the film crew round the Nairobi National Park, with the stand-in for his co-star next to him. The crew and game warden were in the back of the semi-open Land Rover. Although all the animals in the park were wild they were used to vehicles. Many shots of various animals were taken, including baboons. For the latter Hudson threw peanuts onto the front of the vehicle. One half-grown male, seeing the actual source of this food, jumped through the half-door onto Hudson's lap, stole some extra peanuts and even snatched a lipstick from the hand of the stand-in. Hudson grabbed the baboon by the scruff of the neck, calmly took back the lipstick and threw the animal out.


2:00pm -- A Patch Of Blue (1965)
A blind white girl falls in love with a black man.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Shelley Winters, Elizabeth Hartman, Wallace Ford
Dir: Guy Green
BW-105 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Shelley Winters

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Elizabeth Hartman, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- George W. Davis, Urie McCleary, Henry Grace and Charles S. Thompson, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Robert Burks, and Best Music, Score - Substantially Original -- Jerry Goldsmith

Elizabeth Hartman wore a pair of opaque contact lenses that not only made her appear blind, but genuinely deprived her of her sight.


4:00pm -- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
An aging couple's liberal principles are tested when their daughter announces her engagement to a black doctor.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Houghton
Dir: Stanley Kramer
C-108 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Katharine Hepburn (Katharine Hepburn was not present at the awards ceremony. George Cukor accepted the award on her behalf.), and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen -- William Rose

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Spencer Tracy (posthumously), Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Cecil Kellaway, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Beah Richards, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Robert Clatworthy and Frank Tuttle, Best Director -- Stanley Kramer, Best Film Editing -- Robert C. Jones, Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment -- Frank De Vol, and Best Picture

When the movie was conceived and launched by producer-director Stanley Kramer, one of Hollywood's greatest liberal movie-makers, intermarriage between African Americans and Caucasians was still illegal in 14 states. Towards the end of production, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Loving v. Virginia. The Loving decision was made on June 12, 1967, two days after the death of star Spencer Tracy, who had played a "phony" white liberal who grudgingly accepts his daughter's marriage to a black man. In Loving, the High Court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were unconstitutional. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

Interestingly, Kramer kept in the line of the African American father played by Roy Glenn, who tells his son played by Sidney Poitier, "In 16 or 17 states you'll be breaking the law. You'll be criminals." This was probably because Kramer realized that, despite the change in the law, the couple would still be facing a great deal of prejudice requiring a stalwart love for their marriage to survive, which was the message Tracy's character gives in an eight-minute scene that is the climax of the movie. The scene summing up the theme of the movie was the last one the dying Tracy filmed for the movie, and it was the last time he would ever appear on film. It took a week to shoot the scene and at the end, he was given a standing ovation by the crew. He died a little over a fortnight after walking off of a sound-stage for the last time.


6:00pm -- To Sir, With Love (1967)
A substitute teacher changes the lives of the slum children in his class.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Christian Roberts, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall
Dir: James Clavell
C-105 mins, TV-PG

The film did so unexpectedly well in America that Columbia Pictures did market research to find out why so many people had gone to it. Their answer: Sidney Poitier. Duh!


What's On Tonight: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: SIDNEY POITIER


8:00pm -- A Raisin in the Sun (1961)
A black woman uses her late husband's life insurance to build a better world for her children.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands
Dir: Daniel Petrie
BW-128 mins, TV-PG

The Broadway production of "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on March 11, 1959, ran for 530 performances and was nominated for the 1960 Tony Award (New York City) for the Best Play. Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Ivan Dixon, Louis Gossett Jr. and John Fiedler recreated their stage roles in the movie version. A 1960 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play nomination went to Claudia McNeil.


10:15pm -- Lilies of the Field (1963)
An itinerant handyman in the Southwest gets a new outlook on life when he helps a group of German nuns build a chapel.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Lilia Skala, Lisa Mann, Isa Crino
Dir: Ralph Nelson
BW-94 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Sidney Poitier

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Lilia Skala, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Ernest Haller, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- James Poe, and Best Picture

Since the story's action was tied to the chapel's construction, crew had to work through the night to keep up with it "progress" in the film. The actual building was real and could have stood for decades, but because it was built on rented property, it had to be demolished immediately after the filming was completed.


12:00am -- Buck and the Preacher (1972)
A con man helps a group of former slaves survive the perils of the wild West in their search for the promised land.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Cameron Mitchell
Dir: Sidney Poitier
C-103 mins, TV-14

First time director 'Sydney Poitier' took over the job from Joseph Sargent when he became dissatisfied with the film's point of view.


2:00am -- Edge of the City (1957)
An army deserter and a black dock worker join forces against a corrupt union official.
Cast: John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier, Jack Warden, Kathleen Maguire
Dir: Martin Ritt
BW-86 mins, TV-PG

Remake of the Philco Television Playhouse -- A Man Is Ten Feet Tall (1955). Poitier played the same role, but Don Murray, and Martin Balsam played the other starring roles.


4:00am -- Brother John (1971)
A man returns to Earth as an angel to intervene in a small-town labor strike.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Will Geer, Bradford Dillman, Beverly Todd
Dir: James Goldstone
C-96 mins, TV-14

Writer Ernest Kinoy won Emmies for Roots (1977) and the episode Blacklist, in the television series The Defenders (1963).

[Staph]

1. Sidney Poitier

* Films in Bold Type Air on 8/14

When Sidney Poitier became famous as an actor, producer, director, author, and ambassador, he fulfilled an unlikely prophesy made by a fortune-teller soon after his birth. Born two months prematurely in Miami, Florida, on February 20, 1927, Poitier was not expected to live. As author Carol Bergman wrote in her book, Black Americans of Achievement: Sidney Poitier, "Shortly after the delivery, Sidney's father visited an undertaker in Miami and came back with a small casket. Evelyn (Poitier, Sidney's mother), ignored his pessimism. Although she had lost other babies, she was convinced that Sidney would overcome his early difficulties. Not normally a superstitious person, she went to see a fortune-teller, hoping to hear something positive about her new son's future. From the depths of a trance, the woman told her, 'He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world.'"

This prediction seemed extremely unlikely, given that Sidney Poitier was born to poor tomato farmers from the Bahamas and grew up in obscurity on Cat Island and Nassau, where the family moved in 1937. The Depression had affected Bahamian farmers when the United States imposed an embargo on their produce to help boost prices in the United States. Unable to sell their crop, Poitier's parents moved the family to the larger island in hopes of finding work. It was here that Sidney Poitier saw his first motion picture and idolized such movie cowboys as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Tom Mix.

Moving to a large city after living on a sparsely populated island gave Poitier a different kind of education. After getting into minor trouble with the law, his father decided that Sidney should go to live with his brother in Miami where he would have a better future. In January 1943, the 16 year-old left the Bahamas where he had lived since the age of three months and returned to America. Here he experienced more than just culture shock; he had his first taste of racism. As an African-American with a heavy Bahamian accent in the Deep South, he found himself in trouble with the local Ku Klux Klan. His offense was delivering groceries to a white woman's front door instead of going around to the back of the house. Having no real grasp of the racial situation in the United States, he logically thought he should have gone to the front door. Later that day, the Klan turned up at his house, but luckily he was not home. Poitier left Florida that night and after a brief stay in Georgia, he made his way to New York City. It was as different from life in the Bahamas as on another planet - and it was also where he first saw snow and experienced the cold. He later remembered, "I was fractured, disoriented, almost immobilized. My feeble defense was to wear all of my clothes at once."

Before he was able to get a job as a dishwasher, he slept in train stations, on top of buildings under newspapers and in bathrooms. After being picked up for vagrancy, he lied about his age and entered the Army in November 1943. Instead of being sent overseas, he was assigned to a mental hospital in New York where he trained as a medical attendant. A few months later, disenchanted with the Army and not liking the way the patients were being treated, he wanted out of the service. Not wanting to admit he'd lied about his age, he pretended to be crazy so he could get out on a Section Eight discharge. It was his first acting job and he was convincing enough to be threatened with shock treatment. When he finally confessed to the psychiatrist that he was faking to get out of the Army he was discharged, miraculously escaping a court martial. It was December 1944 and Sidney Poitier was two months away from his eighteenth birthday. He was ready to find his true profession.

By now he was back to washing dishes and dreaming of better things, and when he stumbled across a newspaper ad requesting actors for the Little Theater Group in Harlem, he auditioned, despite having no experience. The director of the theater, Frederick O'Neal stopped his audition after a few moments, screaming that Poitier couldn't act and with such a heavy accent, he'd be better off as a dishwasher. It was a devastating blow to the young man, but after going home and giving it serious thought, he realized that O'Neal was right. He immediately began to improve his reading skills by reading the newspaper every day. Every night after work he would go home and listen to different radio station announcers and then repeat back what they said, imitating their accent. It worked. In April 1946 he auditioned at the American Negro Theater and won a place as a student.

When the theater put on Days of Our Youth, Poitier found himself understudying another young actor, Harry Belafonte, and was very unhappy about it. He felt he should have won the lead and that he had been discriminated against because his skin was darker than Belafonte's. But luck was with him: on a night when Belafonte was ill and had to miss rehearsal, Poitier was seen by James Light, a Broadway producer who cast him as Polydorus in an all-black production of Lysistrata. The play was a failure, as was Poitier's first professional performance. He was gripped by stage fright, forgot his lines and ran off the stage before he was finished. Incredibly, he received good reviews for his "comic" performance. When the play closed after only a few performances, the American Negro Theater hired him for their touring show of Anna Lucasta where he honed his craft for three years until he was spotted by a talent scout from Twentieth Century Fox. He won a film role opposite Richard Widmark and Linda Darnell in No Way Out (1950) and his career began to take off.

After receiving excellent notices in No Way Out he flew back to New York where he was immediately invited by director Zoltan Korda to come to London to make Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) co-starring Juano Hernandez, with locations shot in South Africa. Before going to London, he made his first trip back to Nassau in eight years to see his parents. There he found it hard to explain to his mother what he did for a living. Evelyn Poitier had never seen a motion picture.

Like most actors, Poitier experienced a period where he had trouble finding roles, and for a time ran a barbecue restaurant to support his wife and growing family. But in 1955, he co-starred in a NBC television production of A Man Is Ten Feet Tall which attracted millions of viewers in prime time and Poitier went on to star in the film version, Edge of the City (1957). The following year, 1958, he costarred with Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones which earned him a New York Film Critics' Best Actor award. More importantly, he became the first African-American to be nominated for a Best Actor award. He may not have won the award, but he was now a star.

The 1960s were Sidney Poitier's decade. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964 for Lilies of the Field (1963), starred in several top ten films such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and To Sir, with Love (1967). The 1970s proved more difficult. Films starring African-Americans were now moving into the "Blaxploitation" genre of more violent, sexier movies like Shaft (1971). Poitier's image had been (sometimes to his detriment) as a noble, heroic, and often idealized black man, one with no visible romantic life or sexual urges. His career went into a decline. He continued to make films, sometimes directing his own - Buck and the Preacher (1972) - but none were top-ten hits. He retreated to his home in the Bahamas for a few years before coming back with Uptown Saturday Night (1974) which he directed and co-starred with Bill Cosby. It was a hit. He later wrote, "The success of Uptown Saturday Night told me that black people wanted to laugh at themselves and have fun. They were weary of being represented on the local screen by pimps, hustlers, prostitutes, private detectives, violence, macho men and dirty words." The sequel, Let's Do It Again (1975) was an even bigger hit.

In 1977 Poitier decided not to act in another film until he could find the right material. His retirement from acting lasted ten years. He didn't appear on film screens again until Little Nikita (1988) but he did continue to direct. Stir Crazy (1980) starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, was the most successful film by an African-American filmmaker until Keenen Ivory Wayans' 2000 film Scary Movie. Other films he directed include Hanky Panky (1982), Fast Forward (1985) and Ghost Dad (1990).

Along with his sporadic return to acting, Poitier has also served on the Board of Directors at the Disney Company, and in April 1997, the Bahamas appointed him their Ambassador to Japan. He had fulfilled the predictions of the fortune-teller his mother consulted shortly after his birth. Sidney Poitier did, indeed, become rich and famous and his name has been carried all over the world.

by Lorraine LoBianco

Sources:

The Internet Movie Database

Black Americans of Achievement: Sidney Poitier by Carol Bergman, 1988

Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon by Aram Goudsouzian, 2004