Sidney skims the surface of Poitier's life and career

The documentary, now streaming on Apple TV+, lacks the content and context necessary for a proper appreciation of Poitier's work.

Sep 23, 2022

Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in *The Defiant Ones* (1958).

In the early days of the Covid lockdowns, when everyone was looking for something to binge-watch, I noticed that the Criterion Channel still had a rather large collection of Sidney Poitier films that they had been streaming since Black History Month.

I had watched To Sir, with Love repeatedly when I was a kid but I had seen only a few of Poitier’s other movies, so I decided to do a month-long marathon of his entire filmography, watching everything that was on the Criterion Channel and filling in the gaps with online rentals and the like. In the end, I missed a few of the TV productions from the very, very end of his career—they were virtually impossible to find online—but I did see every single one of his feature films, plus all of the TV shows he made between those films, and I wrote some detailed notes about each film on my Facebook page, notes which I re-posted to my blog for Black History Month in 2021.

So I was very interested when I heard that Apple TV+ was releasing a documentary about Poitier, who passed away in January of this year at the age of 94. The film, simply called Sidney, came out today, and I’m happy to say I learned a few things from it, but I found it awfully superficial. Perhaps that was inevitable: something has to be left out when you’re compressing a half-century career (and an almost century-long life!) to a less-than-two-hour movie. But the film is so heavily invested in the idea that Poitier changed everything when it comes to black representation on film that it oversimplifies to the point of distortion, to the point where it would almost be better not to watch the film. There is, in a nutshell, a lack of content and context; the film, which is so heavily invested in Poitier’s status as a trailblazing icon, ignores the content of films that could make his onscreen persona more complex, and it ignores the context by which some of those trails had already been blazed for him.

The main things I learned from the film concern Poitier’s personal life, which I didn’t really look into much while I was watching the films and reading up on how they were made. It’s fascinating to hear that Poitier grew up in such poverty, in the Bahamas, that he didn’t even know what a mirror was until he was ten years old. The values instilled in him by his parents are a recurring theme, and it’s quite striking to see the elderly Poitier—a great-grandparent himself—choke up at the mention of his father. I knew that Poitier had met his second wife while shooting 1969’s The Lost Man, but I did not that he had previously had an affair with Diahann Carroll, his co-star in 1959’s Porgy and Bess and 1961’s Paris Blues. I knew that Poitier and Harry Belafonte were close friends, but I did not know that they had a falling out after the death of Martin Luther King Jr, and that they were only reconciled a few years later when they teamed up for 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, which ended up being Poitier’s directorial debut after the original director ankled the project about a week into shooting.

When it comes to Poitier’s films, the documentary does cover the basics. Poitier’s big-screen career got off to a great start with the lead role in 1950’s No Way Out, in which he plays a black doctor who has to deal with a racist patient, but he didn’t get his next big break until five years later, when he played a high school student in 1955’s Blackboard Jungle (and it is still really, really weird to see Poitier go from playing a doctor when he was about 23 to playing a teenager five years later). Naturally, the documentary covers Poitier’s Oscar-nominated roles in 1958’s The Defiant Ones and 1963’s Lilies of the Field—the latter of which made him the first black man to win the Oscar for Best Actor—and it covers the three big films of 1967, when Poitier was one of the biggest stars in the world, if not the biggest: To Sir with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. And then the documentary moves on to Buck and the Preacher and Poitier’s subsequent career as a director, including one of the biggest box-office hits ever directed by a black filmmaker, 1980’s Stir Crazy.

But there are a lot of films that go missing along the way. The anger over racial injustice that Poitier expresses onscreen is largely limited to 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun, but it could have been interesting to explore how Poitier had expressed this anger—sometimes in contrast to more patient or accommodating black characters—in a range of films, like 1952’s Red Ball Express and 1957’s Band of Angels, before his reputation as an “ebony saint” set in. It might also have been good to take a look at how Poitier tried to mix things up by playing an outright villain in 1964’s The Long Ships, or how he tried his hand at romantic comedy with 1968’s For Love of Ivy. The documentary does make a point of noting that, with the rise of blaxploitation films in the 1970s, everything that once seemed progressive about Poitier’s career now seemed somewhat quaint and outdated—why try to earn The Man’s respect when you could just blow him away?—but there’s no acknowledgement that Poitier tried to adapt to these new cultural standards by, e.g., tweaking his character from In the Heat of the Night in the film’s sequels, 1970’s They Call Me Mister Tibbs! and 1971’s The Organization.

It’s also curious how some of Poitier’s frequent collaborators are basically ignored. I get that it would have been awkward to include any reference to Bill Cosby, who starred in four of the nine films Poitier directed, from 1974’s Uptown Saturday Night to 1990’s Ghost Dad. But what about Richard Widmark, who co-starred with Poitier in three films, starting with No Way Out, and was directed by him in a fourth, 1982’s Hanky Panky? (1965’s The Bedford Incident, a nuclear-paranoia thriller co-produced by Widmark that starred Widmark as a Navy destroyer captain and Poitier as a journalist, just might be the first film in which Poitier’s race was completely irrelevant to the script, which itself might be a milestone worth noting.) What about Ruby Dee, who worked with Poitier on six films between No Way Out and Buck and the Preacher?

And some of the statements of fact in this film are simply wrong, or at least very, very misleading. One of Poitier’s daughters says his Best Actor nomination for The Defiant Ones was the first time a black person had been nominated for an Oscar since Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for 1939’s Gone with the Wind—but that’s not true, because Ethel Waters was nominated for her supporting role in 1949’s Pinky and Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for her lead role in 1954’s Carmen Jones. (Dandridge eventually co-starred with Poitier in Porgy and Bess, the complicated legacy of which could sustain a documentary all its own—but that film, too, is never mentioned here.) Another interviewee says Buck and the Preacher “ends up dealing with blacks in the west, which was a new topic, which pop culture hadn’t dealt with at all, really, and only in dismissive ways.” But that, too, is not true, as Poitier himself had co-starred in 1966’s Duel at Diablo at the peak of his career, and John Ford had directed Woody Strode in 1960’s Sergeant Rutledge, to cite just two of the films that the Criterion Channel hosted last year as part of their series on Black Westerns. I don’t want to overstate the profile of films like those, but they did exist, and they were part of a broader trend that Poitier built on but did not invent out of whole cloth.

Produced by Oprah Winfrey and Derik Murray “in close collaboration with the Poitier family,” as the Apple TV+ synopsis puts it, Sidney is ultimately more concerned with Poitier as Inspirational Role Model than anything else, as figures like Halle Berry, Denzel Washington and, well, Winfrey herself talk about what Poitier meant to them. (Berry and Washington famously won Oscars on the very same night that Poitier received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy in 2002.) Curiously, Robert Redford is also on hand to talk about how Poitier inspired his career—but I don’t believe the film ever acknowledges that Poitier and Redford worked together on 1992’s Sneakers. (Sidney basically ignores Poitier’s entire career after Stir Crazy.)

The resulting film is a decent tribute to the man, and it’s an okay primer for people who might be unfamiliar with his work. But there is a lot more that could—and should—be said about it, and I’d encourage viewers to take a look at the films themselves and, where possible, the really informative bonus features that companies like Criterion have put together for films like A Raisin in the Sun, In the Heat of the Night, and Buck and the Preacher. You’ll learn a lot more about Poitier’s work that way.

These are the notes I wrote during my Sidney Poitier marathon in April 2020:

The four Poitier movies I never saw were Free of Eden (1998), David and Lisa (1998), The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (1999), and The Last Brickmaker in America (2001).

Thoughts and Spoilers

Discussion about this post