All Else Confusion

Sidney Poitier was born 2 months premature, weighing just 3 pounds, to a poor Bahamian tomato farmer and his wife. His father went to the undertaker and returned with a coffin the size of a shoe box. His mother went to a fortune teller where she was told, "He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world."

Poitier left the Bahamas at 16, heading first to Miami, where he encountered racism, and eventually to New York, where he encountered snow. He lived in train stations, bathrooms, under newspapers. He would listen to radio announcers and imitate them to improve his accent. Finally, after three years in America, he won a place as a student in the American Negro Theatre. Three years later, he was seen by a Hollywood talent scout and given a role in No Way Out with Linda Darnell and Richard Widmark. In 1958, he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis. In 1964, he was again nominated, and this time he won for Lilies of the Field, the story of German nuns who come to America and build a chapel, with the help of a drifter, on nothing but faith.

In 1997, the Bahamas appointed Poitier Ambassador to Japan. His name was carried all over the world.

Check out In the Heat of the Night with Rod Steiger. Poitier plays Philadelphia police detective, Virgil Tibbs, who is asked to help investigate a murder is a small, southern town. Steiger is the local sheriff, Chief Gillespie,who must keep peace among the town's racist population, and deal with his own racism. Tibbs poses several problems to the towns people besides his race. He is an outsder and his knowledge of forensics threatens to make the local police look ridiculous. Tibbs and Gillespie are finely drawn characters; as they work together they slowly come to the understanding they they have more in common than they want to admit, and even develop a grudging respect for each other. Thus, instead of an obvious movie with heavy-handed stereotypes, it is a subtle, wonderfully played gem.

Labels: movies