Sidney Poitier

To be ordinary, an actor often has to be extraordinary and that was doubly the case with Sidney Poitier, who passed away a couple days ago at the age of 94. In his first film, which is also my favourite of his films, 1950's No Way Out, he gave the first strong lead performance by a black actor in a mainstream Hollywood film. If you look at performances by black actors in Hollywood films prior to this, if you weren't looking at films with all black casts designed for black audiences, you tended to see men and women in supporting roles delivering weak or dopey, broadly comic performances. Fittingly, part of the plot of No Way Out is that the doctor Poitier plays had to be twice as skilled as his white peers to get the same job. Likewise, to break the mould of black performances, he had to be amazing, and he was.

As artists and studios struggled for decades over how to present black characters in light of the ongoing civil rights movement, many of Poitier's roles were in films that are, in retrospect, awkward and heavy handed, like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. But regardless of the quality of the film otherwise, Poitier was always sharp and human. My other favourite of his films is In the Heat of the Night, which, like No Way Out, examined the psychology of racism while getting into just how ugly and complex it can be.

In both films, Poitier succeeds by creating portraits of human beings. Whatever the race, gender, or orientation of the viewer, Poitier's protagonists were people you could identify with because they were always undeniably human.

No Way Out is available on The Criterion Channel.

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