R.I.P Sidney Poitier

At a time of year when I'm inclined to write a lot about film, and the posts are already backing up for future publication, I haven't paused to acknowledge the passing of some recent greats, including Betty White and Peter Bogdanovich. I was going to write a post about David Gulpilil, the indigenous Australian actor, and even watched a documentary about him, but it got lost in the ether of moving and other end-of-year activities.

The passing of Sidney Poitier has finally forced me to pause from whatever else I was doing, in among however many posts are starting to back up, to acknowledge a great, even though as I'm typing this I don't know exactly what I'm going to say about him.

As an indication of the ways my head is still in the clouds a bit, I didn't hear about Poitier's passing through the normal channels of news or social media. It was actually going on to my old website, AllMovie, that exposed me to an article devoted to him on the landing page. That was only 15 minutes ago. Now I'm writing this.

Poitier was not "my guy," as such, in that I didn't see that many of his performances all told (only eight out of more than 50). But there was something about his presence that just seared into you, even when he was not playing a man of extreme intensity. I fondly remember his performance in Lillies of the Field, for example, where he plays a very affable character, one not burdened by the responsibility of trying to explode the prejudices of white society.

This last was indeed the form in which Poitier made his greatest mark. In the year 1967 alone, Poitier appeared in two of his most iconic roles, each of which was conceived as a way of directly addressing the racial divide between Blacks and whites in America. Those were Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night, the former of which found him as the boyfriend of a white girl trying to be excessively polite to win over her parents, the latter of which featured his Detective Tibbs working to pierce the racial preconceptions of a southern police force during a murder investigation. Both films were at the forefront of the discussions of social justice in 1967, flawed though they may have been in some respects, especially as viewed through a modern lens.

As the face of the attempt to truly integrate popular cinema, Poitier was, in many ways, the perfect candidate for this role, for better or worse. He could, in fact, be extremely "polite" -- and I use that word knowing it carries an insidious implication that "politeness" was something that did not occur naturally to Black people and had to be specifically striven for. However, "politeness" was a necessary first step with a white audience, when anything more radical would have been rejected out of hand.

To the credit of Poitier and the writers and directors who provided the content for him at that time, though, he rarely was forced -- in the roles I've seen anyway -- to just purely subjugate himself to the needs of this integrating venture. That's particularly the case in In the Heat of the Night, where he'd shrewdly toe the line in order to keep the peace, but only to a point -- and then he would stand up for himself in no uncertain terms, and by extension, anyone else who looked like him.

The usage of Poitier throughout his career was likely not perfect. Having seen only eight of his films, I can't really speak to that with authority. With any guinea pig, there would be teething issues, if that's not a mixing of metaphors.

But given the task he was saddled with, he accomplished it admirably, becoming a beloved figure both in the Black community and well beyond it. I know that every time I saw someone call his name at an awards ceremony, as he received some richly deserved career achievement award, I felt inclined to join the standing ovation along with the people who were actually there in the room with him.

At age 94, Poitier could not have been expected to live much longer. He's kind of like Betty White in that way. He lived a good long life that no one can reasonably say was too short. I hope he was happy for much of that life, even though I know it was not always easy for him.

That doesn't mean I'm not still a bit sad this morning as I contemplate the man's departure from this world. Great artists leave a mark, and even though we were never going to get another performance from Poitier, I'll miss seeing him stand at an awards ceremony, smile a smile of exquisite gratitude, and wave at his adoring fans, of which I was one.