Reviews by JxSxPx

Sidney Poitier’s transformation from individual performer to all-encompassing symbol of an entire race as the lone black star of prominence is evident by the mid-60s. His thankless role of therapist to an alt-right Bobby Darin in Pressure Point was a red flag of this happening, as was his great work as a “respectable” character in Lilies of the Field. The sexuality, reservoirs of fire, and loose physicality in films like A Raisin in the Sun and The Defiant Ones is slowly giving way to transitioning him to a living marble statue.

Into this change comes 1965’s A Patch of Blue in which he engages with a supremely chaste romance with a blind girl (Elizabeth Hartman) in a narrative that broadly sweeps his black skin and her blank eyes as the same type of socially ostracizing thing. Circling around them are Shelley Winters, flirting with the full camp virago that would bloom in later films, as a truly monstrous mother and Wallace Ford as an emotionally abusive alcoholic grandpa. The film threatens to go full-on maudlin, safely “important” at any given moment with the heroes clearly wearing white hats and the villains in black ones.

What saves it is the joy in watching a group of actors this good elevate emotionally manipulative material into something nearly poetic. Hartman, in particular, is the heartbreaking glue that holds it all together as she navigates the Dickensian squalor and cruelty of her home life and the great awakening that Poitier’s kindness brings to her life. She creates a believable reality with Winters and Ford, who clearly realize they’ve gotten the showiest roles in the thing and go beyond broke and scenery chewing into almost high-art. Hell, she almost makes us believe in the possibilities of a romantic relationship between her and Poitier during an era when miscegenation was still a hot button topic.

A Patch of Blue is really her story with Poitier not quite functioning as a magical negro, but he’s still playing the part of the person who proverbially opens her eyes. His interior life and reasons for extending so much to this girl remain occasionally oblique, but he still engineers an ending that is probably the smartest and least sentimental possible. But even Poitier realized there was a problem stating, “either there were no women, or there was a woman but she was blind, or the relationship was of a nature that satisfied the taboos. I was at my wits end when I finished A Patch of Blue.”

That frustration and the real-time entombing him as an integrationist model of near sexless and peaceable interaction was going strong and wouldn’t entirely get shaken up until In the Heat of the Night’s slap heard ‘round the world. There are tiny peekaboo moments when the more mature and developed interracial love story emerges, but it often subsumed with the melodramatics of Winters’ harridan. A Patch of Blue entertains but it comes with an asterisk.        

A simple story that aims for emotional warmth and heart-tugging uplift, and succeeds, Lilies of the Field is a sweet little movie that charms. One of the Oscars earliest little movies that could, Sidney Poitier took points on the backend and director Ralph Nelson put his house up as collateral, this is the film that won Poitier his Oscar, a ceiling shattering piece of history. While no cinematic giant like A Raisin in the Sun or In the Heat of the Night, Lilies of the Field still has considerable power despite its creakier elements.

There’s no getting around it when you watch enough films of Sidney Poitier in a row: Lilies provides a respectable and safe character for him. One that folds easily into his burgeoning sexlessness and transformation into dignified symbol of Hollywood’ timid liberalism. Here is an itinerant worker that stumbles upon the convent of East German nuns who spars playfully with the mother superior (Lilia Skala) and demonstrates the hints of rapacious humor, physical freedom, and pleasing sensuality that erupted in prior works. While the role is a bit too saintly, it’s easy to see why this particular role nabbed him that coveted gold statue and cemented his place in cinematic history.  

Sure, the storytelling is formulaic yet there’s still several pleasing moments and an overall charm that works. Watching Skala’s mother superior culture clashing with Poitier is a joy that finds numerous permutations throughout the film. Poitier’s humor is a refreshing antidote to what could otherwise be a turgid, heavily sentimental journey. The begrudging respect and companionable relationship formed between the characters forms the backbone of the film, and winds up providing it with an optimism and small-scale poignancy.

Stanley Kramer, Hollywood’s original good liberal, may not have directed (most of) this film, but his fingerprints are all over it. From the histrionic treatment of socially important material to the presence of movie stars in subbing in for ideological arguments, Pressure Point has all the hallmarks of his cinema. It asks that we try and understand, if not empathize, with a young white male who slowly gets radicalized by Nazi ideology. No thanks, I’m good. Sidney Poitier gets the thankless role of the saintly therapist; Peter Falk gets an even worse role as a struggling upstart who gets told this story by Poitier’s veteran as a form of lesson teaching and bridge-building. It is Bobby Darin as the wild youth that really energizes the movie. His movie career was brief but what a dynamite screen actor he was! As a teen idol, you’d think he’d go for less substantive parts and instead play it easy with teen-orientated romances with then-wife Sandra Dee, but between his Nazi sympathizer youth here and PTSD victim in Captain Newman, M.D., which nabbed him his lone Oscar nomination, he revealed a terrific naturalism and fearlessness in never asking to be liked in his roles. He’s far better than Pressure Point deserves.  

I must confess that this version of A Raisin in the Sun was the very first that I have watched, including stage shows and tv movies. I have known the basics of the plot – generational conflict, white flight, economic unease, striving for a better life for your family – but had never actually read or seen Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal work.

Like many great works of art, A Raisin in the Sun remains timeless even if the specifics of the plot have aged. Her characters are fully rounded and richly developed on the page, and this is before we even get into the actor’s breathing vital life into them, and her themes throb with anxiety and are filled with nuance. The scars of red-lining, white flight, and shrunken opportunities for black Americans remain relevant topics. The lyrics have changed but the melodies remain the same.

Lena Younger (Claudia McNeil) plans on using her late husband’s life insurance money to put the down payment on a house. Lena’s son, Walter (Sidney Poitier), wants to use the money to open a business and make financial gains for the family, including his ever-supportive wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee). Walter’s sister, Beneatha (Diana Sands), dreams of medical school and wants to use the money to help pay for her college tuition. (Lord, $10,000 could pay for medical school back in 1959? Times have changed)

That’s merely the setup for the rest of the dramatics that goes along intelligently developed and thought out means. Hansberry never descends into shrieking melodrama or anything that feels antithetical to her overall tone and aims of the story. It remains grounded in truth and engaging because these people are so recognizably human and universal in their struggles and dreams.

The smartest decision that director Daniel Petrie made was bringing back the principal cast members from the original Broadway run to repeat their roles. Of course, by this point Poitier was on the rise and aimed squarely at becoming Hollywood’s first above the title black star, Dee had appeared in a handful of films, so it wasn’t like these were players that were unknown to Hollywood’s power structures. A Raisin in the Sun succeeds in the transition from the stage to the screen as strongly as A Streetcar Named Desire, widely considered the best Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptation.

Petrie’s camerawork is smartly unadorned as Raisin depends on its power from simply viewing its actors reciting words and watching where they place the emphasis. If this isn’t the performance Poitier’s film career, then it’s somewhere near the very top as he threatens to explode with barely concealed rage, perspires with desperation, and demonstrates a loose, limber sensuality with Dee that highlights how handsome and physically free he could be as an actor.

But he does perform in a vacuum as every emotional volley he throws out is returned to him by McNeil and Dee. On paper, Dee’s role as a long-suffering and supportive wife can be appear canned, but Dee brings hints of explosive emotional intensity just beneath the surface. While McNeil’s Lena is the equal creation of Poitier’s Walter. She is steady and nurturing, tough but fair, and her ability to alternate between criticism and affection is astounding. She is one of cinema’s best strong, tough moms. Actually, they both are.

None of this is to deny Sands her shine, as her proxy for Hansberry is also strong, but the bulk of the narrative is built around those three with Beneatha clearly in fourth place. This is one of the best acting ensembles assembled. Not a false note or self-conscious choice to be found in the bunch. Hansberry’s words function like thunderous music with the actors as seasoned musicians working in tandem to create a colossal emotional experience. A Raisin in the Sun is a classic that still feels alive and powerful where others have aged into polite appreciation.

I think the four credited writers it took to adapt Harold Flender’s 1957 novel are the biggest tell that something is going to be ‘off’ with the final product. Sure enough, this one has got to be a lesser, if not the least, entry in the collaboration between director Martin Ritt and star Paul Newman. How you assemble as cast as wonderful as Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, and Diahann Carroll then sack them with such a milquetoast plot is anyone’s guess. At least there’s a vibrant score from Duke Ellington and some wonderful shots of Paris to keep things interesting.

It all boils down to the story of two expat American jazz musicians (Newman, Poitier) who meet-cute with two American women on vacation (Woodward, Carroll). There’s plenty of romance and tension between whether they’ll stay and work on their musical dreams or return to the states with their new love. An element of how different black artists are treated in France versus the states is brought up before getting quickly tossed aside. How you craft a story about these elements and ignore that for a more generic tale of love and art, and the ways they’re at odds with each other or require compromise.

It's lovely to see Poitier in a romantic mode and his scenes of courtship with Carroll glow with a warmth, intimacy, and casual sensuality that is rarely seen from the screen legend. Their story is far more engaging than that of Newman and Woodward, but they’re routinely tossed to the background. Newman and Woodward’s doomed love affair overpowers the story while Newman goes through the motions of middle-brow notions of great, daring art and the sacrifices it requires, Woodward delivers one of her customary fiery performances. She burns through the clichés to craft something real and human on the screen, and it is her work that we walk away remembering the most.    

James Baldwin famously derided this as white liberal wish fulfillment, and he wasn’t off the mark. Stanley Kramer’s cinema at its most essential elements is just that, well-intentioned if sanctimonious liberal guilt/fantasy. The Defiant Ones is another entry in that canon as it literalizes elements of racism by shackling the races together in a chain gang.

Never mind reality when there’s an elaborate metaphor to explore racial tensions during the civil rights movement. It’s a long-form fable that starts out like The Fugitive, car crash that leaves two prisoners chained together on the run with the law in hot pursuit, before providing a series of moralizing episodes that explore a host of issues. Some of them are great and some of them are heavy-handed in their treatment, more often than not they swing between the two modes.

Excusing that there’s no way the deeply segregated south would ever allow black and white prisoners to mix, The Defiant Ones is still a nice display for the cinematic talents of stars Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. Yes, Curtis’ natural accent slips through his attempt at a southern one, but the emotional heft and power he brings to role outweigh that detail. While Poitier’s riotous indignant, even better served as Virgil Tibbs, and barely concealed rage at the system made me rethink my prior idea of him as a marbleized figure, basically a living monument. They’re wonderful individually but even better playing off each other.

There’s still plenty of The Defiant Ones that has aged finely, not just the two lead performances, but Cara Williams and Lon Chaney, Jr. as a lonely widow and sympathetic former prisoner, respectively, who appear in the best vignettes of the film. It is certainly the best of the Kramer/Poitier films having remained more visceral and dynamic than the lethargic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and hysterical Pressure Point. Restraint is one of the key ingredients that has allowed this one to stand tall during the intervening decades.

Nothing ages quite as quick as a mainstream Hollywood film about hot button social issues. Look no further than Blackboard Jungle, which reimagines an inner-city high school as a war zone of rapist students, gang violence, and a Molotov cocktail waiting to be thrown. Brute Force: Junior Edition, essentially.

These overly pious lecterns desperately try to underscore the sincerity and rational of outdated social mores by cranking the problems in question to absurdist levels. As though the obsolete generation wanted to take the younger to task by imagining an entire Eisenhower generation as murderous, drug addicted thugs and wondering where it all went wrong while absolving themselves of the culpability in the creation of these problems. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.

Glenn Ford’s idealist/former military man teacher inadvertently stirs up racial discord when he tries to help Sidney Poitier’s musical prodigy in the making. That most of these bad kids are clearly rushing towards 30 almost makes Blackboard Jungle work as camp. There’s only one reason to sit through this slog and that’s to watch Poitier’s star-in-the-making turn scald the screen and threaten to upend everything. He’s dynamite in this screed of a message movie about juvenile delinquency. 

Alan Paton adapted his own for the big screen and helped craft one of cinema’s first discussion about Apartheid in South Africa. Zoltan Korda creates a distinguished if heavily sentimental affair that has its heart in the right place. Movies about big, important social issues are often like this: well intentioned if awkward, stately and distant when trying to present as intelligent and rational discussions of problems that wind up feeling sluggish and cool.

Cry, the Beloved Country tells the story of a black preacher (Canada Lee) who discovers that his son has killed the white son of a landowner (Charles Carson). The problems of racial inequality and economic disparity, which are often intertwined to the point of being blurred together, are highlighted while the two races form a hard-fought respect for each other. There’s a naivety about how easily Apartheid would be overcome, since when have entrenched systems been cleanly disrupted and replaced, that hampers these social issues films.

At least Beloved Country has great performances from Lee and Carson. Sidney Poitier has a small role as a priest in Johannesburg that helps Lee uncover the truth of the matter, and he’s electric even in this early stage of his career. The ingredients are all there for a searing film, but Korda seems more concerned with stately prestige than emotional depth. Cry, the Beloved Country is respectable and nothing more.

Louis Malle’s camera fills his tableaus with all sorts of eccentric details in this sweet, modest romance about two desperate people looking for a lifeline. We have Burt Lancaster bringing his history of tough guys to an aging gangster romancing Susan Sarandon’s waitress with a shady past in a city that’s crumbling around them. The film’s hypnotic strangeness provides a ripe environment for these actors to demonstrate their prodigious gifts.

Aging gangster Lou (Lancaster) works for a widow named Grace (Kate Reid) in a building destined for demolition. Across the way lives an oyster-bar waitress (Sarandon) that Lou is erotically obsessed with. Lou claims he was once a contemporary of Bugsy Siegel but now runs a low-level gambling racket when not running errands, occasionally sexual, for Grace. Grace knew him way back when and found herself stranded in this no man’s land in 40s when she traveled here for a Betty Grable lookalike contest.

We haven’t even gotten into the background and tortured past of Sally, Sarandon’s waitress. Malle’s drafted a cast of colorful characters that could scan as clearly fictional creations yet there’s a grounded sense of truth to them. We’ve all seen those former glamour girl types that refused to let their glory go and venturing into aging female impersonator territory. Or the man obsessed with former glories and their own fabricated self-mythology.

These characters are layered and complex despite their initial scanning as fictional creations. They eventually reveal parts of themselves that complicate our initial reading of them and their circumstances. We don’t just believe that these people are real but that their circumstances are founded in truth. How many stories about recluses and eccentrics can point towards orientating these people as founded in truth?

Into this decaying world come Sally’s former husband and younger sister who disrupt the life she’s trying to engineer for herself. Her husband was a criminal that seduced her younger sister and ran away together. They show back up on her doorstep pregnant and with nowhere else to go. Sally and Lou’s eventual meeting is one of lonely people trying to amount to something.

Sally’s former husband also brought along drugs to sell while hiding out, but he gets killed, Lou winds up with them, Grace and Sally’s sister become confidants, and Lou becomes Sally’s white knight. Atlantic City doesn’t reinvent the wheel but presents a pleasing structure to simply enjoy these characters and the mood. Lou’s remaking of his own past and the scenario that has fallen into his lap are an opportunity for him to live up to his own mythologized hype while Sally recognizes this and doesn’t judge him for it.

Instead, Sally recognizes that she has no present and a shaky future. There’s a world-weary center to her character that all the nudity cannot overshadow, almost despite the occasional gratuitous nature of Sarandon’s breast baring. There’s a sweetness to how she knows she needs help and knows that Lou is offering it for complicated reasons, and how this a chance for something to happen. What that something is remains particularly ill-defined, but with a purpose, until the final act.

Atlantic City retains its human element throughout never giving over to judging any of these characters. It merely exists with them and spends time watching them. It all ends in a way that feels predestinated. What a lovely, strange little film this is.

A box office failure in its heyday, 1968’s The Swimmer has since attained status as a cult film. Based on John Cheever’s short story of the same name, The Swimmer is an odd exploration of suburban malaise, the ennui of one man who has since been closed off from his privileged lifestyle, or a hallucinatory descent into purgatory. It one of the most experimental and weird films of Burt Lancaster’s career, and one of his absolute best.

The Swimmer is also an ode to Lancaster’s muscular body as he was headed towards 50. He wears the skimpiest of trunks throughout and little else, including one brief nude scene that proves his taunt body would be the envy of several men half his age. Lancaster’s muscularity and physical dynamism were frequently on proud display throughout his film work, but The Swimmer provides initial titillation in drinking him in before stripping that away to reveal a broken man.

Which is not to say that Lancaster’s emotional range is also not on display as his gut rot performance is a revelation. This film is buried beneath the flashier titles of his previous work (From Here to Eternity, Elmer Gantry), but this might be his trickiest and best performance. He must immediately engage our attention by strolling through the households like a panther that gradually dissolves as how he thinks of his character and how the other think of him come into conflict. The tension between the interior and exterior must be read from moment-to-moment in Lancaster’s work as he alternates between self-mythology and its mirage-like reality.

We never entirely get concrete details about what this man did for living, what ostracized him, or how he managed to seemingly manifest out of thin air and appear in the backyard of a former neighbor. We follow his journey home as he realizes that he could “swim home” by taking a lap in every pool in the backyard between this starting point and his final destination. The reveal that his house is a dilapidated and abandoned relic only heightens the surrealism of what has preceded this climax.

Whatever the literal truth is at the heart of The Swimmer does not matter. I prefer to think of it as something of a remodel of the myth of Narcissus. Someone else could think of it as a purgatorial passion-like punishment, or an allegory for one man’s possible recklessness and alcoholic destruction, or maybe he’s simply lost his mind and is replaying various memories that span decades into a singular afternoon. The literal-minded truth does not matter as much as the symbolic power of the story.

The Swimmer details the passive observation of one man’s identity. His amnesia-like relationship to his life causes him to rediscover and reconsider the illusionary nature of safety his community provided. This malaise and terror become ours as Lancaster’s stoic face crumbles and he represents every man’s fear of abandonment and obsolescence. Please seek this movie out.