By 1969, Sidney Poitier was a bonafide superstar with a series of successful movies to his credit. That year saw him move away from his good guy persona with The Lost Man, an earnest attempt to examine the racial tumult…
Directed by Norman Jewison (Moonstruck, The Hurricane), In the Heat of the Night won five Oscars in 1967: Best Picture, Best Actor (Rod Steiger), Best Screenplay (Stirling Silliphant), Best Editing (Hal Ashby), and Best Sound. Nearly sixty years later, the…
These days, A Patch of Blue is dismissed by some as being corny and predictable. Perhaps, but I, a longtime fan of star Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field) have always enjoyed the film. Released in 1965, it’s a story…
[amazon_link asins=’B077Y3QTS5′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’moviegazett03-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’6dfcf6d6-110a-11e8-b7a8-8de5a9e57dc2′]Set in South Africa when Apartheid was the rule of law, The Wilby Conspiracy stars Sidney Poitier as a revolutionary, and Michael Caine as a mining engineer, on the run from the South African military…
[amazon_link asins=’B0779SPXYG’ template=’ProductAd’ store=’moviegazett03-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’ec7955e4-fd38-11e7-b353-e10293c428a1′]Released in 1968, For Love of Ivy marked the first time in mainstream film that African Americans were shown in a mature, romantic relationship. The late sixties ushered in a whole new generation of filmmakers…
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is fifty years old this year. No stranger to controversial topics, in 1967 director/producer Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind, Judgement at Nuremberg) offered his thoughts on race relations and interracial marriage (something that had been…
An unemployed construction worker, Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) is traveling west when his car breaks down in the Arizona desert. When his car begins to overheat, he stops at a ranch in search of water. As it turns out, the…
An unemployed construction worker, Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) is traveling west when his car breaks down in the Arizona desert. When his car begins to overheat, he stops at a ranch in search of water. As it turns out, the…
No stranger to controversial topics, in 1967 director/producer Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind, Judgement at Nuremberg) offered his thoughts on race relations and interracial marriage with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He cast long-time friends Spencer Tracy (who’d worked with…
The first male actor of African descent to be nominated for a competitive Academy Award, for The Defiant Ones in 1958, Sidney Poitier would become the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964, for…