By Leonard Quart.
In the fifties and through most of the sixties few if any Hollywood
films dealt in a serious and authentic manner with black life. The
only one that readily comes to mind is Michael Roemer's (a white
filmmaker) Nothing But a Man (1964), starring Ivan Dixon as an
itinerant black laborer in the Deep South of the early 60s. Nothing
But a Man was a low-budget, realist film that managed to capture the
humiliation of being a second-class citizen in the 60s south, and,
more distinctively, African-American society's class differences and
the fragility of its family structure.
There were no working black directors in Hollywood, and also only one
genuine black film star during that period, Sidney Poitier. His
self-possessed, charismatic, heroic presence graced a number of films
ranging from Stanley Kramer's work of liberal poster art, The Defiant
Ones (1958) to the glossy, chaste interracial romance Guess Who's
Coming Home to Dinner (1967).
Poitier was the black star who Hollywood had designated as their
token African-American. In fact, he was the first African-American
actor to achieve leading man status in Hollywood films. In film after
film he played a, character whose humanity and dignity made him
consistently successful with white audiences. Poitier never bowed or
scraped to whites, but he was so reasonable and humane that white
audience knew that his anger, no matter how much he would smolder,
would always stay within acceptable bounds, and that there was
nothing to fear from the characters he portrayed. His characters were
the type of men who could only arouse the hatred or abuse of the most
ignorant or racist of whites.
During the more militant, and race-conscious sixties, black activists
often put down Poitier's persona as middle-class, masochistic, and
liberal. Nevertheless, he was one black actor who no longer had to
sing, dance, clown, and roll his eyes to have his image appear on the
screen. And though Hollywood's handling of the race problem was
neither bold nor imaginative, given the conformist and racist
political tenor of the time, the emergence of a token black star
could still be viewed as a minor triumph. [...]
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at 1/30/2009 10:05:00 PM
