Sidney Poitier appreciation: A movie star of many firsts, and the slap heard around the world

“Don’t cry, white boy. You’re gonna live.”

With those seven words, a young Bahamian American actor named Sidney Poitier concluded his film debut, in the final scene of the 1950 drama “No Way Out.” Poitier plays Dr. Brooks, the sole Black physician at a hospital whose prison ward patients include a virulent white racist played by Richard Widmark. The film’s director and co-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz made a much bigger splash that same year with “All About Eve.” But “No Way Out” holds up: It’s pungent, tightly packed stuff.

It’s also fascinating to see what happens in Poitier’s concluding line of dialogue: a character, rather thinly drawn, defined by self-doubt, suddenly reveals the sum total of all the prejudice he has weathered in his young life. The man he’s trying to save, the man who wants him dead, breaks down in sniveling tears. And in that one line, Poitier becomes a different, more immediate film actor than he is in all his previous scenes in the same picture.

It’s not a Big Moment, but it’s a signal: This young actor will go far, if his profession and his country allows him the latitude.

So much eloquent tribute has been paid in the days following Poitier’s Jan. 6 death at the age of 94. He was a man of several first-and-onlies.

First Black actor nominated for best actor: Poitier, “The Defiant Ones,” co-starring Tony Curtis, 1958. Besides being director Stanley Kramer’s liveliest work, it’s a liberal message drama that holds up better than that description suggests. Certainly if you saw that film at a young age (I caught it on television sometime in the early ‘70s) its blunt allegorical lessons in racial understanding may have been simplistic. But they were effective, and moving, thanks to the acting.

First Black actor to win a best actor Oscar? Poitier, for the gentle, wispy “Lilies of the Field,” 1963.

America’s first bona fide Black movie star, as well as first Black No. 1 box office attraction? Poitier, in the trifecta year of 1967.

He had “To Sir, With Love” and “In the Heat of the Night” in theaters that racially inflamed summer. Then “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” came out around the holidays. That film, another Kramer homily, is hard to watch now, leaning all the way into the cliches about Poitier as embodiment of unassailable Black grace and class. He’s basically there to prop up the conversion therapy his future in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, undergo, methodically, one monologue at a time.

But “In the Heat of the Night” was, and remains, a different story — a story ending in early 1968 with Poitier’s co-star, Rod Steiger, winning the Oscar over, among others, the un-nominated Poitier. Steiger portrays the racist Mississippi sheriff obstructing the local murder investigation undertaken by visiting Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs. The final scene, at the train station, was derided by some critics who didn’t buy the “we all learned something here” message.

There’s one scene in particular, however, that lit a fire everywhere. In director Norman Jewison’s hit, which beat out “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” that year at the Oscars, it exemplifies tiptop Hollywood storytelling craftsmanship of its era. It’s the scene so many praised in the wake of Poitier’s death:

The slap.

Tibbs and Sheriff Gillespie are paying a visit to a shady, powerful plantation owner (Larry Gates). This man, Endicott, is as devoted to his hothouse orchids as he is to his rights and privileges as a Southern bigot.

After a gradual build in the restrained banter between Tibbs and Endicott, the man tending his flowers realizes he’s being questioned regarding the murder case. In a perfectly framed shot containing four actors, Endicott slaps Tibbs across the face. Then, instantly, comes what became known as “the slap heard around the world”: Tibbs backhands Endicott in return, only slightly harder, a little higher up the side of the suspect’s face.

There’s no close-up for emphasis, no cut, no music. It’s almost unassuming, as well as being culturally momentous. Poitier’s reaction isn’t movie-star swagger; it’s simply human, and just. The scene continues. The sheriff admits he doesn’t know how to handle the table-turning moment.

“There was a time when I could’ve had you shot,” Endicott says.

That slap, said “Killer of Sheep” director Charles Burnett on Twitter Friday, was for him and so many other future Black filmmakers, “the scene of scenes.” He added: “And remember … attitudes like Endicott’s still live, legislate and make policy.”

In a 1967 New York Times interview, Poitier addressed widespread criticism that he had built a very specific screen image of saintly Black heroism, with the opportunities he was given. His response:

“If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game. not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency.”

Here’s a final “first” on a great, valiant movie star’s long list of accomplishments as actor, director, political force and symbol of American excellence. Poitier starred as Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s breakthrough Broadway play “A Raisin in the Sun.” The film version came out in 1961.

By the time of the play, Poitier had a decade’s worth of film credits, and an Oscar nomination, even if he wasn’t yet considered “box office” because Hollywood saw that in one color only.

After a promising three-city out-of-town tryout, concluding in Chicago in 1959 at the Blackstone Theater, “Raisin” went to New York City and made history: first Black female playwright on Broadway.

How did it get there? Poitier’s name and cache didn’t hurt. So he has that on his resume as well: He helped make “Raisin” happen. And “Raisin” paved the way for every Black playwright since, and an entire wave of Black theatrical talent.

In “No Way Out,” Poitier’s fourth-billed debut, there’s a line spoken by the mother of a secondary Black character, a hospital elevator operator and victim of racial violence. With a race riot brewing, the woman warns her son that mob violence won’t “change the world. You’ve got work to do.” Sidney Poitier also had work to do. And he changed the world.

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