Sidney Poitier's 20 most notable films

Poitier got his first Hollywood break playing the only Black intern in a white urban hospital who has to treat a racist criminal (Richard Widmark) in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's liberal message movie/film noir hybrid. At 22, he's too young for the role, but he inhabits it with real assurance, and many of the building blocks of the archetypal Poitier character — cool under fire, solitary and exceptional, simmering but never boiling over, and ready and willing to teach all doubters a lesson by being better than everyone around him — are already in place here.

All but forgotten now, Martin Ritt's early film was called "a milestone in the screen presentation of an American Negro" by Variety. It's not, but it is at least a skillful variation on some themes established a couple of years earlier by On the Waterfront, with Poitier and John Cassavetes as two longshoremen headed for tragedy. As in many of his early films, Poitier doesn't get the chance to make this credit-to-his-race character much more than a tool for the white guy's eventual redemption, but here he's at least permitted a home life (Ruby Dee plays his wife) and a couple of good scenes in which race isn't an issue.

Poitier didn't want to star in Otto Preminger's adaptation of the great Gershwin opera, feeling that its slangy depiction of the impoverished residents of Catfish Row was patronizing and "an insult to Black people"; backed into a corner and threatened with losing the chance to make The Defiant Ones, he decided to take the role opposite Dorothy Dandridge (the singing for both stars was dubbed) at what he later called "the most dangerous crossroads of my career." The resulting film was neither as bad as he feared nor as good as admirers of the opera would have hoped; the Gershwin estate disliked it, however, and it has long been out of circulation.

You might need a spoonful of vinegar to swallow this sugary confection, a micro-budgeted comedy in which Poitier plays a saintly wanderer who stops to help a convent full of German, Austrian and Hungarian nuns build a chapel in the Arizona desert. (What are they doing there? What is he doing there? Who knows?) But audiences back then felt uplifted by seeing how the potentially incendiary premise of a Black man stumbling upon a group of white nuns could be played for laughs and sweetness. "The screen overflows with enough brotherhood… to make even the kindest spectator retch," complained Newsweek. But, deploying every ounce of his charm, Poitier shattered a major barrier, winning the Best Actor Oscar Raisin should have brought him two years earlier.

For much of his career, Poitier found himself in a double bind — the roles he was offered were either defined entirely by race, or bent over so far backwards to ignore race completely that the results could seem slightly bizarre — as in this no-frills variation on The Caine Mutiny and Fail-Safe, in which Poitier plays a journalist assigned to a virtually all-white Navy destroyer whose creepily autocratic captain (Richard Widmark) may be headed into conflict with a Russian submarine. Poitier always liked working with Widmark, and both stars give steady performances, at least until the script torpedoes all credibility.

If you had to pick just one film that represents all of Poitier's strengths, it would likely be Norman Jewison's taut, lean, expertly constructed thriller about Virgil Tibbs, a Black Philadelphia police offer stranded in a racist Southern backwater trying to help the white locals solve a murder. Challenged and inspired by Rod Steiger's deep-dish Method acting as the redneck police chief, Poitier found new and fascinating ways to calibrate his hauteur, wariness and suppressed anger in a superb performance that he ranked among his own favorites.

Poitier used his growing box-office stature to fulfill a longstanding dream to make a romantic comedy in which he would actually get to court an African-American woman instead of being paired with a white actress in yet another sexless role. The result was this disappointingly half-hearted comedy-drama about a white family's maid (singer Abbey Lincoln, shooting off lively sparks of temper) who's wooed by a decent if semi-shady businessman (Poitier). The cast is good (Carroll O'Connor and Beau Bridges also appear), but the script is oddly sitcomish, as if the writers of The Brady Bunch had suddenly discovered racial politics.

In the 1970s, when Poitier started working as a director, he was trying to stay one step ahead of Blaxploitation action films, which he hated. His solution was to develop a new genre — a kind of amiable, loose, by-us-for-us style of urban comedy that proved to have enormous crossover appeal and the influence of which has resonated for decades, straight through the films of Ice Cube. Uptown Saturday Night is the first of several movies in which Poitier teamed with Bill Cosby (here, they play buddies who try to steal back a winning sweepstakes ticket from the hoods who robbed them), and it's lively, shaggy fun. Followed by an even more successful almost-sequel, Let's Do It Again (1975).

By any conventional standards this movie is a mess, but as a representation of what was on Poitier's mind in the 1970s, it's one of his most fascinating films. Clocking in at well over two hours, this meandering criminal caper reteams Poitier with Cosby; they're two thieves who are blackmailed by a retired cop (James Earl Jones) into working with ghetto teens in a job-placement community program. Cue a whole different movie — To Sir Without Much Love — that seems to be embedded in the middle of this one, as streetwise Black kids face off with "bougie" counselors in scenes that seem crafted by Poitier (who also directed) as a head-on response to critics who charged that he was out of touch with the Black community.

After he ended his long acting hiatus in the late 1980s, Poitier did much of his strongest work for television. In some ways, though, little had changed over the last 40 years; when this two-part TV movie about Thurgood Marshall and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision first aired, some critics couldn't notice anything but the actor's skin color, complaining that he was insensitively cast as the lighter-skinned Marshall. Admittedly, the two men look nothing alike, but it's the shading of Poitier's performance, not his skin, that will stay with you.