Samuel Blumenfeld, newspaper critic The world and specialist in American cinema, greeted Friday, January 7 the memory of actor Sidney Poitier, who died at the age of 94, by calling him “exceptional actor” Who “will have moved all the lines”. Sidney Poitier is the first African-American actor to receive an Oscar, in 1964, for his portrayal of the character of Homer Smith in Lily of the fields. “It sounds like a thunderclap in a country, the United States, which is still largely segregationist”, highlighted Samuel Blumenfeld.
franceinfo: When he received the Oscar for best actor in 1964, it was a revolution. Why ?
Samuel Blumenfeld : Sidney Poitier, other than being an exceptional actor, will have moved all lines. He is truly the first black star in the history of American cinema. It’s a revolution, first of all because until the 1950s, a black actor in any case was reduced to figurative roles. It was contradictory to be black and a movie star. An individual had to finally succeed in moving the lines. So, when Sidney Poitier receives his Oscar for best actor, obviously it formalizes the irruption of a black star in the landscape of Hollywood cinema. It echoes like a thunderclap in a country, the United States, which is still largely segregationist and is just beginning to awaken to the civil rights movement. Sidney Poitier is the image, is one of the showcases of the civil rights movement.
Is he the only black actor at this time?
I would tend to say that we are never alone, but that we always arrive in pairs. In the case of Sidney Poitier, it actually happens almost concomitantly with Harry Belafonte. He’s the other black superstar. But Harry Belafonte was both actor and singer. The way Poitier and Belafonte distribute themselves in the landscape is interesting because, politically, Harry Belafonte is someone quite radical, while Sidney Poitier is someone much more moderate, which does not mean that he is not engaged. To give a little rough borders, Poitier is more on the side of Martin Luther King, while Belafonte would be more on the side of Malcom X.
It was said of him that he was just a foil. Is this unfair?
It is both unfair and totally inaccurate. Obviously, the idea of the arguing is someone who was a black actor in the roles, but who was in fact playing “proto-roles” of white people. It is a controversy that was aroused after the success of Guess who’s coming to dinner by Stanley Kramer, in 1967, in which Sidney Poitier played a doctor who was truly the ideal son-in-law. At the time, we said, “that man does not exist, he’s a Superman”! Hence the absolutely unfair reputation that was made in Poitier as a smooth actor. It was quite the opposite. What takes place in Guess who’s coming to dinner, which is very important, in the context of the end of the 1960s, is that for the first time, Poitier embodied a senior executive. What Poitier explained after the success of this film, is why a doctor couldn’t be a role model for young black Americans? Why does he have to be a mobster or a cop? And in that he was absolutely right. It was not that he submitted to a dominant power, on the contrary, Poitier was the agent of a revolution.