#in kind direct dinner clarence house 11

[world-of-wales]

CATHERINE'S STYLE FILES - 2011

26 OCTOBER 2011 || The Duchess of Cambridge attended a dinner in support of the 'In Kind Direct' charity at Clarence House in London.

[tcm]

Sidney Poitier, In His Own Words By Susan King

Sidney Poitier was the first African-American to win an Oscar for a lead role for 1963’s LILIES OF THE FIELD. Five years later, he was the No. 1 box-office champ thanks to a trio of hit films that were released in 1967: IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER and the baby boomer fave, TO SIR, WITH LOVE.

But early in his career, Poitier and actor/activist Canada Lee had to be listed as indentured servants in order to make the lauded 1951 drama CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY in apartheid South Africa for director Zoltan Korda. If they had been described as actors, both Poitier, Lee and Korda probably would have been arrested and held without trial.

When I interviewed Poitier in 1997 for the L.A. Times, he recalled the horrors he encountered in South Africa in 1950. “The experience in South Africa made an impact,” said Poitier. “I mean, it was stunning in its brutality. The law required that we live 26 miles outside the city of Johannesburg. They rented us a farm for that purpose. A car would come and get us in the morning and take us to Johannesburg to the studio. When we were done, we would get in the car and it would take us out of the city and back to the farm.”

Poitier, who was 23 when he made the film, described himself as a “fairly alert kid when I was that age, so I knew what to expect [and] that it would be different from where I came from, but I really wasn’t ready for the extent of it.”

He made his feature film debut in the 1950 gritty racial drama NO WAY OUT, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, in which he played a young hospital intern forced to take care of a wounded, bigoted criminal played by Richard Widmark, who became a good friend of the young actor. They would go on to work on other projects including 1965’s THE BEDFORD INCIDENT.

The New York Times was effusive in its praise of Poitier, writing that he “gives a fine, sensitive performance …and his quiet dignity is in sharp, affecting contrast to the volatile, sneering, base animal mentality and vigor that Mr. Widmark expresses so expertly as Ray Biddle.”

(Ossie Davis also made his film debut in NO WAY OUT, which also featured his wife Ruby Dee.)

Poitier told me in a 1991 interview I did for the L.A. Times that some areas of the South refused to screen NO WAY OUT. “But it was not closed out entirely,” he noted. “There were areas in the white community in the South where pictures with black stars played, but they didn’t get uniformly wide distribution in those days. Much of it depended on what the films were about. NO WAY OUT was an explosive film about race relations. I am sure it was not shown in every corner of the South.”

The film also ran into trouble in the North. The New York Times reported on Aug. 30, 1950 that “Capt. Harry Fulmer of the censor division of the Chicago Police Department announced today that the showing of the motion picture NO WAY OUT would be permitted in this city with a small portion of the film deleted.”

Richard Brooks’ 1955 BLACKBOARD JUNGLE starring Poitier as a bright but troubled inner-city high school student also ran into controversy. “That picture has kind of carved a little place for itself in the consciousness,” he said. “But it was recommended by Claire Boothe Luce that the picture not be screened in Europe.” Of course, TCM fans may know Luce for her hit play The Women that was adapted into the hit 1939 film comedy. But in 1955, she was President Dwight Eisenhower’s Ambassador to Italy.

“She thought it was showing America in a bad light,” Poitier explained. “We were just not accustomed in America to deal with tough social questions. The question of race was avoided altogether. The word ‘damn’ was not allowed in a film. So that was the mind-set then.” Poitier continued: “In such a mind-set, a film like BLACKBOARD JUNGLE could be considered controversial, but to be considered sufficient to have a US. Ambassador recommend that it be censored or denied exposure? So, you see we have grown some.”

I first saw Poitier when I was 11 in LILIES OF THE FIELD as the second feature on a double bill with Disney’s 1966 comedy, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. The latter is just a blip in my memory, but encountering Poitier in his endearing turn as a sweet itinerant handyman who helps East German nuns living in Arizona build a chapel is etched in my mind.

When I asked Poitier about the film, he explained “director Ralph Nelson, in order to make the movie, put his house up as collateral to United Artists. We rehearsed that picture here in town. Then we got on a plane and went to Arizona where he had gone to a deserted area and built a little church. We were so well-rehearsed that it took us 14 days to make the movie.”

Poitier admitted that “the guys who were forerunners to me, like Canada Lee, Rex Ingram, Clarence Muse and women like Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers and Juanita Moore, they were terribly boxed in. They were maids and stable people and butlers, principally. But they, in some way, prepared the ground for me. I like to think I may have turned a pebble or two for those who have come behind me.”