Loading ...Guess who’s like to win an Oscar: racism at the movies
1967 is often considered something of a watershed for cinema, the year in which the counter-cultural sensibilities of the sixties began to seep through into the mainstream and presage of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’, with the commercial and critical success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde paving the way. It was also a busy year for Sidney Poitier, the top box office star of that year and the first black male to win the Academy Award in 1963, who starred in three pictures that purported to deal with serious social and racial fissures of the time, to varying degrees of success. In addition to school-set melodrama To Sir, with Love, Poitier took centre stage in two other self-consciously culturally significant efforts that yearned for Oscar attention.
The first was In the Heat of the Night, a sweaty, raw but ultimately pat police procedural that the actor still cites as his favourite work, its most famous line (“They call me MISTER Tibbs!”) remaining well-known and much-parodied to this day. The second was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a toothless Stanley Kramer prestige picture, which boasted the final pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and little else. Both were touted at the time as laudable films that wouldn’t shy away from the issue of race, thrusting Sidney Poitier as they did into overwhelmingly ‘white’ environments – a prison cell in a small Southern town, the dinner table of an upper-class liberal family – and having him triumph over backwardness and bigotry. The films were feted with awards (In the Heat of the Night winning for Best Picture), and praised for their forthrightness. But Poitier’s career was never to scale such heights again.
Viewing these films retrospectively in this allegedly ‘post-racial’ clime, it’s tempting to see the outwardly progressive agendas of both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as bald and condescending; thinly-veiled attempts to cash in on liberal guilt and play it as straight entertainment. Granted, we have to watch these films in the context of the era they were made. But even then, they were both, to some extent, preaching to the converted: by the end of each film, a stubbornly antagonistic white male (Rod Steiger in Heat, Spencer Tracy in Dinner) has become reconciled to Poitier’s character’s inherent worth and value, this staggering feat apparently only possible by solving a local murder or enduring several hours’ worth of embarrassment in front of your girlfriend’s parents. By the same token Poitier is idealised to a ridiculous degree. He’s the street-smart homicide detective amongst a gaggle of idiot racists in In the Heat of the Night, and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner his character is deified to such laughable heights (an internationally-respected doctor who lectures in Hawaii and Switzerland) it derails the film almost entirely.
Both films never transcend the narrow trappings of their ‘social issues’ agenda. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, however, is ultimately the weaker effort. Like Kramer’s The Defiant Ones before it, Poitier is taken to be emblematic of all African-Americans firstly, and a character in his own right secondly, only existing as a social phenomena that must be ‘solved’ by the film’s self-righteous protagonists. At least In the Heat of the Night, which was to spawn two sequels featuring Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs, makes attempts at raw exuberance and grim violence, even if its strident rhetoric would’ve merely reaffirmed its largely liberal audience’s pre-existing beliefs. Considering blaxploitation would erupt as a sub-genre just four years later with the release of the incendiary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, Poitier’s 1967 pair come off as overly mannered and woefully naive. Both should take comfort, though, in the fact that neither are as austere and mincing as Paul Haggis’ insipid race-relations drama and Worst Best Picture Oscar winner ever, 2004’s Crash, which propounds the notion that having Sandra Bullock fall down the stairs will cure her, and by extension the whole of Los Angeles, of their intractable racial prejudices.
Race continues to be a divisive and trenchant issue in contemporary American society, as the wrongful arrest of Henry Gates, Glenn Beck’s continued lunacy at Fox News and ex-President Carter’s recent claims of racism against Barack Obama will testify. Invariably these issues will always reach our cinema screens. Few attempt something genuinely radical; the ones that do flare heated, but often productive debate, by conceptualising people of different races with appropriate individuality and dignity. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is the obvious example here. Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t shower the rest of the more ham-fisted attempts with Oscars. But 1967 was a watershed for cinema, in that it opened the channels of racial discourse. And however cloying some of the end results seem today, it would be a grave mistake to consign these issues to a past conceived as either ‘dead’ or ‘irrelevant’.
