Word: poitier
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...mainstream movies a generation ago, Sidney Poitier was Hollywood's Martin Luther King Jr. Poitier's screen characters were as noble as any blond hero -- nobler, because they withstood and deflected so much unjustified abuse. But the role of soulful sufferer was a dead end for blacks on both sides of the movie screen. Intransigent white America could not be persuaded to lift blacks to equality. Could the system then be scared into action? The Watts and Newark riots of the mid-'60s may have been mainly fratricidal, and the your-money-or- your-wife taunts of the Black Panthers...
Occasionally, however, one comes along that recalls the heroic scope and seriousness, if not the air time, of a vanishing breed. Separate but Equal, a two-part ABC movie, portrays the events leading up to the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision outlawing segregation in public schools. Sidney Poitier, in his first TV appearance since 1955, stars as future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who headed the N.A.A.C.P.'s legal effort. Burt Lancaster, another rare bird in television land, plays Marshall's courtroom adversary, John W. Davis. George Stevens Jr., whose father created some of Hollywood's great epics...
Just about the only spark of life is Poitier's flamboyant performance. Not that the spark is always warming. Though Poitier, 64, is still a magnetic screen presence, his precise diction, darting gestures and eccentric pauses have become so mannered that any resemblance to flesh-and-blood conversation seems merely coincidental. In his big courtroom speeches, one can hardly find the legal arguments amid the actorish flourishes. No real judge would be swayed, but the Emmy jury will undoubtedly be bowled over...
...Separation Broadway playwright John Guare muses on the saddest fact of urban life -- how close people are physically while they remain economically and psychologically so far apart. He takes the true story of a young man who entered the homes of the privileged by purporting to be Sidney Poitier's son and brings into collision the normally separated lives of some modern Manhattanites, each yearning to know about some distant and romantic way of life that is actually just an acquaintanceship or two away...
...Sidney Poitier film...