Word: poitiers
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...first staged. Every actor, from Adolph Caesar as the frog-voiced, wonderfully malign drill sergeant to Howard E. Rollins Jr. as the haughty black lawyer assigned to investigate the sergeant's death, puts subtlety and pride into his performance. Rollins is scarily imposing: he suggests a Sidney Poitier who refuses to ingratiate himself to anyone, least of all the audience...
...Paul Robeson (too strong, too smart, too sexy, too damned uppity) and denied Lena Horne her best potential movie roles, as the mulatto heroines of Pinky and Show Boat, handing the parts instead to Jeanne Crain and Ava Gardner. It was not until the rise to stardom of Sidney Poitier in the 1950s that blacks had a bankable movie hero. "To this day," argues Film Historian Donald Bogle, "Poitier remains the most important black actor. The image he presented made white audiences take black Americans seriously, at least while they sat in the movie theater...
Outside the theater, blacks were becoming hard to ignore, and their impact was refracted on the screen. "When schools were being desegregated," recalls Danny Glover, a likely Oscar nominee for his performance as the hobo in Places in the Heart, "you saw Poitier become a film star. And in the wake of the Watts riots and the push for community control, you got blaxploitation." These were the low-budget gangster and horror movies that, along with prestige efforts like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, detonated the explosion of black films in the early '70s. Suddenly directors like Gordon...
...safe, high-yielding Government securities. Moreover, said the brokerage houses, they would manage the accounts so that customers would get large income tax deductions. Among the 88 investors enticed into laying out at least $600,000 apiece in cash and notes to one of the firms were Actor Sidney Poitier, Television Producer Norman Lear and Composer Henry Mancini...
Although unaware that they were claiming questionable deductions, the Sentinel customers benefited mightily from their investments. Lear, who created such TV hits as All in the Family, Good Times and The Jeffersons, deducted $1.8 million on his 1980 federal return. Poitier wrote off $657,184 the same year. The largest amount claimed by an individual, some $3.5 million, was taken by George Scharffenberger, chairman of City Investing, a New York-based financial concern. Said he: "There's still a trial to be held, and they deny the charges very vigorously. We'll have to wait...