![]() ![]() She’s just the kind of person who likes to play mysterious games. Poitier’s next two films were in different genres, but continued to express a particular interest in African and/or African-American culture.Ī Warm December (1973), for example, is a romance between a widowed African-American man who goes to England for a vacation and falls in love with an African princess/diplomat.Īt first, you might think that there is some sort of Hitchcockian intrigue going on here - the woman first meets Poitier when she tries to hide behind him from a man who is following her on the sidewalk - but no, it turns out that there are no villains here, and no big conspiracy. 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, his first directorial effort, put a different spin on the western by focusing on a wagon train of ex-slaves looking for a new home. ![]() So it’s striking to see how, by the 1970s, Poitier had taken his stardom and used it to (a) launch his career as a movie director and (b) focus on stories with all- or mostly-black casts. ![]() In 1963’s Lilies of the Field, for which he won the best-actor Oscar, the white characters were arguably outnumbered by the Hispanic characters, but Poitier remained the only black character of any significance. In 1967 alone, he played the black teacher in a mostly-white British high school, the black cop who helps a white small-town police force find the white killer of a white murder victim, and the black man who meets his white fiancee’s white parents for the first time.
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