Barack Obama + Sidney Poitier In The Heat of the Night.

Poitier plays a Philadelphia detective who ends up in a small, hick Southern town in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Headed back North after a family visit, he is waiting to change trains. However, a white man has just been murdered, and so when the deputy sheriff happens upon him in the deserted station, he arrests him on the spot. When the misunderstanding is finally cleared up, Poitier sticks around to help the local, redneck sheriff solve the crime.

 

And so throughout the film, as the not too bright law officer arrests a succession of men, all white, as prime suspects, one-by-one Poitier proves them innocent, as he conducts a thorough, scientific investigation that eventually nets the real killer. However, not before he is repeatedly called the N word, otherwise insulted, chased by mobs and almost killed twice. Now, I don’t know about you, but if it were me, I would have gotten the hell out of Dodge. Not Poitier though, he doggedly continues his search no matter what. Somehow, that strangely reminded me of President Obama.

 

To many of us, he seems as if he is thoroughly mixed up in white people’s business. He is trying to get a better life for them with fairer taxes, health care coverage, gay rights, etc., but many do not give a damn. All many of them see is a Black man  in the White House, and so, against their own best interests, they follow behind a string of white candidates bellowing against the president and whipping them up into an absolute frenzy, candidates who, if elected, will rob these people blind. Time and time again we have seen any number of white politicians solemnly swear that their “number one goal is to defeat Barack Obama,” not help the country, not end the wars, not heal the people, not end income inequality, but “defeat Barack Obama!”

 

In the movie, you never see the Black family members that Poitier was visiting, or the family he presumably has in Philadelphia. He is dropped into the town as if out of nowhere, and in the end heads off into nothingness. His character is only perceived as someone trying to help the white people. At one point, when the sheriff takes him to spend the night with a local Black family, they just look at him with quizzical faces that seem to say, “What are you doing working with the man?” That is pretty much the only contact he has with the Black community. Likewise, it seems sometimes as if President Obama really does not have anything much to do with us.

 

Uh, oh. I can hear you now saying I am being unfair, that Obama, in fighting for health care and other measures, is helping us all. Yes, but when Obama pushes the issue of gays in the military and immigration reform, areas where he has expended a lot of political capital, he is putting at the head of his agenda matters that largely benefit others. (And boy is he getting holy hell for it!) Meanwhile, matters like the mass incarceration of Black males and the wanton police shootings are not even looked at.

 

At any rate, since this is Black History Month and since many of Poitier’s films are being shown non-stop, by all means watch them, but watch them with a critical eye, and note what images or resonances they bring to mind. My favorite is Raisin in the Sun (1959) about a Black family living in Chicago. Try and watch it from the very beginning without interruption. It puts to shame the remakes done by Danny Glover and Sean Coombs. I also liked his little seen 1971 film, Brother John, in which he literally portrays an avenging angel. The 1958 film, The Defiant Ones, in which he plays an escapee from a chain gang, handcuffed to a white prisoner, was also pretty interesting.

 

Meanwhile, films like A Patch of Blue, in which he meets and falls in love with a blind white girl, and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner where he falls in love with a white woman and her parents have a fit, and Lillies of the Field in which he builds a chapel, free of charge, for some nuns in the desert and for which he won the Oscar, portray the politically correct image of the Black man the white audience was, and is, much more happy seeing. But watch them all, and note the bits of history and sociology that any well made film always conveys. And be sure to write us and give us your opinions. . .