sydney | The social legacy of Hollywood’s first black star

(Los Angeles) New documentary from Apple TV+, sydney looks back on the career of Hollywood’s first big black star, Sidney Poitier, and in particular on the criticism of African-American activists and intellectuals who accused him of playing stereotypical roles for white audiences, in the midst of the civil rights movement.

Produced by Oprah Winfrey and bringing together personalities ranging from Denzel Washington to Morgan Freeman via Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, sydney — which comes out Friday — aims to demonstrate why these accusations were unfair to the actor, who died in January at the age of 94.

“The reality is that since the invention of cinema, there have always been these degrading images of black Americans. And Sidney Poitier single-handedly destroyed, film after film, these images,” Reginald Hudlin, the director of sydney.

Describing the actor who rose to fame in the 1960s as a “warrior” on racial issues, he explains: “Without him, you don’t have me, and you don’t have Oprah Winfrey or Barack either. Barack Obama”.

Oprah Winfrey is also present in the documentary since sydney contains interviews that the actor gave to the television presenter, years before his death.

The film also tackles thorny subjects such as Sidney Poitier’s extramarital affair during his first marriage to Juanita Hardy. A subject which may anger those concerned but which did not prevent M^me Hardy and the couple’s three daughters answer the director’s questions for the documentary.

“When I first sat down with the family to discuss the possibility of making this film, I asked, ‘Is there anything I can’t talk about?’ And I specifically brought up that example,” Hudlin says.

“They said, ‘No, no, no, we want to tell the whole truth.’ I appreciated the gesture and the fact that they were not just there to tell what we already know”.

The film also evokes terrifying moments of racist violence experienced by the actor.

In 1964, Sidney Poitier and singer Harry Belafonte were chased in Mississippi by armed Ku Klux Klan members while delivering money to a suffrage movement.

An earlier run-in with the KKK, and another with a white policeman who harassed a teenaged Sidney Poitier at gunpoint, are featured in the film as triggers in his often-hidden fight for the American rights movement. civics.

“That’s what’s fascinating about him: he never let himself be broken, he never sank into resentment,” explains Reginald Hudlin.

Sanitized Hero

But perhaps the most contested part of the actor’s legacy is the moniker “Uncle Tom” sometimes thrown at him — a reference used in the United States that implied he was too docile. towards white audiences and Hollywood.

The documentary evokes an article from the New York Times dated 1967 entitled “Why does white America love Sidney Poitier so much? », and who accuses the actor of « essentially playing the same role », that of the sanitized and flat hero.

A “Sidney Poitier syndrome” is also described in the article, that of “a good guy in a white world, without a wife, without a lover, without a woman to love or kiss, helping the white man to solve the problem of the white man.

Three years earlier, he had become the first black actor to win an Oscar for Field lilyin which he plays a traveling handyman, who helps a community of white nuns with whom he eventually befriends.

Other roles, such as that of the beggar in Porgy and Besshave been described as racist by some critics.

According to Reginald Hudlin, the blame “was an inevitable consequence of the work he was doing” and Poitier, who “knew it was coming”, was more interested in embodying the African-American experience on screen.

“I think now we can look at it with a broader historical perspective, and conclude that these decisions made by Sidney Poitier were right and helped the social movement to move forward,” he pleads.

The documentary also highlights the groundbreaking nature of Sidney Poitier’s kiss with white actress Katharine Houghton in Guess who’s coming to dinnerand the scene of In the heat of the Night where he slaps a white southern aristocrat in the United States.

“There was no precedent for who he was and what he did,” concludes Reginald Hudlin.