With the recent death of Sidney Poitier, it’s only been reaffirmed how important he was to the culture in so many ways. He opened so many doors for other Black performers and carried with him such a monumental grace as an actor that it’s nearly impossible to sum up his greatness in just one role. This is especially true when Sidney Poitier’s influence and interests extended beyond the world of cinema, since he was also an activist, philanthropist, and for some time served as an ambassador for his native Bahamas. That said, there is a type of character that Poitier is most famous for playing — a kind of ultra-competent professional who is forced to turn the other cheek when confronted by racism, and must wrestle with whether to suppress his own rage or act on it. Though this archetype would come to define Poitier at the height of his career in the 1960s, you can actually see a potent early version of it in his first credited screen role and first turn as a leading man, 1950’s social issue noir, No Way Out.

The Beginnings of a Legend

Sidney Poitier and Linda Darnell looking at Richard Widmark in No Way Out
Image via 20th Century Studios

By the late 1940s, Sidney Poitier had overcome his thick Bahamian accent and inability to sing and dance fluently, which had held him back during his early days as a struggling stage actor living in New York City. He was working for the American Negro Theater, the same theater that had initially rejected him due to these shortcomings, which led to his casting in a Broadway production of Lysistrata. Though the play only ran for a few days, it led to a series of other smaller Broadway roles that helped establish Poitier as an up-and-coming actor. It was around this time that director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had begun a lengthy process of auditioning actors for a film concerning the racism faced by a Black doctor working in a prison ward. As far as the movie roles that were available to Black actors at the time, it's hard to think of one that was more ideal for Poitier, since he was able to establish his film career with a role free of stereotypes or marginalization. This created a path for him to navigate a career in which he could choose only to play the kind of noble, upstanding characters who non-white moviegoers yearned to see themselves in.

It’s also worth mentioning that the creative team behind the film was almost exclusively white men, which tended to be the case for most of Poitier’s social issue dramas, which were often just as much about white people wrestling with their own prejudices as they were about Poitier’s characters. Though considering the make-up of Hollywood during this time, it’s hard to imagine Poitier could have become such a breakthrough leading man in any other way. Also, even for its white filmmakers, No Way Out was far from an easy sell. By 1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was one of the most versatile and accomplished personalities in Hollywood, so he could afford to take on hot-button material. He’d started as a writer during the early sound era, before graduating to producer, and eventually making his way to director, with his then-most-recent film A Letter To Three Wives being a sizable hit. While the “social issue drama” had become a considerable force in movies by the late ‘40s, it’s still hard to imagine a film so audacious in its depictions of racism could’ve been made if it hadn’t been backed by someone as accomplished as Mankiewicz or producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who by this time had become arguably the most powerful industry player at 20th Century Fox.

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'No Way Out's Exploration of Racism

no way out
Image via 20th Century Fox

Perhaps the best way to explain what was (and still is) so shocking and essential about No Way Out is to recount its plot. It centers on Luther Brooks (Poitier), the only Black doctor in the prison ward of a county hospital. One night while he’s on the job, a pair of brothers are brought into the ward, having both been shot in the course of a botched robbery attempt. One of the brothers, Ray (Richard Widmark), is angered by the fact that his brother Johnny is being operated on by a Black doctor, as from the get-go Ray appears to be a virulent racist. When Brooks isn’t able to save Johnny’s life, Ray believes it was Brooks’s intention to murder him. Ray refuses an autopsy, so Luther and his boss, Wharton (Stephen McNally), seek a request for the autopsy from Johnny’s widow Edie (Linda Darnell), who is conflicted over the whole ordeal, questioning but also understands the racism that fuels Ray, having grown up in the same white working-class neighborhood, Beaver Canal.

Edie’s receptiveness to Ray’s point of view causes her to become a pawn in an attempt by some of the men of Beaver Canal to attack the residents of the nearby Black neighborhood, which results in a harrowing race riot. Brooks is working at the hospital the night of the riot, and gets fed up when a white woman demands that he take his “Black hands” off her son before spitting in his face. Luther then turns himself in for the murder of Johnny, which he knows will force an autopsy. Even though the autopsy proves Brooks’s innocence, Ray still becomes hell-bent on killing Brooks, as his status as a walking embodiment of unrestrained bigotry becomes more and more unhinged.

As the movie becomes more and more intense as Ray’s racism becomes increasingly out of control, Sidney Poitier is the calm at the center of the film’s racially-charged storm. At just 22 years of age, Poitier’s performance not only announces him as a new screen presence, but also establishes Brooks as the kind of composed, dignified character that signified a turning point for the kinds of roles available to Black actors. While Brooks is certainly aware of his need to cooperate with his white bosses, you also get the sense that the character feels trapped by his circumstances while a silent rage is bubbling underneath, threatening to come undone every time Widmark’s Ray hurls a litany of racial slurs at him. Yet for every time he’s tested, he retains a kind of grace that makes him incredibly likable, which is a dynamic that a lot of Poitier’s characters would embody as the actor's stardom became more and more prominent throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s.

'No Way Out' Has Only Grown in Importance

no way out
Image via 20th Century Fox

Despite No Way Out announcing the arrival of fresh new talent, the film was not a huge hit when it was released. It certainly says something about the dilemma that Fox was in that Sydney Poitier is fourth-billed on the poster despite clearly being the film’s star. Since the South was still very much segregated at the time, No Way Out was banned from playing there, instantly dooming its box office prospects. As noted in Aram Goudsouzian's Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, there was also a particularly tense battle for the film to be released in Chicago, where the NAACP decried the city’s police censor board for banning the film, before it was finally released after lopping off three minutes of its more controversial scenes. Clearly, America just wasn’t quite ready for a film that tackles racism in quite as bold of a way as No Way Out.

Regardless, the film still established Sidney Poitier as an undeniable force to be reckoned with. After playing supporting roles in films like 1951’s Cry, The Beloved Country and 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, Poitier reclaimed the leading man status he’d shown promise for with films like 1957’s Edge of the City and 1958’s The Defiant Ones, the latter of which would earn Poitier an Academy Award nomination, the first for a Black male actor. Poitier would then break another Oscar barrier by becoming the first Black man to win the Best Actor Oscar with 1963’s Lilies of The Field, which coincided with Poitier’s unprecedented rise as one of the biggest stars in America. During this period, Poitier and his close friend Harry Belafonte were two of show business’s biggest names to become involved with the Civil Rights movement, a movement whose urgency no doubt influenced white audiences’ openness to embrace Poitier as a movie star.

At the height of Poitier’s fame, he had an unbelievable year in 1967 with the release of arguably his three biggest movies — Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, With Love. In these three films, he plays a doctor, a seasoned detective, and a teacher, all respectable professional-types not unlike Dr. Luther Brooks in No Way Out. Also similarly, despite the calm, dignified nature of these characters, to varying degrees the race of Poitier’s characters always becomes an issue between him and the white characters he’s surrounded by. While there’s no denying how great Poitier is in these movies, the same issue arises that Poitier appeared in the middle of stories with a decidedly white liberal perspective, which he was often criticized for by the Black community. Still, Poitier had become a big enough star that he had a decent amount of influence over what appeared in his movies. The most famous example would be a scene from In the Heat of the Night, where Poitier’s Detective Virgil Tibbs, working in the deep South, questions a possible white suspect who slaps Tibbs in the face before Tibbs instantly slaps him back. Poitier refused to take the part unless it was re-written to show him slapping a white man, and serves as a thrilling reminder that as cool and collected as Poitier’s characters were, they still had a breaking point.

As beloved as Poitier had become for playing this kind of strong, stoic character, by the 1970s it seemed that he had a desire to distance himself from these social issue dramas that he’d built his career on. He started directing more of his films, many of them comedies such as Uptown Saturday Night or the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor vehicle Stir Crazy. His desire to take on less topical material may have been due to the changing nature of Hollywood, which was starting to embrace the blaxploitation movies that stood as a considerable contrast to the films that Poitier had broken down barriers with. It also could have had to do with the way his characters were sometimes criticized for having a misguided exceptionalism that could be seen as problematic in some ways. Though at the same time, it doesn’t really feel like the time to poke holes in Poitier’s accomplishments as an actor, which are still pretty mind-boggling. The outpouring of love that has accompanied his death has proven that Sidney Poitier was undeniably a force for good in the world of movies — and it all started with him seizing the unlikely opportunity of being cast as the 22-year-old lead of No Way Out.