Chapter 5: Acting

Essay: Contemporary Treatments of Race in Popular Cinema

Very few actors play leading roles in feature films, and minority actors achieve that level of success even more rarely. Only a handful of minority actors have ever won an Oscar. Sidney Poitier (b. 1927) and Denzel Washington (b. 1954) belong to both select groups, however, and are likely the two most famous and successful African American actors in Hollywood history. Each has captured the hearts and minds of the American filmgoing public. Thanks to talent, charm, physical appeal, and determination, each has succeeded in a system dominated by white leading men, within a society focused on white heroes and a culture filled with stories of white success. A comparison of their careers, which span two very different eras, reveals some of the ways the treatment of race in popular cinema has evolved over the past forty years.

A male film star is always an expression of, an endorsement of, indeed a celebration of, some masculine ideal. Cary Grant played suave ladies' men, Bruce Willis plays tough guys, and so on. Such a broad distinction—one is a lover, one a fighter—is not very helpful unless we compare each actor with other actors who also embody that general ideal. For example, Willis, like Harrison Ford, tends to play action film heroes who triumph over villains by thinking on their feet, using craftiness and street smarts, whereas Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone generally play heroes who rely on sheer physical strength, even brutality. Whatever ideal he typifies, a male film star is largely defined by the way he expresses force and passion. Working within that predefined area, a male African American film star faces the difficult task of expressing masculinity in a culture largely threatened by any African American expression of force or passion. Many successful African American leading men have had to be, like Jackie Robinson (1919–1972), the second baseman who broke the color barrier in baseball, above reproach, their aggression carefully controlled and their passion chaste and noble.

Because Sidney Poitier's film career began in the segregated early 1950s, his road to success was rockier than Denzel Washington's. As a young immigrant, Poitier worked menial jobs in Miami and Harlem. When his heavy Bahamian accent got him laughed off the stage at the American Negro Theater, he worked for months to improve his diction. When Poitier appeared in his first major film—Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950)—the Civil Rights Movement had not yet begun. In that film, Poitier's role (a black doctor treating a white racist) was a type he was to repeat many times over: a character who, when faced with adversity and racism, expresses his anger with controlled eloquence, effecting change through the strength of his will and the righteousness of his cause. In Ralph Nelson's Lilies of the Field (1963), Poitier played another righteous character, a handyman who helps a group of German nuns build a chapel in the Arizona desert, and he became the first African American actor to win an Oscar for a leading role. Poitier played similarly admirable and well-received characters in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and James Clavell's To Sir, with Love (1967). In the former, Poitier portrayed a highly respected doctor with impeccable international credentials who falls in love with a wealthy, white San Francisco college girl; and in the latter, he portrayed an English schoolteacher who in just a few weeks turns a ragged group of East End students into proper young British adults. To such roles, Poitier brought a dignified, controlled, and stoic presence. He played heroes who sublimated their aggression and passion by mastering socially sanctioned manners, in every sense of that word.

Sublimated aggression	Chaste passion
Intensity of thought	Chaste passion

These stills, from To Sir, with Love, illustrate Poitier's range; he could play the fun-loving prankster as well as the smoldering champion of just causes. Like many great film actors, Poitier realized early on that underplaying roles encourages film viewers to infer a character's thoughts and emotions.

In To Sir, with Love, Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) attempts to bond with his working-class students by describing his journey from poor child to successful teacher

Dr. John Wade Prentice (Sidney Poitier) tells Matt Drayton (Spencer Tracy) that he is in love with his daughter

When the Draytons' African American maid, Tillie (Isabel Sanford), assumes the worst about Prentice and turns out to be less accepting of an interracial relationship than the Draytons are, the film humorously and ironically challenges assumptions about race

Prentice's lecture to his father (Roy Glenn) about paternal obligations and filial responsibilities comes across as the filmmakers' polemic about the need for changes in racial attitudes

By the time Denzel Washington began appearing on television and in movies, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the road to success for African American actors had been paved by pioneers from Oscar Micheaux (see the chapter 7 discovery module "African American Filmmakers") to Sidney Poitier. Like Poitier, Washington began his career by playing roles that highlighted his dignity, controlled strength, and gentlemanly good looks. For six years, Washington played a doctor in the successful television series St. Elsewhere. He then portrayed the nearly saintly figure of murdered black South African activist Steven Biko in Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom (1987). In 1989, Washington won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role as Trip in Edward Zwick's Glory, a Civil War drama that, in depicting the first all-black regiment in the United States, traces Trip's transformation from an angry militant to a self-sacrificing Union soldier. In Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992), a biopic of the somewhat contradictory and highly controversial African American activist, who undergoes his own trajectory from militancy to self-sacrifice, Washington cemented his iconic status. In the series of big-budget films that followed—Alan J. Pakula's The Pelican Brief (1993), Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993), Tony Scott's Crimson Tide (1995), Penny Marshall's The Preacher's Wife (1996), and Zwick's Courage Under Fire (1996)—Washington played somewhat compromised but noble men who despite many temptations to take the low road ultimately make decisions based on higher principle. Washington's personal life harmonized with his characters' moral integrity; he has a long and stable marriage and family life and conveys unusual humility and discretion in interviews.

After many years of representing, on and off the screen, a new kind of all-American man suited to increasingly multicultural times, Washington elected to veer away from idealization when he accepted the role of Detective Alonzo Harris, a corrupt police officer, in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day (2001). No one's idea of a good role model, but a disconcertingly charming villain, Harris uses force and passion to evil rather than heroic ends. With this portrayal, Washington became only the second African American man to win an Oscar for a leading role, almost forty years after Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field.

Washington's win for Training Day suggests how far the Hollywood film industry has come and how long it took to get there. After all, two of the most offensive and reductive depictions of African Americans in American cinema were also two of the most widely seen films of the first half of the century: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939). In early films such as these, African American characters are presented as simple-minded caricatures. Most of Poitier's and Washington's roles presented more positive African American stereotypes, but they nonetheless reinforced stereotypes rather than shedding light on the full humanity of men who happened to be African American. That an African American man was rewarded for representing well a vicious, morally hollow character suggests that filmmakers and viewers finally may be ready to see African American actors in a wider range of roles.

Detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) literally holds a gun to the head of Officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) and forces him to smoke marijuana laced with PCP

Harris argues with Hoyt that cops must be wolves to stop the wolves

Harris alone in the world with no place to turn