It was also the first film his parents ever saw him in.
Reginald and Evelyn Poitier, the tomato farmers from Cat Island who had expected their premature youngest son to die in a Miami hospital, watched their son on a movie screen. Poitier described this moment in later interviews as one that carried a specific and unrepeatable weight. Whatever he had built — the bus ticket north, the years of kitchen work, the nights with the newspaper, the auditions and the stage and the camera — it was visible to them now. It had a shape.
The films that followed in the first decade of Poitier’s career established his range and his willingness to take on material that made white Hollywood uncomfortable.
Cry, the Beloved Country, filmed in South Africa in 1951 and released in 1952, was among the first major Hollywood films to address apartheid directly. Blackboard Jungle, in 1955, cast him as an alienated and challenging high school student in a film about urban public education that was itself a contested and controversial text — the film was banned in some cities, its use of rock and roll soundtrack held up as evidence of social decay by some critics.
Edge of the City, in 1957, built a friendship between Poitier and John Cassavetes across racial lines in a story set on the New York waterfront. The film showed the friendship without condescension and without the careful management of discomfort that usually characterized interracial relationships on American screens in the 1950s.
The Defiant Ones, in 1958, put Poitier and Tony Curtis on screen together as escaped convicts chained to each other — a Black man and a white man who despise each other, who have to survive together, whose survival depends on learning to function as something other than enemies. The film earned Poitier his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.