Lilies of the Field was not a film with large ambitions or a large budget. It was shot in black and white, which was already becoming unusual for films released in 1963. Its director was Ralph Nelson, a veteran of television drama. Its source material was a 1962 novel by William Edmund Barrett — not a celebrated literary text, not an adaptation of a well-known stage property, not a prestige project in any obvious sense.
What it had was Sidney Poitier.
He played Homer Smith, a traveling handyman and former United States Army soldier who stops his car in the Arizona desert to get water from a pump. He encounters a group of East German nuns — refugees who have established themselves in a dilapidated property in the desert — and ends up, through a combination of his own good nature and the prioress’s absolute certainty that God has sent him to build them a chapel, spending the next several weeks constructing the building.
The role required Poitier to be genuinely funny, to be genuinely warm, to carry the film’s emotional arc through a character who is not the most expressive of his feelings and who is being pulled by obligations he didn’t choose and doesn’t fully understand. Homer Smith sings. He teaches the German nuns to sing. He shows the local community how to help. He builds the chapel, which is the physical expression of something that none of the film’s characters, including Homer, can easily articulate.
It is, on its surface, a simple story. It is the kind of story that requires a specific quality of screen presence to make work without tipping into sentimentality or condescension. Poitier had that quality.