He made choices throughout this period. The choices were not always optimal. He sometimes said yes to material that he subsequently wished he had refused. He sometimes had limited options — the leverage that a major star can exercise is real, but it is not unlimited, and it is especially limited when the industry has decided that your market is a specific and bounded one.
What he did consistently was maintain the core of the instrument. The seriousness as a performer. The refusal to degrade the character even when the material around the character was mediocre. The quality of attention and presence that made him watchable even in films that were not fully worthy of what he brought to them.
That quality — the watchability, the presence, the sense of someone genuinely thinking and feeling rather than executing a performance — was built over those twelve years, from the reading lessons in the closed restaurant to the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. It was not given to him. It was assembled, piece by piece, in the work.
## Homer Smith, the Chapel, and Why That Film
Lilies of the Field is a quiet film. That is one of its most distinctive qualities, and it is one of the qualities that the 1964 Oscar win can obscure if you approach the film already knowing it won.
The film is not loud. It is not politically urgent in an obvious way. It does not announce itself as the film that would win Sidney Poitier a Best Actor Oscar. It has the texture of a modest enterprise — a small story, a limited setting, a cast that does not include major stars beyond Poitier himself, a production aesthetic that is spare and unglamorous.