Poitier’s first instinct was to refuse. He was on record as opposing the production. He believed, and said so, that the material was demeaning to Black Americans.
He accepted anyway. The specific reasons are a matter of some complexity — the contractual situation, the pressure from the studio, the calculation that refusal might cost him professionally in ways that acceptance might not, the possibility that his participation could shape the production in ways that refusal could not. He went through with it.
The film was produced in 1959, directed by Otto Preminger. It was not a success — critically or commercially, it failed to reach the expectations that the production budget and the prestige cast might have suggested. Poitier’s performance was noted but the film was not warmly received. It was, by most accounts, exactly the kind of film he had feared it would be.
He spoke about it honestly in later years. He did not claim it was a good decision. He placed it in the larger context of a career in which not every decision had been optimal, in which the constraints of the industry and the pragmatic calculations of survival sometimes led to choices that, in retrospect, he wished he had made differently.
The Porgy and Bess episode matters for several reasons. It illustrates that Poitier’s career was not a clean line of principled choices leading inevitably to glory. It was a human career — a series of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty and constraint, some of them correct, some of them not. The man who made Oscar history in 1964 was the same man who had done Porgy and Bess in 1959, and the two facts exist together without resolving into a simple narrative.