Lilies of the Field

It's time for my annual look back 50 years into Hollywood's past by viewing the nominees for Best Picture, this time those of 1963, the year JFK died and Brad Pitt was born. I start with Lilies of the Field, which was a landmark film in one way--it earned its star, Sidney Poitier, the first Best Actor award won by a black man.

What's interesting about a film from 1963 starring a black actor is that Lilies of the Field is not about race. Poitier plays Homer Smith, a kind of everyman (the name, surely not an accident, has a reference to the Odyssey and the most generic surname in America). He is driving cross country when he needs water for his car. He pulls into a driveway which leads to a small structure. Outside are nuns. The mother superior (Lilia Skala) looks heavenward, as her prayers for a strong man have been aswered.

Poitier, an itinerant worker, agrees to fix their roof, but for pay. He stays for dinner, teaches them a little English, and stays the night. But the next morning Skalia does not pay him. Instead she shows him a tangle of beams and bricks. She says he has been sent by God to help build a chapel.

The rest of the film is a contest of wills between the two. They exchange Bible verses--that's where the title comes from--but Poitier is no match for her, a German nun who escaped over the Berlin wall. She knows how to manipulate his pride, and he ends up not only working on the chapel, but insisting on doing it by himself. Eventually the entire community chips in.

There is only one inkling of racial tension. Poitier, in order to fund his stay, takes a job with a construction company, as he is an experienced driver of bulldozers. The company's owner, played by director Ralph Nelson, calls him "boy." Poitier calls him boy right back, a bit of foreshadowing of the moment four years later Poitier, as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night, slaps a white man, a moment that would change movie history.

Lilies of the Field is an okay film, but it doesn't hold up well. Poitier is very animated in the film, but he's given better performances. The script never does fix on why he stays. Skala, who was also nominated for an Oscar, has an easier part to play, as her motivation is clear--she's a true believer.