Officially, he’s one of an ensemble cast of six, all men, with a seventh appearing briefly early on, but he really has the starring role and he’s the focal point of the entire film. What’s more, he does a fantastic job in a complex role and, in doing so, set the stage for Poitier and the big changes that we would see over the next couple of decades, if often through Poitier’s far more prominent performances. Yet a year earlier, another African American actor made his mark in a role that would have been perfect for Poitier his name was James Edwards and he would have been a hundred years old today.
He made his mark early in his career in No Way Out, playing a doctor who treats a pair of racist brothers, but that was in 1950 it was his second film and the first for which he received a credit. It seems appropriate to mention here that Sidney Poitier was only thirteen at the time, because we tend to see him nowadays as the true beginning of progress, but that’s not entirely fair. While that was a major step, it has to also be remembered that Georgia’s segregationist laws meant that she was barred from even attending the film’s premiere in Atlanta Hollywood and America had a long way to go. Less well remembered is the fact that she was also the first African American nominee.
I chose The Ghost Breakers to remember him, given that he was close to being half a comedic double act with Bob Hope in it, but he still had to deal with spook jokes and dialogue like, ‘You look like a blackout in a blackout.’ It was 1940, after all, only a year after Hattie McDaniel had become the first African American winner of an Academy Award for her performance in Gone with the Wind. A couple of years ago, I took a look at how outrageously racist Hollywood was back in its classic era, while celebrating the career of Willie Best, a massively talented African American actor who began his career as Sleep n’ Eat and was given next to nothing to do for decades well, except act lazy, eat watermelon and roll dice. Movies like this are shocking realisations of how far we’ve really come and how quickly because they chart the passage of time. Watching the news lately, it sometimes seems like we’ve hardly progressed at all in the world of race relations.
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