To Sir, With Love (1967)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) 1967 was an extraordinary year for Sidney Poitier, but while we readily remember In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, fewer will remember the third of his movies that year: To Sir, With Love. This time, he’s off to London as a teacher in a tough school, befriending local hoodlums and wayward girls after the initial hostility. The same super-teacher movie has been made and remade many times since then, but two things help To Sir, With Love remain interesting fifty years later—Poitier’s performance, obviously, but also the street-level view of London in the mid-1960s, as the film confronts the rise in teenage rebellion. The film itself is definitely on the side of the establishment—as the protagonist befriends his charges, he lifts them toward notions of respectability and good manners, helping them fit in society. As such, you can see the film as deeply conservative, but that too is in the tradition of that kind of movie. To Sir, With Love is a film about the revolution but not a revolutionary film—as such, it may have aged a bit better than the trendy New Hollywood movies that followed slightly later. For Poitier, this is a great role—he gets to whip up a few youngsters into shape, befitting his image as the capable, nearly unflappable black man. There’s a lot to unpack in this persona, as it was the only one allowed to him at the time, but that’s a discussion for another time, and about his other two movies of 1967.