A Patch of Blue (1965)

(On Cable TV, April 2021) There’s a completely unsubtle romance at the core of A Patch of Blue — a literal illustration of “love is blind” in which a blind white girl falls for a black man. For 1965, this was courageous stuff, but what saves the film for modern audiences is the utterly likable performance from Sidney Poitier, who carries the film without missteps even at this early stage of his career. The cast around him is quite good as well—Elizabeth Hartman is suitably sympathetic as the blind girl, while Shelley Winters is striking as her incredibly unpleasant mother. The narrative isn’t much—and for all of its progressive intentions, the film isn’t allowed to go very far—but the acting is great and the individual scenes avoid hammering the already-unsubtle nature of the narrative. It doesn’t take much more than that to transform A Patch of Blue from what could have been an overbearing Oscar-baiting film into something quite watchable.