The 1950 film noir NO WAY OUT not only broke convention by casting a Black leading man, it confronted white racism in a way few films do even today.
Sidney Poitier, the trailblazing, Academy Award-winning actor who died on January 6 at the age of 94, made a career portraying characters who maintained their dignity in the face of racism, both overt and subtle. In his most acclaimed performances, from his Oscar turn in 1964’s Lilies of the Field to his iconic “call me Mister Tibbs” moment in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, Poitier embodied the ‘take the high road” approach to confronting racial prejudice, shaming haters by expressing the basic humanity that they tried to deny him. At a moment when white America was attempting to dismantle the formal apparatus of segregation through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, these portrayals were both powerful and necessary. What’s less known is that Poitier began his career in a film that confronted the issues of race more directly than most Hollywood films today, much less at the time it was made. That movie was No Way Out, a film noir directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and written by Mankiewicz and Lesser Samuels, released in 1950 – half a decade before the Montgomery bus boycott and the earliest stirrings of mass protests. No Way Out would have been remarkable simply for the casting of the very young Poitier in a role other than the Pullman porters, domestics, and cringeworthy “comic relief” characters that Hollywood had consigned Black actors to in the 30s and 40s. Here he plays the first Black doctor hired by a major municipal hospital, full of pride at his accomplishment but also riddled with self-doubt and painfully aware that he is being held to different standards, even by nominally open-minded white colleagues, due to his race and circumstance.
