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The wordsmith's noir streak, cf. Somewhere in the Night, the violence under the epigram. A Hippocratic test, the Black physician (Sidney Poitier) earning his stripes by patching up the raging bigot (Richard Widmark). "I thought this was a hospital. You got mixed up, we're at the Cotton Club." The hoodlum's brother dies mid-spinal tap, an autopsy would exonerate the doctor, permission is denied by the venomous next of kin. The resident supervisor (Stephen McNally) stands by his pupil, the administrator (Stanley Ridges) braces himself for a public-relations ordeal while broadcasting his enlightenment. "Why, if anything, I'm pro-Negro." The dead patient's widow (Linda Darnell) is a hard-boiled slattern, a weary version of the gold-digger from A Letter to Three Wives and equally concerned with upward mobility, from sewer to swamp. The race riot is a memory of the war, a flare pistol announces the preemptive attack on shantytown hotheads. "Don't you see? This way you're no better than they are." "Ain't that askin' a lot for us to be better than them, when we get killed just trying to prove we're as good?" A sententious social-message tract and a gripping suspense thriller, two movies dueling for control like Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screenplay versus his camera. Poitier in his debut already deftly wraps fury in elegance, the household also includes the young Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The sky over the junkyard of ignorance lights up right before the rumble, the "mad dog" of prejudice meets his match in the hero who understands that healing is the best revenge. "Don't cry, white boy. You're gonna live." Hubert Cornfield borrows Poitier and amps up the expressionism for his stark companion piece, Pressure Point. With Mildred Joanne Smith, Harry Bellaver, Dots Johnson, Bert Freed, Amanda Randolph, Dick Paxton, and Will Wright. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |