Product: Lilies of the Field [VHS] (1963)
Rating: 5.0
Excellent!
Sidney Poiter is one of my favorite actors. He is not only smart and talented but also embodies a sense of decency no matter what character he's playing. In this, he is like few other actors. (Gregory Peck and, to a lesser degree, Robert Redford come to mind.) He has enormous charisma even in some of his later, less satisfying movies. It is not an accident, corny as it may sound, that I was inspired as a boy to even consider teaching by his turn in "To Sir, with Love"; I've long since moved on from any such idealistic notions, but Poitier made teaching an even nobler calling than it is. I was surprised that I'd not seen "Lilies of the Field" until recently, both because it is one of my mother's favorite movies and because it got him a well-deserved Academy Award. (I'm also surprised that it was directed by Ralph Nelson, whose eclectic body of works includes the uber-violent "Soldier Blue" a few years later.) The story is sweet and grounded in reality. A handyman drifter encounters a group of destitute, mostly German nuns who through a combination of beguilement and determination get him to build them a chapel. For most of the film, Poitier's Homer Smith butts heads with Mother Maria Mathe (Lilia Skala), whom at one point he compares to Hitler. She is tough-as-nails, and in one particularly charming scene, out Bibles the Baptist Smith in a contest of using scripture to find a way to not have to pay him. Smith, or Schmidt, as the nuns call him, ultimately and not surprisingly comes around to their way of thinking. Based on a novel by William Edmund Barrett, "Lilies of the Field" is sentimental without being treacly, succeeding more because it is honest than because of anything manipulative. It doesn't ram religion down anyone's throat, and yet makes believing in something more meaningful than petty self interest as natural an expression of human experience as eating and breathing. Even Jerry Goldsmith's modest score, including the hymn "Amen," never overshadows the sincerity of the emotions. The movie may seem quaint in this age of mega churches and assembly-line tithing and salvation, but, its dramatic qualities notwithstanding, "Lilies of the Field" says more about the spirit of what it preaches than a thousand fire and brimstone types resorting to telling rather than showing, or, perhaps, pontificating rather than living.