CATCH A CLASSIC
MLK Day Sidney Poitier Marathon
TCM, beginning at 5 a.m.
TCM’s Martin Luther King Day lineup is all about the African American experience, beginning with seven movies starring the iconic Sidney Poitier, who helped pave the way for Black actors in Hollywood with his first Oscar nomination in 1959 and his Oscar win in 1964. Seven of his films air this morning and into the afternoon. First, in the romance drama A Warm December (1973), an African American doctor falls in love with the niece of an African ambassador (Esther
Anderson) while on vacation in London, then discovers she is sick from a rare terminal illness. Next, two families struggle with the interracial marriage of their children in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a Black police officer from Philadelphia is wrongly suspected of a local murder while traveling through a small Mississippi town in the 1967 Oscar-winning thriller In the Heat of the Night (pictured), and Oscar winner Shelley Winters co-stars as a blind woman befriended by a Black man who becomes determined to help her escape an abusive home in the romance drama A Patch of Blue (1965). The next film, Lilies of the Field (1963), which was the film Poitier received his only Oscar for, follows an out-ofwork handyman who is recruited by a group of nuns to help them build a church. Finally, two convicts (Poitier and Tony Curtis, both nominated for Oscars for their roles) who are chained together escape to freedom in The Defiant Ones (1958), and a pair of brothers are wounded during an attempted robbery in the film noir (1950).