Sidney Poitier Movies

“Little Nikita” (1988)

Long before Fox’s TV series The Americans, director Richard Benjamin’s Little Nikita, starring the late Sidney Poitier opposite the late River Phoenix, soft pedaled Soviet sleeper agents in America. Paramount’s 1988 movie teams the two actors, who re-teamed in 1992’s similarly Russian spy-themed Robert Redford vehicle, Sneakers.

With excellent exposition, actor-director Richard Benjamin begins with the drumbeat of a military march which marks a transition to an all-American parade in Southern California. As talented drum majorettes and an Uncle Sam on stilts march—as a young, slimmer Loretta Devine coordinates—Little Nikita introduces the energetic young Phoenix as an ambitious teenager. Amid a meeting in Mexico at Soviet Russia’s embassy, a horse racetrack murder of an IRS agent by a double agent and Reagan-Gorbachev clips, Mr. Poitier’s hard-working man of justice seems intent on finding the killer of his partner 20 years ago. This puts moral emphasis on the year 1968 (the late Sixt…