Sidney Poitier Movies
“To Sir, With Love II” (1996)
For the rare, thoughtful and very romantic sequel to a classic movie, Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love II makes a delightful 90-minute diversion. The Sony Pictures Television film, which aired on CBS on April 7, 1996, was the late director Peter Bogdanovich’s first television picture. If you’ve seen the 1967 original, this’ll be a treat.
To Sir, With Love II’s predictable and enjoyable at once. The late Mr. Poitier recreates his role as British schoolteacher Mark Thackeray, and both Lulu and Judy Geeson reprise their roles in cameo appearances, taking a job on Chicago’s south side for personal reasons. The original story and characters are based on the 1959 novel by E.R. Braithwaite, a black British teacher who was the son of a diamond and gold miner—his parents attended Oxford University—and earned a master’s degree in physics.
In this sequel, widower Thackeray's assigned to teach at John Adams High School for a former colleague (Daniel J. Travanti) and, naturally, ends up teaching history to delinquents who are the Nineties version of thugs, tramps and street kids. Instilling values, treating them as individuals as he did in the earlier movie, he tries to make progress. In the best scene, he takes the class on a field trip in downtown Chicago to learn how to conduct themselves as human beings. A subplot entails his personal goal to find a lost love which circuitously gains momentum from his teaching.
Besides Hill Street Blues actor Travanti and Sidney Poitier, look for a good cast (including journalist LZ Granderson as a student badly influenced by his criminal older brother) in a fresh, entertaining story by Philip Rosenberg with a few subplots about kids struggling to survive. The Bogdanovich movie’s an achievement in that the serious issues are taken seriously yet Mr. Poitier gets to shine in a distinctive, unusual role which was ahead of its time in 1967, more so in 1996 and suited to his refined grit. Screenwriter Rosenberg managed to pack pathos into various parts of the script.
To Sir, With Love II is better than its reputation—there’s frequently value in movies directed by Peter Bogdanovich—and the original movie’s theme of sweetening young people’s lives with a strong, principled man of the mind as an example endures, even if only as a kind of modern Hollywood fable.
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I haven't seen this film; will have to check it out. Another Poitier film that deserves a sequel is "Brother John." In this odd 1971 picture, the enigmatic John Kane returns to his small, Southern hometown for his sister's funeral. Amid racial and labor tensions, local law enforcement become highly suspicious of John, who has managed to travel the world without any hint of what he does for a living. Only kindly town doctor Will Geer, who delivered John years ago, comes to realize that he is an extraterrestrial. When he asks John what he has seen, John replies: "I have seen ... people. Swarming all over the world ... like maggots on a rotten apple, getting ready to leap off the earth. First to the moon, and then to the stars. "