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Does that reflect the actual life expectancy at that time? A quick bit of Googling indicates that a 1994 study found that the median life expectancy for women with sickle cell anemia was 48 - did it get better over the years? Anderson is 27 and worried that she could die at any time her mother died of the disease at 22, and the only reassurance Poitier can give her is that some patients have been known to live into their 30s.
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Wikipedia says it also occurs “relatively frequently” in parts of India and the Arabian Peninsula. Poitier tells his daughter that Anderson is suffering from sickle cell anemia, a genetic disorder that he characterizes as “a black disease” because it affects people of African descent far more often than other demographic groups. Poitier was 46 I don’t believe his character’s age is ever specified, though he is a widower with a young daughter. Anderson was 27 when the film came out, just like her character. The first time Poitier and Anderson are about to sleep together, there’s an amusing bit where she nervously rattles off a list of facts about her nation and its resources while he begins to stroke her, and finally she says, “So if you don’t stop doing that, I’m going to fall apart.” (The two lead characters are from the United States and Africa, respectively, but - given that Poitier was from the Bahamas - both of the actors playing them were from the West Indies.)
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The princess is played by Esther Anderson, a Jamaican actress and filmmaker who (according to her Wikipedia page, though the IMDb does not confirm this) had already served as a producer on 1972’s The Harder They Fall. The Poitier character’s last name is Younger, just like his character in 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun. I am sure that that subplot reflects the political reality of post-colonial Africa on some level, but I do wonder how the film’s treatment of it played in the early 1970s. The film is also remarkably casual about the fact that the princess is chummy with representatives of the Soviet Union, who are planning to sell her country a hydroelectric plant. (Between her political position and her illness, the fact that their relationship has a time limit attached to it is reminiscent of both Roman Holiday and any of a number of man-falls-for-sick-woman movies, from Love Story to I Still Believe - though it tilts more towards the former kind of movie.)Īlong the way, there are glimpses of African culture including a fantastic performance of Miriam Makeba’s ‘Nonqonqo’ by Letta Mbulu.
So when she and Poitier do get serious about each other, it’s with the knowledge that their affair could be cut very short. (I will confess that the phrase “manic pixie dream girl” flashed through my mind once or twice, though she’s not quite as flighty as all that.)Īnd the reason she’s playing these games is because (spoiler alert!) she’s sick and doesn’t know how much longer she’ll have to live. She’s just the kind of person who likes to play mysterious games. Poitier’s next two films were in different genres, but continued to express a particular interest in African and/or African-American culture.Ī Warm December (1973), for example, is a romance between a widowed African-American man who goes to England for a vacation and falls in love with an African princess/diplomat.Īt first, you might think that there is some sort of Hitchcockian intrigue going on here - the woman first meets Poitier when she tries to hide behind him from a man who is following her on the sidewalk - but no, it turns out that there are no villains here, and no big conspiracy. 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, his first directorial effort, put a different spin on the western by focusing on a wagon train of ex-slaves looking for a new home.
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So it’s striking to see how, by the 1970s, Poitier had taken his stardom and used it to (a) launch his career as a movie director and (b) focus on stories with all- or mostly-black casts. In 1963’s Lilies of the Field, for which he won the best-actor Oscar, the white characters were arguably outnumbered by the Hispanic characters, but Poitier remained the only black character of any significance. In 1967 alone, he played the black teacher in a mostly-white British high school, the black cop who helps a white small-town police force find the white killer of a white murder victim, and the black man who meets his white fiancee’s white parents for the first time.