I didn't think it was possible for me to be shocked by a film about racism released in 1950, but I was wrong.
In "No Way Out," Richard Widmark plays an absolutely vile racist who spews the most hateful language I've heard in a narrative film in a long time. I found myself actually wincing every time he used some sort of racial epithet, which is frequently. His target is Sidney Poitier, the doctor who he thinks killed his brother while pretending to try to save his life. This specific story of racism plays out against the backdrop of a larger story of racist violence that occurs between a black neighborhood and the white trash enclave that has sworn vengeance against it.
This is a harsh, angry, bitter pill of a movie, and deserves to be rediscovered in our current climate of renewed racial outrage. I'd like to think Widmark's character is a bit of a caricature, but after hearing and seeing some of the people living in our country today, it would seem not. Poitier plays his role the way he played every role he was ever in, while Linda Darnell, as Widmark's former sister-in-law, creates the film's most fascinating character, a woman whose actual experience with black people doesn't jive with what she's been taught to think about them.
What I liked most about "No Way Out" was the way it refuses to condescend to black people and portray them all as too good to be true noble sufferers, the way other movies from the time period do. The scenes set in Poitier's household portray them as just normal people, painfully aware at all times of the burden of being black in America, but otherwise just wanting to go about their lives. The character of a black maid who works for a white doctor was one of my favorites in the movie. She has a warm employee/employer relationship with the doctor, and he even treats her at times like one of the family, but a word or glance she throws out here and there make clear that she never forgets the difference between them, even if he thinks he does.
"No Way Out" brought Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Lesser Samuels an Oscar nomination for Best Story and Screenplay in the same year that Mankiewicz won the awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay for "All About Eve." Good year for him.
Grade: A
