Lilies of the Field

From the Bible, Mathhew 6:28, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.  They toil not, neither do they spin."  

Lilies of the Field is a 1963 black and white film which starred Sidney Poitier and Lilia Skala.  It was nominated for five Academy Awards:  Best Picture (won by Tom Jones), Best Actor (won by Poitier), Best Supporting Actress (Skala, but won by Margaret Rutherford for The V.I.P.s), Best Screenplay (James Poe, but won by John Osborne for Tom Jones) and Best Cinematography (won by Hud).

Homer Smith (Poitier), a travelling jack-of-all-trades, stops for water at an isolated farm in Arizona run by a group of East German nuns led by Mother Maria (Skala).  The nuns believe he was sent by God to build their chapel.  

Smith starts doing some odd jobs for the nuns hoping to earn some money, but is never paid.  They have no money.  

Eventually, people from the community come to help when he finally agrees to build the chapel.  "Smith brings the chapel to completion, placing the cross on the spire himself and signing his work where only he and God will know."

Sidney Poitier was born February 20, 1927 in Miami, Florida to Bahamian parents.  After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he attempted a career as an actor.

In 1950, Poitier appeared in his first movie, No Way Out, as a doctor who treats a bigoted patient (played by Richard Widmark).  In 1955, he portrayed a problem high school student opposing his English teacher (played by Glen Ford) in Blackboard Jungle.

In 1958, Poitier and Tony Curtis (playing a racist) were two escaped prisoners chained together in The Defiant Ones.  In 1961, Poitier was the eldest son of a Black family moving into an all-White neighborhood in A Raisin in the Sun.

After Lilies of the Field, Poitier hit the trifecta in 1967 with three outstanding films:  To Sir, With Love (as a teacher in an inner city school in Britain), In the Heat of the Night (as a police detective investigating a murder in a racist town in Mississippi, co-starring Rod Steiger as the local police chief) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (as a doctor engaged to a rich young White woman in San Francisco, co-starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as her parents). 

Sidney Poitier recently died in Beverly Hills, California at the age of ninety-four.