Sidney Poitier Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Clyde Jeavons

Critical Essay by Clyde Jeavons

Although apparently intent on saying something meaningful about emergent Africa, Sidney Poitier's second feature as director [A Warm December] turns out to be an amorphous transposition of Love Story, employing familiar push-button techniques to spring one's emotions. The dark continent is sentimentalised in the worst traditions of [Zoltan Korda's] Sanders of the River by the interpolation halfway through of an achingly pretty Swahili folksong, while the fictitious and unconvincing state of Torunda has closer ties with those speculative, wind-of-change television dramas of the Sixties … than with the turbulent political arena of Amin, Kaunda and Co. Saddled with an aimless script, Poitier is marginally more effective in front of the camera than behind it, responding with understandable warmth to the pretty [Catherine] and participating in some incongruous motocross events whenever the plot runs out of steam.

Clyde Jeavons, in his review of "A Warm December," in Monthly Film Bulletin...
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