Lilies of the Field (1963)

 For his part in 'Lilies of the Field' Sidney Poitier becomes the first person of color to win an Oscar for a lead acting performance. Based on William Edmund Barrett's 1962 novella 'The Lilies of the Field', the film is about a black Baptist handy man who helps a group of Germanic nuns build a small chapel in Arizona. Though the subjects of religion and race are there in the foreground, they are never gotten at too deeply. This is not a probing examination, it is intended to uplift. It is the film on these matters that audiences in early 1960's America were ready to accept, pretty well down the line, it reportedly did quite good business in at least the metropolitan centers of the old South. Pleasant, likable, with just enough heart, and just enough to say, to not be forgettable. ***