In the 1967 movie “In the Heat of the Night,” Virgil Tibbs, a Black detective played by Sidney Poitier, is slapped across the face by Endicott, a white plantation owner he is interrogating in a murder investigation. Tibbs immediately retaliates with a slap of his own—a gesture that has gone down in history as “the slap heard round the world” (Guardian, 1/7). Never before had the Hollywood screen allowed–let alone affirmed—such an expression of Black antiracist anger. We want to cheer.
Yet, even this feel-good moment is directed by the ruling class. Working-class movie-goers need to be skeptical of the pleasures afforded by popular culture. We may think movies are “just entertainment,” but we are being strategically positioned to view some characters and actions as villainous, and others as admirable: nothing could be more political. So, how do movies reflect the historical pressures of their times? What ruling-class ideologies do they affirm? How do we apply communist criticism to the propaganda of the bosses—capitalist entertainment, after all, is part of the state apparatus.
Impossible stains status
The films of the recently-deceased Sidney Poitier (1927—2022) provide an excellent opportunity for communist critique. Poitier is best known for several films from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s in which he played characters transcending racial antagonism through near-impossible displays of individual integrity, stoicism, and moral generosity.
In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), he and Tony Curtis co-star as escaping prisoners chained together; at the end, Poitier’s character gives up the chance to hop onto a freight car to remain with his wounded friend. In “Lilies of the Field“ (1963)—for which Poitier was the first Black man to win the Best Actor Oscar award—he plays an itinerant handyman who, free of charge, constructs a church for a group of German nuns. In these sentimental films, multiracial solidarity is linked not with antiracist struggle, but self-sacrifice.  
As James Baldwin caustically commented about the finale of “The Defiant Ones:” “Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney, at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. . . . The Harlem audience was outraged and yelled, Get back on the train you fool! “ (The Conversation, 1/7).
In 1967, three of Poitier’s films were top box office hits. In “To Sir, with Love,” Poitier plays a teacher who tames and edifies rebellious youth in a tough London neighborhood. “In the Heat of the Night” shows Virgil Tibbs not only slapping the plantation owner but also challenging the racist condescension of the Mississippi sheriff who calls him “boy.” “They call me Mister Tibbs,” is his famous response.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” features Poitier as a brilliant doctor who confronts—and triumphs over—the liberal racism of the parents of the young white woman he plans to marry. While the film challenged near-universal taboos on representing interracial relationships it aimed to portray Poitier as an impossibly perfect suitor, feeding into respectability politics.
Poitier furthers myth of individual success
In preceding decades, such heroic roles had not been available to Black actors. Poitier ostensibly broke the mold, clearing the way for Laurence Fishburne and Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett and Viola Davis.  But Poitier’s aura of near-saintly “dignity” came at a price. The heroes he portrayed were “well-dressed,” “well-spoken,” and “self-controlled”; they never organized collective resistance to racism.
Indeed, they embodied the myth of individual success: Virgil Tibbs insists upon being called “Mister Tibbs.” Moreover, despite his matinee-idol good looks, Poitier was almost never cast as leading man in a romantic role; even his role in “Guess who’s Coming to Dinner” contains near-zero erotic charge.
Poitier’s films appealed to hesitant, white liberals by making it possible to identify with a Black man who did not require them to do anything more than admire him. (See Sharon Willis, The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and the Fantasies of Reconciliation).  
In his offscreen life, Poitier hardly conformed to the pacifist image he projected in his most popular films. He and his closest friend Harry Belafonte together risked their lives to bring desperately-needed funds to Mississippi after the 1963 lynchings of civil rights fighters (Dallas News, 1/22)).When racist mobs gathered outside his Mississippi motel room while he was filming “In the Heat of the Night,” he slept with a gun under his pillow—and told the movie’s director, Norman Jewison, "I got a gun under my pillow and I'm going to blow away the first guy who comes through that door" (People, 1/22).
But Poitier insisted on only taking roles that would refute inherited stereotypes, even if this committed him to playing the same hero over and over. “I felt I was representing 15, 18 million people with every movie I made,” he once commented (NYT, 1/7).
Poitier and actors like him help legitimize U.S. capitalism
Many of Poitier’s obituaries noted that his career traced the arc of the Civil Rights Movement. What they failed to mention is the role he played in stifling the very antiracism to which his films gave expression. The U.S. ruling class was fearful of a working-class uprising, and especially of Black rebellion (see Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns). Ultimately, the typical Poitier hero supports the capitalist state; Virgil Tibbs is, after all, a cop, bent on restoring law and order. Like their predecessor, current actors like  Angela Bassett also help workers buy into a more diverse face of capitalism.
Furthermore, Poitier’s films legitimized U.S. imperialism by shoring up the image of the United States in the eyes of the world. Starting in the mid-1950s, the U.S. was competing for the hearts and minds of the vast nonwhite populations rising up against colonialism and drawn toward the Soviet Union (See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy).  
There was a division in the ruling class: southern landowners wished to retain the highly profitable practice of Jim Crow, while more far-seeing imperialists wanted to sanitize the nation’s image by proposing that the nation was overcoming its racist past. The “slap heard round the world” was part of this ideological project.
In the final analysis, Sidney Poitier was no culture hero in the working-class struggle against racism. From this era, far more important—and for this reason maligned and harangued to the end of his life by the U.S. government—was the communist Paul Robeson (See CHALLENGE, 1/5).