This is for my friend Mark! Guy Green’s beautifully-made “A Patch of Blue” (1956) brings a Swinging Sixties sermon-like touch to a kitchen-sink drama, exploring how compassion binds humanity together through the sightless eyes of young Selina D’Arcy (frail and arresting Elizabeth Hartman), whose difficult environment prove to be a greater obstacle than being blind. Until today, Selina’s life is confined to a tenement-like apartment which she shares with abusive/negligent guardians, keeping house and stringing necklaces. Despite Rose-Ann’s and Ole Pa’s prejudiced insistence that she can’t handle being out alone, her good employer Mr. Faber takes her out to the neighbourhood park, where she eventually meets office worker Gordon Rolfe (Sidney Poitier, compellingly and swooningly perfect as ever).
Kind, gentle Gordon finds himself drawn to and concerned for this naïve but bright girl who has never tried pineapple juice, or even heard of Braille. Their friendship sees him treat her with an admirably empowering, encouraging respect but it also brings out the prejudice of the complacent crowds, as Gordon struggles with silent stares of racial discrimination, and Selina a cruel indifference to her difference (In words befitting MLK Jr.’s rhetoric, Gordon tells her once, ‘you have been much sinned against’). So to me, more powerful than their infamous kiss is Selina’s angry discovery that she hasn’t the ‘right’ to live as fully as she now knows she can, and the film sympathetically immerses the viewer’s senses in the way Selina sees the world. After a viscerally violent struggle for freedom, those crowds now let Gordon take Selina away, eventually to a school for the blind. But it’s not a one-sided rescue; in their touching goodbye, Gordon is innocently surprised when Selina confesses with spirited honesty that she finds him beautiful because she knows him, returning a little light in the dark Xo
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