Film History: ‘To Sir, With Love’ Showcases Sidney Poitier At His Best!

In the pantheon of classroom dramas, few remain as memorable as To Sir, With Love and few teachers as inspirational as Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray, the stalwart head of an unruly class of misfits.

The film was a sleeper hit of 1967 despite a tepid reception from critics, who brushed it off as “well-meaning tripe.”

To Sir, with Love, a significant milestone made more poignant with the death of E.R. Braithwaite on Dec. 12, 2016 at 104 years old.

Braithwaite was an author, an educator and a diplomat. He was also the “sir” in To Sir, With Love. His book of the same name — a semi-autobiographical novel published a decade before the film’s release — chronicles his experiences as a young Black teacher in a classroom of predominantly white students at a London East End high school.

When the book captured the attention of Hollywood, director and screenwriter James Clavell repositioned Braithwaite’s story from the drab postwar ’50s to the hip, swinging ’60s to capitalize on the then-current wave of British pop culture. Mark Thackeray, Braithwaite’s cinematic stand-in, became a signature role for Poitier, and the title song was nominated for a Grammy and catapulted Lulu to international fame.

To Sir, with Love – a 1967 True Classic

To Sir, with Love — through Poitier’s idealized vision of Thackeray — turns Braithwaite into the quintessential firm but caring teacher, teaching the unteachable and filling them with an appetite for knowledge and a sense of self-worth. I learned of Braithwaite’s death several months later when his companion, Ginette Ast, emailed me to about an interview I did with Braithwaite for TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies.