Color-Blind

A Patch of Blue takes some getting used to. It starts as a pointless little tearjerker, then turns abruptly into contemporary hope opera. To save it from itself requires extraordinary skill, and the movie is fortunate in having miracle workers at hand.

Unseeing, hopelessly ignorant because she has never been to school, a blind girl gropes through a squalid, nightmare life. Her name is Selina. All day long she sits alone in a city tenement, stringing costume-jewelry beads to earn her keep. Her grandfather (Wallace Ford) is a maudlin old drunk. Her mother (Shelley Winters at her strident best) is a fat, vicious trollop who accidentally caused Selina's blindness years ago, now despises her for deserving pity.

One day her "Ole Pa," as Selina calls him, drops her off for the infrequent pleasure of an outing in the park. As she turns to her beads under a shade tree, a caterpillar wriggles down the back of her dress. She screams. A hand some young Negro (Sidney Poitier) runs to help, and the stage is set for the rather obvious tale of a girl to whom all men are colorless. In time she tells her new-found friend her problems, and he, of course, understands instinctively, given the troubles he's seen.

Luckily, Director Guy Green (The Angry Silence, The Mark) has a knack for sustaining the sort of idea that in lesser hands might easily slip from pathos into bathos. Green's style is simple, forceful and true, and he habitually activates a performer's most astonishing inner resources. The prize of his present cast is 21-year-old film fledgling Elizabeth Hartman. Spindly and coltish as Selina, with a plain-pretty face that can erupt unexpectedly into electric beauty, she wins genuine sympathy by playing up the spunk in her role, playing against the saccharine. She is achingly real without ever being soppy, whether cursing her fate, dodging flatware during a pitched battle between Winters and Ford, or unemotionally explaining to Poitier that she is "experienced" with men because of a brutal encounter with one of her mother's drunken beaus.

Patch of Blue flirts openly with the issue of interracial love, only to leave it unresolved in the last reel, and the film's message becomes almost immaterial. In their quiet, tender scenes together, Hartman and Poitier conquer the insipidity of a plot that reduces tangled human problems to a case of the black leading the blind.

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