Movies that take on the subject of race generally aren’t popular. No Way Out, for which you see a promo poster above, was a prestige production but was only the 87th highest grossing film of its year (both Twelve Years a Slave and Green Book were in the same range for their years). Somewhere in the eighties isn’t terrible, but No Way Out still lagged behind such immortal efforts as Yellow Cab Man, Wabash Avenue, and Bright Leaf.
The plot sets up almost immediately: a pair of robbers are shot, captured by police, and conducted in handcuffs to a hospital for medical attention. Sidney Poitier is the doctor they draw. One of the robbers, Richard Widmark, is a virulent racist. He’s so hateful that he keeps trying to convince his suffering brother not to cooperate with Poitier. The problem is his brother has more than just a gunshot wound, though only Poitier can see it.
When baby bro dies due to complications from a previously undiagnosed longterm illness, Widmark is devastated, but always the opportunist, he turns the tables at that point. Poitier can’t prove he didn’t kill the brother through malpractice unless there’s an autopsy, and Widmark won’t agree to one. What develops is a battle of wills—Poitier’s quiet dignity, polite exterior, and superhuman patience that normal people simply don’t have (he’d play this role over and over) against Widmark’s frothing and irrational hatred.
There’s a lot to unpack here. No Way Out goes after racism with a power jab and a flying spin kick. It’s unsubtle. That makes sense because racism is unsubtle, you might say. No—there are blatant strains, but largely, it is subtle. For example, after decades of backward movement U.S. schools are as segregated right now as they were in 1968, and U.S. neighborhoods are highly segregated too. How did that happen? Easy. The processes of racism have been folded inside the mechanisms of the market and the dynamics of individual choice. Gentrification is just one example of a subsequent result.
After No Way Out was released today in 1950 it took another fourteen years—an entire generation as most people measure them—before the U.S. passed the Civil Rights Act. But the legislation has been constantly chipped at or even had sections outright struck down, contributing to the aforementioned segregation, and all sorts of other damage. The laws stood just long enough for the belief that things were better to become culturally entrenched, then they were decimated. Now people hold obsolete beliefs about equality, and have a hard time seeing that many things are getting worse.
This is why movies about race usually don’t age well. Yes, it’s partly due to outdated sentiments, language, characterizations, and story arcs, but it’s also because they presume improvement in problems that, as it turned out, never went away, but were merely reconstituted in ways that can be invisible to people today, and which vintage movies were never designed to elucidate. No Way Out is to racism as Romeo and Juliet is to love. It’s big and bold and scores some points, but it mostly comes across as obvious. Don’t get us wrong—it’s a damn good movie. But it’s also no longer relevant to the issue it examines.
