Sidney Poitier Stands and Delivers

Three decades may have passed, but Sidney Poitier had no difficulty resurrecting his memorable character of teacher Mark Thackeray for “To Sir, With Love II.” The sequel to his 1967 classic film airs Sunday on CBS.

Thackeray and Poitier, according to the movie’s director, Peter Bogdanovich, “are very close in the audience’s perception. In reality, whatever reality is, Sidney has become Thackeray.”

“To Sir, With Love” struck a chord with teeny-boppers 29 years ago. In the sentimental drama, the British Guyana-born Thackeray wins the hearts and minds of a group of unruly, poor high school students in London’s East End. “Sir,” which was directed by novelist James Clavell of “Shogun” fame, was the eighth-highest grossing film of the year. Co-star Lulu’s groovy rendition of the theme song hit No. 1 on the charts.

Judy Geeson, who played Thackeray’s student Pamela Dare, appears in the opening sequence of the sequel, as does Lulu, who reprises her hit tune. Though she only worked on the film one day, Geeson says it was an emotional experience being reunited with Poitier and Lulu. In fact, she adds, “I had no idea how emotional it would be. During the day I worked with Sidney, it was like those 30 years had just flown by. It felt so comfortable working with him again.”

Bogdanovich never saw the original “Sir” until he became involved with the project. But he knew what an impact it had had. “When I said I was going to do this thing, everybody said, ‘Oh, my God!’ There wasn’t one person who didn’t know the movie and it didn’t matter their age. Everybody has a personal memory about it. Sidney is amazing. Sidney and the song is why that picture [was a hit]. He is a genuine American icon.”

Directing Poitier, Bogdanovich says, “you just kind of turn on the camera. He knows what he is doing. He is tremendously accomplished and has directed movies and produced them and worked on the scripts. As I said to him a number of times, ‘You don’t really need me here. You can do all of this.’ He would laugh.”’

“Thackeray is and I am 30 years older,” explains the elegant Poitier, who is an ageless 69. “I work differently now as an actor than I did then. I worked differently because the years have either seasoned me or dulled me. I don’t know which, but something has happened.”

“To Sir, With Love II” opens as Thackeray is retiring from the London school system and moving to Chicago, where he has taken a job at a high school on the South Side. His new students are rebellious, violent, incorrigible--even worse than what he encountered in the first movie.

“The day he walks into the class he knows exactly what is going on,” Poitier says. “It is the most chaotic--you cannot imagine what is going on. It also effects me because the whole behavior is designed to tell me I’m just going to be another [teacher] who is chopped up. And they chop. They really go after me.”

But Thackeray, Poitier says, “dives into the problems of the children and he goes right to the heart of it. He interprets knowledge and understanding in their terms, in terms of their lives, and before you know it, he gets them to listen and it just begins to work.”

Schools today, Poitier laments, “are a stepchild on our priority list in our country. We don’t tackle anything with the fervor and the gusto we used to. Now we wait for consensus--and that’s not just the government; the public waits for consensus. Unfortunately, we look at the wrong places for clues--spin doctors.”

Early in his film career, Poitier played a student at a trouble-plagued New York inner-city high school in the controversial 1955 hit “The Blackboard Jungle.” Back then, Poitier recalls, “We were not ready to acknowledge [the problems]. Claire Booth Luce went so far as to say [the film] was Communist propaganda. Times have changed in so many ways, but we still have the problems [in schools], infinitely more than we ever had.”

Poitier, who won the best actor Oscar for his role in 1963’s “Lilies of the Field” and co-starred in the groundbreaking “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in 1967, has been approached over the years about reprising “Sir,” but turned down the projects until now.

“I was captivated by this idea,” Poitier explains. “I had said before I was not interested in doing it again because I always envisioned doing it again as a remake, which would have been silly with me. But this is not a remake, it is a life--the life of principal character Thackeray. He’s been teaching for the succeeding 30 years at various places but he also spent years in administration, so he is a person, a teacher, of some dimension and knowledge.

“So when they said let’s pick him up at his retirement, I got interested, because if he was an interesting teacher at 29, then 30 years later he has to be quite an interesting person in more ways than one. He might very well be a different kind of teacher.”

Thackeray also has a hidden agenda as to why he leaves London and moves to Chicago. It’s not simply because he’s friends with the school’s principal (Daniel J. Travanti).

“Somewhere in the center [of the film] we learn that he is in Chicago for another reason,” Poitier says with a warm smile. “I am not even going to tell you what it is. You can discover it when you see the movie.”

“To Sir, With Love II” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.