A Patch Of Blue - movie review

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Movie producers often confuse sensory overload with emotional intensity. Witness the current crop of digital-effects action films exploding out of Hollywood today. For a refresher course in the meaning of the word, "intensity," see the 1965 film A PATCH OF BLUE by Guy Green, starring Sydney Poiter, Elizabeth Hartman, Shelley Winters, and Wallace Ford.
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Normally, I don't mind spoiling the plot and telling all details, but A Patch Of Blue is wound so emotionally tight, I don't want to deprive you of any of it. It connects to the viewer like a great stage play, and you won't want to take your eyes off the screen.
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In the story, a young blind white girl (Hartman) lives a hellish life with her hateful mother (Winters) and her drunken grandfather (Ford). Though her mother tries to keep her shut up in their 1-room apartment, the girl begins to make unapproved excursions to the park, where she meets a kind man (Portier - who else?) and falls in love with him. Portier finds that both the life and the affections of the young girl are in his hands, and he must balance his own affections against her welfare.
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Racial tensions and a purely evil dysfunctional family threaten to destroy the small hope that the girl would ever find a happier existence.
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Nowadays, blind people have much better access to specialized training, and interracial romances are hardly controversial (at least in the US and Europe.) But the story loses none of its drama for being told in "more enlightened" times - the present age has its own outcasts and its own hateful characters as well.
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A particularly harrowing scene is the girl describing to Poitier when one of her mother's boyfriends raped her. Another is the terrified blind girl alone in the park at night during a thunderstorm, freezing and disoriented.
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A Patch Of Blue is more engrossing than anything I have seen from the last twenty years. Yet despite the white-hot (I can't stop saying...) "intensity" the film never seems overdone, due to a believable script, and finely nuanced performances that mesh on screen.
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The ending sets the viewer down rather hard, making clear the writer's intention of cutting a compact story from one that would reward examination in more macroscopic perspective. Don't look for all the loose ends to be tied up with sitcom-string. The story won't let go of you that easily.
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The film is intelligent and involving, thought-provoking, and may have a side-effect: the digitally-baked pap extruding from Hollywood today will begin to look trivial by comparison. Find A Patch Of Blue. Rent it. Watch it!