A Patch of Blue

Shelley Winters won an Oscar for being perfectly horrible as the harridan mom in this dated, but not too sentimental fable in which blind daughter Hartman is brought out of her shell and given a sense of self-worth by her burgeoning friendship with Poitier, unaware throughout that he's a black man. In hindsight, it all looks like a rather tentative Hollywood essay at the race angle, but the actors do mesh together convincingly despite the obvious narrative contrivances, and debut girl Hartman's persuasive account of the everyday travails of the sightless is engrossing without overdoing the self-pity. That, unfortunately, is left to Jerry Goldsmith's insistently 'sensitive' score, plaintive woodwinds to the fore.