Schmidt, You Build Us A Shapel

Opposites attract…or do they?

Lillies of the Field is a pretty significant movie. While it was low-budget, it doesn’t look it, and it helped its male lead, Sidney Poitier, win a Best Actor Oscar, the first such achievement for a black man. It’s also a pretty personal movie for a lot of people. I’ve grown up on Lillies of the Field. For that matter, so have my parents–they were almost-twenty-one year old newlyweds when it came out and they’ve always loved it. To this day, my dad will break into that song, “Amen” if given half a chance.

The movie opens with a station wagon driving down a desert road in Arizona, only to overheat and pull up to what seems to be a rather shabby farm out in the middle of nowhere. Out of the wagon pops Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier), an itinerant journeyman laborer and frustrated architect who’s also a vagabond and likes it. At this farm, he meets five East German nuns who regard him more or less suspiciously, and it doesn’t take long before Mother Superior (Lilia Skala) presses Homer into doing some work around the farm.

Homer has other ideas. He just wants water for his radiator, and then he’s off down the road. He’ll do some work for the nuns, but as soon as Mother Maria pays him for his labor he’s out of there. Mother Maria has her own ideas, however. She acts as if she hasn’t heard Homer say he wants to leave; she briskly tells “Schmidt” with all the precision of a Prussian officer that she’ll ring the bell when dinner’s ready.

After dinner come English lessons, and the sisters take advantage of having a native speaker in their midst, which Homer enjoys in spite of himself. These lessons become a delightful bit that runs all through the movie.

Long story short, Homer doesn’t leave after dinner, or even the day after dinner. Mother Maria has an idea that God sent Homer to them to build them a chapel, or a “shapel” as she calls it. But first, Homer has to drive them to Mass, which is held out of the back of a fifth-wheeler next to a diner. That’s why the community needs a chapel so much. The nuns are too poor to pay for it, of course, due to their vow of poverty. Just putting food on the table is a feat: What they call breakfast is a single egg and a cup of milk.

Since he’s basically stuck waiting for Mother Maria to pay him, Homer uses his time wisely. He gets a job working a couple of days a week for a local construction company and relishes the opportunity to have some real food on the table, including the occasional sweets.  Meanwhile, the chapel is still sitting off to the side like the proverbial elephant in the room. It’s not much of a question who will build it or how long it’s going to take, but the journey is what counts.

What makes Lillies of the Field so satisfying is the character development, and watching Homer and Mother Maria continually butt heads is fun, as each is, in a sense, using the other as a means to an end. Homer wants to be paid for his labor. Mother Maria wants a chapel. When Homer first meets Mother Maria, he tries to express his desire to get paid via an angle she’s familiar with and will respect: The Bible. Baptist Homer thinks he’ll use it to show paying workers is Biblical, and he’ll even read it to Mother in English.

After a quick Battle of Killer Verses, Mother Maria KOs Homer with Matthew 6:28-29 (KJV), and the look Homer gives her says he knows she’s won. He even knows the verse by heart:

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Even when these two meet in the middle, they still clash, but the movie shows how Mother and Homer end up respecting and valuing each other.

It’s also cool watching the cultural exchange between Homer and the nuns. One particular highlight is “Amen,” the song I mentioned earlier. While I can’t resist sharing it, the uninitiated should be warned that “Amen” is an earworm. And no, Sidney Poitier is not doing his own singing, but Jester Hairston, the composer:

The movie inevitably deals with the racism Homer no doubt experienced, as the story takes place in the early sixties, after Brown v. Board of Education but right before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Some of the Mexican Americans call Homer a gringo, and Mr. Ashton (Ralph Nelson) first greets Homer by calling him, “Boy.”

Homer handles these situations with finesse, though. He turns the “Boy” thing right back on Mr. Ashton, who soon comes to respect Homer’s abilities at operating earth-moving machines, although he still thinks Homer is shiftless and irresponsible. Homer also drinks and parties with the Mexican Americans, imbibing enough tequila to fill them with awe. He pays for it the next day, of course, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Lillies of the Field was nominated for Best Picture, Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, and Actress (for Lilia Skala). Poitier’s Oscar win is one of its landmark moments, however. As TCM put it, “Perhaps most significantly, Poiter won for a role as an individual not defined by race in a motion picture devoid of racial judgment; an important lesson finally learned by the Academy.”

Or, as Poitier himself put it, “It has been a long journey to this moment.”

Naturally, Lillies of the Field has done extremely well over the years, which isn’t too shabby for a movie that narrowly escaped being called a low-budget sleeper in 1963 Hollywood. In 2020 it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress. It’s still regarded favorably by most film critics. For the rest of us, though, Lillies of the Field is a simple and unforgettable story of people coming together for a common cause and an unlikely duo coming to respect and value each other for who they are.

For more mismatched couples, please see Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews and Barry at Cinematic Catharsis. Thanks for hosting this, y’all–it was a blast! Thanks for reading, everyone, and I hope to see you tomorrow for Taking Up Room’s third and final blogathon announcement of this week…

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