Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Your late evening camp
Earlier this evening, Karen was watching A Patch of Blue. She explained the plot to Jake, and when she got to the part about the white blind girl befriending the black guy, I said, “Who, back then, could only be Sidney Poitier.”
Then I thought, hold on, there must have been at least a few other strong black leads back then. But the only man I could recall was Woody Strode. (It’s hard for me to think of others. Poitier’s great, but he really did dominate the field.)
Now, you might not have heard of Woody Strode unless you’ve seen Kubrick’s Spartacus or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Strode had small but memorable parts in both movies: in Spartacus, he engages Kirk Douglas in a fight to the death, while in Once Upon A Time In The West, he plays one of three gunmen sent to kill Harmonica (Charles Bronson) in the film’s stunning opening.
According to the Wiki linked above, Strode was a decathlete and football star before becoming an actor. Of his athletic career,
His world class decathlon capabilities were spearheaded by a fifty foot plus shot put (when the world record was fifty seven feet) and a six-four high jump (world record at time was 6-10). Strode posed for a nude portrait, part of Hubert Stowitts’s acclaimed exhibition of athletic portraits shown at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (although the inclusion of black and Jewish athletes caused the Nazis to close the exhibit).
(You can see a few of those nude paintings, including Strode’s, here.) I couldn’t find a good Strode video clip to share with you, but I did find a campy one. See if you can name his white, male co-star.
Okay, I gotta go see what happens to the dog.
D.
