The random film of the day served up a deceptively modest piece: "Lilies of the Field" from 1963—a black-and-white 94-minute parable about a laborer and five nuns, unremarkable rating, familiar plot: a man builds a chapel in the desert. Seems like there's nothing to watch. In reality, this "harmless" picture hid an entire cluster of historical surprises—from the director mortgaging his house to finance the film to the first Oscar ever awarded to a Black actor in a leading role. And both lines—the financial and the historical—are one and the same story.
Formally, it all started with a random film generator: "Lilies of the Field," 1963, director Ralph Nelson, starring Sidney Poitier and Lilia Skala. Poitier's name itself is a promise: the man who in 1967 gave cinema its first interracial kiss, and in 1964—an even rarer event.
Verification confirmed the rarity was no illusion: in 1964, Poitier became the first Black actor to receive an Oscar for Best Actor. And—most absurdly—the next person to hold that statuette was Denzel Washington in 2002, thirty-eight years later. Between the two victories lies nearly the entire postwar history of American cinema, and throughout that time the record belonged to a modest desert parable that beat out "Cleopatra" with Rex Harrison and "Hud" with Paul Newman in the Oscar race. Let's figure out how this became possible.
In September 1962, the "Los Angeles Times" announced the screen adaptation of William Barrett's fresh novel: producer and director Ralph Nelson, lead role already promised to Poitier. United Artists allocated about $250,000—laughable money even by 1962 standards, when the average Hollywood film cost three to four times more. Nelson took a desperate step: he mortgaged his own house to guarantee the finishing budget, and set up production headquarters not in a studio office but in his own rumpus room.
Economy was an ideology, not a circumstance. Nelson banned a production designer and sets: "nothing artificial," everything shot on location in Arizona. Filming began November 27, 1962 in Tucson—on a ranch owned by the family of Linda Ronstadt, future star. The doors for the chapel scene were borrowed from a real chapel in Sasabe, on the border with Mexico.
The schedule went crazy: 14 shooting days for the entire film (the industry trade weekly gave 15, which for Hollywood is the same number—an instant). The chapel the hero builds was built for real: a night crew erected it in sync with the story's "progress" so the walls grew from scene to scene. The irony is that the solid building could have stood for decades—but it was demolished immediately after filming because it stood on rented land.
They cut corners everywhere possible, including the cast: Nelson himself played contractor Ashton—and didn't even credit himself in the titles. His secretary Lisa Mann became Sister Gertrude. Two nuns were played by Tucson housewives, another by the production manager's daughter. By January 1963, the film was ready, delivered on time and on budget—according to studio historians, "one of the few UA projects in five years to finish on schedule."
The most grotesque detail of the backstory: long before filming, one Hollywood producer gave Nelson a "friendly" set of advice that today reads like a textbook on how to kill a movie. Change the title—zero commercial potential. Dump Poitier and get Steve McQueen—audiences won't go for a Black hero without a romantic line. Replace the old Mother Superior with a young novice—and add romance with her.
Nelson—himself a television veteran, a man accustomed to instant decisions—refused to change anything. Then the industry suggested at least getting a "serious name" to pair with the little-known Poitier. Instead, Nelson found Austrian theater actress Lilia Skala, who was working at a New York factory between roles and agreed to shoot for bare union minimum, turning down a spot in a Broadway hit's tour for this.
The title was painfully reconsidered: "Piety in the Sky," "Amen," "The Amen Man," "The Odyssey of Homer Smith," and—for dessert—"Mother of Mine, I've Run Out of Bricks," a literal translation of the Italian version. For the trailer, Nelson asked the studio to lend a shot of Max von Sydow saying "consider the lilies of the field" from the still-unfinished "The Greatest Story Ever Told." They refused. Good thing historic film justice doesn't watch trailers.
Poitier had every right to refuse: by 1962 he was the first real Black superstar of American cinema, a nominee for "The Defiant Ones" (1958). His standard film fee was almost twice the entire "Lilies" budget. Belafonte, the first candidate for the role of Homer Smith, considered the character boring—no culture, no love, no civil rights movement—and turned down the role.
Poitier, seeing the script, told his circle a phrase on the edge: "If someone else takes this role—I'll shoot him. This role is mine." And he signed a contract that today looks like a bet: $50,000 up front and 10% of receipts. According to reports that winter, he agreed to a quarter of his usual rate, most of it deferred to better times—which no one promised.
The film came out in October 1963 and became a "sleeper hit": theater owners fought over prints. In the first six months—$2.5 million in rentals, meaning Poitier's share alone was a quarter million—exactly what the entire film cost. The percentage bet paid off as one of the most successful financial combinations of his career: he proved to the industry that his name above the marquee was enough to draw box office. Essentially, Poitier invented backend economics a couple decades before Hollywood, which then had to be rediscovered by each successive generation of stars.
The second "bet" was real logs: there was no money for stunt doubles and props, so on screen Poitier hauled and stacked real bricks, boards, and rolls of roofing felt. During filming he fell through the roof of a barn, caught himself on a beam, and—per protocol—apologized to the crew for delaying production.
Lilia Skala is the most underrated story in the film. Born in Vienna in 1896, Catholic mother, Jewish father. Vienna University didn't accept women then, so Skala went to study architecture in Dresden, where she earned a degree with distinction summa cum laude. She became the first female member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects—in a country where the word "engineer" was still considered an exclusively male title for decades.
In 1938, after the Anschluss, she and her Jewish husband fled the country (separately, through different routes) and settled in the U.S., taking her mother's maiden name—it didn't sound "Jewish" and didn't attract extra questions. Her architecture career in America didn't work out, she had to relearn the profession: work in a factory, act on Broadway, take TV bit parts. The role of Mother Maria—the first deep screen character in her American biography—came to her bypassing all the "serious names" and was played, as it turned out, from personal experience: a woman who knows how to design better than how to beg.
For this work Skala took $1000—Hollywood union minimum, turning down a spot in a Broadway hit's tour for the shoot. The return was of a different nature: Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe. There's a quiet irony of faith in this story: the Catholic Mother Superior was played by a woman with a Jewish father, a refugee from the Nazis, and a follower of Christian Science. Skala lived three more decades after "Lilies," appeared in Stanley Kramer films and "Flashdance," and her Dresden architectural drawings, carried out during the 1939 escape, are now stored in the International Archive of Women in Architecture.
The film's musical story is a separate detective case. The song "Amen" is not a traditional folk spiritual, as one might think from the sound: it was written in the 1930s by Reverend Brodus Hogan of Indianapolis and Laura Davis, with the first studio trace dating to 1948, to the Wings Over Jordan choir. For the film, the arrangement was done by Jester Hairston—actor, composer, and educator, who assembled a version where verses are woven into the refrain and turned into the story of Christ's life.
There's also a technical trick: Poitier himself, by his own admission in his autobiography, is tone-deaf—can't hit a note. So the legendary "ameeeen" sung by Homer Smith is Hairston's voice, dubbing the star. In 1964, The Impressions released their version: seventh on the Billboard Hot 100 and three weeks atop the Cashbox R&B chart. Then the song went into free circulation: Otis Redding's posthumous hit (1968), Elvis Presley's concert medley in the 1970s, and in 1986—an entire NBC TV show called "Amen," where Hairston himself played a deacon.
The legal disorder is also telling: song rights were disputed for decades between publishers—1935 copyright, 1963 renewal, 1957 competitor claim. By 1974, the Wings Over Jordan choir declared the song public domain. In other words, the song that saved the film's box office earned almost nothing from the film itself—and yet it was precisely this song that remained in the ears of generations when the film itself went into the archives.
Poitier went to the Oscar ceremony on April 13, 1964, mentally prepared for defeat: competitors—Albert Finney ("Tom Jones"), Rex Harrison ("Cleopatra"), Paul Newman ("Hud"), Richard Harris. He decided in advance not to prepare a speech, but to rehearse a "gracious loser's face" for the camera. Finney's victory seemed predetermined—and when Anne Bancroft opened the envelope, Poitier jumped from his seat in a state witnesses described as hysterical joy and delivered an improvisation: "It has been a long journey to this moment…"
Historic arithmetic: before him, Black Oscar winners existed, but in exactly one instance—Hattie McDaniel for "Gone with the Wind" (1940), in a supporting role. Poitier became the first Black actor in the lead category—and the second Black winner overall. Bancroft impulsively kissed him on the cheek, and even this gesture caused a "minor scandal" among conservative TV viewers: 1964, three years before the kiss in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"
The film itself competed in five nominations—Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography—and won only one, the lead acting. But consolation prizes accumulated into a whole podium: Golden Globe for "film promoting international understanding," awards from Protestant and Catholic organizations, Berlin Film Festival prize for best actor, and the U.S. State Department recommended "Lilies" for screening at the Edinburgh Festival as an example of American culture. Since 2020, the film has been preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. But the main outcome of the season remained the statuette that changed Oscar arithmetic.
The flip side remained, which is almost never mentioned in retellings. In 1967, playwright Clifford Mason published a scathing text in "The New York Times" with a telling title: "Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?" His answer was caustic: because Poitier plays "the perfect, antiseptic, one-dimensional hero"—a good guy in a completely white world, without a wife, without a lover, helping white people solve white problems. Films like "Lilies" Mason called "artistic NAACP-ism": white America applauded each such "step forward" as proof of its own goodwill.
Against this—the position of Poitier himself and partly the Academy: he consciously chose universal stories in which the Black hero exists without explaining his race. Homer Smith is not a "Black laborer," but simply a man with a car, a sense of humor, and stubbornness. In 1963, the year of Birmingham and Medgar Evers' murder, this was a political statement in itself: normalization, not protest. The debate between "separate pride" and "universality" remains unresolved—and "Lilies" remains its pure experiment: the first case where a "colorblind" role brought a Black actor the industry's highest award.
To see "Lilies of the Field" as a nice movie is to see nothing. This is a rare case where the production mechanics are more interesting than the plot: the director's house in mortgage, nuns from Tucson housewives, a chapel demolished as an illegal structure, a star who risked three-quarters of his fee on a bet against all of Hollywood. Here you can see how great things are born not from abundance but from constraints: 14 days and 250 thousand—and not a single unnecessary frame.
The most beautiful discovery of this story is economic. Poitier's bet "quarter fee for ten percent" preceded the entire future economics of star contracts and became the best investment decision of his career. And the song "Amen," sung not by the one we see, went out into the world and outlived both the film and its authors. If you're looking for a moral—it's in the gospel source of the title itself: the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, and everything works out for them. "Lilies" shouldn't have worked by any studio metric—and that's precisely why they became a story that can't be repeated on schedule.