The phrase “person of consequence” might have been coined for Sidney Poitier. The pioneering black American actor was not only possessed of huge talent, but of immense dignity and deep convictions, active in the civil rights movement and, later, in efforts to hand more power to artists in Hollywood. He was remembered on his death in 2022, aged 94, as a person of unassailable decency and integrity.
That decency and integrity is vigorously assailed in Ryan Calais Cameron’s electric three-hander Retrograde, set in real time in a stuffy NBC lawyer’s office on a sticky LA afternoon in 1955 – the height of the McCarthy era.
