This film begins with a civil rights protest taking place which immediately draws the intense interest in the police. Not long afterward, a brawl erupts with several of the protestors being either beaten or arrested. In the meantime, while all of this is going on, a black man by the name of "Jason Higgs" (Sidney Poitier) sits in the back of a sedan and looks on with seeming indifference. As it soon turns out, the leader of the protest is an activist by the name of "Dennis Lawrence" (Al Freeman Jr.) who has an aversion to violence and prefers peaceful protest instead. Jason Higgs, on the other hand, has since become more militant and is planning to use a similar protest in the near future as a diversion in order to rob a nearby factory to further his more aggressive civil rights agenda. What he doesn't count on, however, is someone within his inner circle betraying him to the police after everything takes a turn for the worse. Now, although not technically a "blaxploitation film" due to the year it was produced, it still incorporated certain concepts that would come to define that subgenre within the next couple of years. Be that as it may, even though this film had a rather cheap feel to it, I liked the cool demeanor of Sidney Poitier and for that reason I have rated this picture accordingly. Slightly above average.
Review of The Lost Man
