FOR LOVE OF IVY, a romantic comedy/light drama, did quite well in 1968, ranking 19th in the year’s box office stats, scoring a win for director Daniel Mann, whose career was marked by home runs (The Rose Tattoo, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Our Man Flint) and strikeouts (Ada,The Revengers, Matilda). For star Sidney Poitier, 41, it was not just another win after his 1967 triple-play of In The Heat Of The Night, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and To Sir, With Love, but a personal score since he’d come up with the idea for the story, a 19-page treatment that Robert Alan Aurther (Warlock, Grand Prix, All That Jazz) fashioned into a screenplay. First and foremost, though, it is a showcase valentine to the actress playing the title lady, singer and activist Abbey Lincoln, 37, who only appeared in four feature films and a handful of TV shows between 1956 and 1990.

For nine years ‘Ivy Moore’ (Lincoln) has worked as a maid for and lived with the ‘Austin’ family at their comfy home in Long Island. White, liberal and privileged (they own a department store) the Austin’s brought Ivy—orphaned, teenaged and black—along from Florida and regard her as “part of the family”. But at 27, she’s ready to move on and move out—to New York City—and find a more fulfilling life. The mother (Nan Martin) panics, the father (Carroll O’Connor) blusters, the mod generation teenagers (Beau Bridges and Lauri Peters) hatch a plan: they’ll set up Ivy with ‘Jack Parks’ (Poitier), a trucking company exec, who’s also a swinging single. They hope this fling will convince her to stay. Jack, meanwhile is shy on the idea. For one thing he adamantly likes being single, and he also has a money-making by-line he wants kept secret: an illegal casino he runs out of one of his trucks. We pretty much know going in that the sweet lady/comely actress and svelte groover/leading man idol will get together; it’s just a matter of surmounting sufficient bumps in the road/screenplay.

Thankfully, the script is not bad, with some dimension beyond simple rom-com silliness, and the cast is disarming. Poitier’s maybe-mate is more flesh & blood interesting than his doctor-catch of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and the tone, while it has a serious underpinning, isn’t overmuch freighted with ‘heavy meaning’. Bridges, 26 but still able to suggest someone younger, makes an affable almost-hippie—he has a long-standing (and understandable) crush on Ivy. Beaming Lauri Peters, 24, had mostly done TV since being goofy-cute in 1962 fave Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation (in the meantime she’d been married for five years to Jon Voight). But fittingly, the story revolves around and the movie belongs to the yearning and determined Ivy and the honest, unaffected and warm-lovely Abbey Lincoln. An in-demand jazz vocalist, she’d done a singing cameo as herself in the 1956 rock’n’roll comedy The Girl Can’t Help It and co-starred (with Ivan Dixon) in the excellent, barely seen 1964 drama Nothing But A Man. She did a few TV spots in the 70s, and just one more movie, a small part in 1990’s ‘Mo Better Blues. Lincoln on film has a quiet incandescence; while the movies lost out by her staying away, seeing her rare performances is a definite win.

Quincy Jones score has a ‘groovy’ era sound and the sweet song “For Love Of Ivy” plucked an Oscar nomination. A $15,900,000 gross easily erased the $2,590,000 production bill. 101 minutes, with Leon Bibb and Lon Satton. Look quick for Jennifer O’Neill, 20 in her debut.

For a more personal and insightful take on the engaging For Love Of Ivy we direct you to the review from Ken Anderson at the site ‘Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For’—ecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2015/08/for-love-of-ivy-1968.html