A Patch of Blue is a 1965 American drama film directed and written by Guy Green about the friendship between an educated black man (played by Sidney Poitier) and an illiterate, blind, white 18-year-old girl (played by Elizabeth Hartman in her film debut), and the problems that plague their friendship in a racially divided America.

Made in 1965 against the backdrop of the growing civil rights movement, the film explores racism while playing on the idea that "love is blind."

According to the DVD audio commentary, it was the decision of director Guy Green that A Patch of Blue be filmed in black and white although color was available.

In addition to the Best Supporting Actress win for Winters, the film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Elizabeth Hartman), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Black-and-White) (George Davis, Urie McCleary, Henry Grace, Charles S. Thompson), Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) and Best Music (Original Music Score).

[3] Selina D'Arcey is a blind white girl living in a city apartment with her crude and vulgar mother Rose-Ann, who works as a prostitute, and her grandfather Ole Pa. She strings beads to supplement her family's small income and spends most of her time doing chores.

Selina convinces her grandfather to take her to the park, where she meets Gordon Ralfe, an educated and soft-spoken black man working night shifts in an office.

[4] The New York Times was critical: "There is no doubt about the good intentions of those who produced 'A Patch of Blue,'....But for the most part this little drama...seems a compound of specious contrivance.

Miss Hartman...is just a wee bit too tidy and sweet...The action is too patly formulated, and Mr. Poitier, who is an honest performer, has to act like a saint.

Why should it be, in a film of this nature...that the cold-water flat in which the heroine lives...looks like any phony slum apartment fabricated by the art department of a studio?

These are small things, but many more like them, strung together in a get-this-clearly way, give an air of artificial fictionalizing to what should be a casual, gritty, human, throbbing film.

As played by Sidney Poitier, he is both kind and practical, never patronizing.....As Selina, newcome Hartman extracts what she can from the mawkish, melodramatic script and effectively captures the personality nuances of the pale, gaunt girl whose frightened-rabbit isolation in the bleak apartment is transformed into a childlike exuberance in the park where a patch of green becomes her patch of blue.

In their quiet, tender scenes together, Hartman and Poitier conquer the insipidity of a plot that reduces tangled human problems to a case of the black leading the blind.