Film · 1965 · Films · 1960s
A Patch of Blue
Scored from 83 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Selina D'Arcey is eighteen, blind since early childhood, and kept in a shabby city apartment stringing beads for pennies, bullied by her mother Rose-Ann, a prostitute, and by her drunken grandfather. Taken to a park for the day, she meets Gordon Ralfe, a considerate office worker who helps her and comes back to teach her the ordinary skills nobody has given her — crossing a street, using a telephone, the idea of a school for the blind. Selina does not know that Gordon is Black, and her mother's racism and her grip on her daughter's dependence make the friendship dangerous. Guy Green directed the drama, with Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Hartman and Shelley Winters.
A Patch of Blue is a 1965 drama and romance film. It runs 1h 42m and carries an Approved certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 1,928 1960s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 256 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 83 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 85 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where A Patch of Blue lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 83.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
