In the Heat of
the Night
This week I watched “In the Heat of the
Night”, number 75 on the AFI Top 100 movies list. “In the Heat of the Night”
was released in 1967, directed by Norman Jewison (“The Thomas Crown Affair”, “Fiddler
on the Roof”), and starred Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, an urban, expert
police detective and Rod Steiger as Gillespie, a prejudiced sheriff in a small
town in Mississippi. The film garnered five Oscar wins, including Best Picture
and a Best Actor win for Steiger. The movie takes place in Sparta, Mississippi,
a closed-off, prejudiced community in the Deep South. The movie begins with a
confusing sequence, following a police officer on his late night drive
throughout the town. He begins in a diner, gets in his car, and drives past a
house with a naked woman in the window. This is extremely strange scene when
watching for the first time but plays a key role as the film progresses. The officer
then finds a dead body on Main Street, who turns out to be Mr. Colbert, a man
who is revitalizing the town by building a new factory. Gillespie arrives to
the scene and instructs the officer, Sam Wood, to visit the depot to see if any
travelers are there who could have committed the crime. At the train station,
Wood finds Tibbs, who he immediately arrests and brings in for questioning.
After some confusion, Tibbs reveals he is an expert homicide detective from Philadelphia
but is invited to stay in Sparta to help solve the murder that no has no leads.
The movie proceeds like a typical crime film with the officers pursuing dead
end leads, using forensics, and eventually finding Colbert’s killer.
The
film is set during the Civil Rights Movement so race relations play a key role
in the film. At first, Gillespie struggles with the fact that Tibbs is
infinitely more knowledgeable than him. However, Gillespie is able to put these
prejudices aside in order to solve this case and protect his community. As the
film goes on, Gillespie begins to come more attached to Tibbs, inviting him
over to his film for a drink and protecting from a lynch mob. Tibbs is
constantly confronted with overt racism and must choose his battle. Poitier is
cast out of character and pulls it of magnificently. He accepts that he will
not be served in the diner but slaps a racist cotton farm owner after he slaps
him. The strength and frustration held by most blacks at the time shines
through Poitier in this role.
The
music of this film is one of the strangest and most varied I have heard. It
begins with a lovely Ray Charles song of the same title. The most pronounced
number is during a chase scene when the police is chasing a suspect. The scene
has great editing—for which they won the Oscar—cutting between the police, the
setting, the suspect, and shots from the suspect’s POV (including one shot
where it appears someone dropped the camera). The music is a mixture of
traditional chase music with lots of bass and an orchestra and soulful guitar.
This Southern style of music continues throughout
Overall,
I thought this was a very good film with strong cinematography, editing, sound,
and performances by Poitier and Steiger (it did have a little bit too much
yelling between the two). I had with this film tonally, however. One moment there is a humorous scene pertaining to race and the next Tibbs is being pursued by a lynch mob. Overall, the mystery was intriguing and would have pushed the
envelope for the time period. This film definitely has held up well—perhaps too
well. It was impossible to not draw parallels between the behavior of police in
the film and today. Officer Wood’s hasty arrest and mistreatment evokes the
police brutality and arrests that have appeared in the news recently. In a
world dominated by virulent Facebook comments regarding race, 50 years later, “In
the Heat of the Night” remains a truthful look at the best and worst of race
relations.
3.5/4 stars
3.5/4 stars
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