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“In the Heat of the Night” is a classic that does not ever leave the mind. Yes, it’s a thriller, and it centers around a murder mystery. But “whodunnit” doesn’t matter to the film’s historically generic thrills, and the more I discuss it, the more it seems like I am missing out on the actual value or themes of the movie.
During Oscar season, watching and re-watching this time capsule of the 1960s South which received five Oscars is frankly irritating because it reminds us that the Academy sometimes actually does know what they are doing on some level for once, with the exception of the blunders they have made, such as with the Best Picture award that for some odd reason they crown over the movie more than half a century later.
Would we care to ask how this award seems to have gotten so out of hand? How in the Hell did they not nominate Sidney Poitier for this jewel that he singlehandedly gets away with? Even if he had a statuette already on his mantelpiece, the omission is as glaring as the film’s southern Racism message.
In the South, senior citizens mostly enjoy the Carrol O’Connor/Howard Rollins’ TV show, which was a soft adaptation of the movie for the 80s. It was a strange, ‘post-racial’ view of a film that was all about race. However, Norman Jewison’s film is different altogether. It is an absolute spectacle, where a cop who is the most educated, articulate, and the smartest in town, turns out to be a black man. Poitier, in his Matinee Idol prime, played the role. So yeah, he was definitely the most handsome man in town.
An outsider with money and a plan to build a factory to create job opportunities in the backward town of Sparta, Mississippi, gets murdered. The new, frantic police chief who is desperate to solve the case and find suspects is played by Rod Steiger, who won an Oscar for Best Actor.
One of the people rounded up is a black man in a suit. Imagine the shock this movie gave audiences in the 60’s. The man waiting for the train to go home is a detective from Philadelphia. He does not tell the moronic cop that picks him up this information, until just long enough to make the racist chief look stupid.
It’s clever of the film to have the sheriff self-aware enough to know that one of the Black man’s simple remarks indicates that this cop is much smarter than him. Whatever he would like to admit, he is definitely nudging Det. Virgil Tibbs’ commander in Philadelphia to make him “help” in the inquiry.
Tibbs shows up with a clenched jaw. He, “the doc,” who is also the coroner, reprimands the cops and the South as a whole with his professionalism and willingness to suppress personal animosity against the South’s people to help solve this murder.
For the first time, however, the archetype “noble” Black man has a counter. There’s only so much he is going to get. An infamously fatal slap is known to be returned by his uttered disdain for the “sleepy time Down South” foolishness and rural incompetence, Poitier’s Tibbs was an indictment of “the way things have always been.”
It’s up to the wealthy industrialist widow “from up north” (Lee Grant) to spell out what Tibbs must be muttering under his breath.
“What a peculiar bunch of people, and what a peculiar place.”
With that quote, there goes the first self-identifying likely victim, Scott Wilson from the film “In Cold Blood,” or perhaps a blend of the protagonist from “The Right Stuff” and a side character in “Monster” and “Junebug.” Not today. Not to be fast-talked by the racism-dripping colonizer cop or at least a cop willing to do anything to slap on a charge no matter how profiled the person is.
The racial slur has been edited out, but I remember the film being full of it. Now, as white supremacy and Twitter (racist) embrace it, it’s impossible to ignore the messaging that the film still hammers home. Every backward corner will remain untouched until bigotry is proposed to the power of every citizen unleashed.
Steiger makes it so that Chief Gillespie is a boiling hot stew of resentment, sarcasm, rage, panic, and a deliciously terrible blend of emotions. His consolation prize for being told to shut up every time he tries to voice his deep-rooted anger towards the world is to lash out at Tibbs wit silly “n-words.” One can hope he finds enjoyment in throwing Tibbs away and letting a mob of country hayseeds take a crack at him.
But he has to refrain, and the pleasure Steiger gives him is well earned criticism of how frustrating and maddening that is to have to deal with him.
He didn’t win an Oscar for this, one of the greatest screen performances of all time. But 55 years down the road that seems like a minor issue. No matter where his career had been or would go, “In the Heat of the Night” made him an icon, one that was dearly remembered by many across the world after his passing last year.
He was a big enough star to make sure that this movie was not filmed in the still fatal for black people south, and so Sparta, Illinois doubled for Sparta, Mississippi. He fought to make sure that the slap heard around the world stayed in “every print” of the movie regardless of where it was shown.
And he is the reason to try to convince old relatives to ditch the softer murder of the week TV rendition of “We All Get Along Now” Sparta. If his name is not above the title and Ray Charles is not singing the theme song, keep moving.
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