by Chris Marshall:
I loved this movie. Let me just get that out there. But In the Heat of the Night is one of those
cases, and there are a few, where a very good film did not deserve to win Best
Picture, for reasons that have nothing to do with its own quality. It’s roughly
analogous to the French Open today. Novak Djokovic played a great match and is one of the best
players of all time, but his opponent, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, would have deserved
the victory more. Unfortunately, it was not to be.
In the Heat of the
Night is not one of the best movies of all time, but it is immensely
enjoyable. It just came out in the wrong year. 1967 was one of the great years
in the history of cinema, giving us The
Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Cool
Hand Luke, among others. Even Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner?, with its oddly placed question mark, garnered
acting nominations in every category.
That film, like In the
Heat of the Night, co-starred Sidney Poitier, who was garnering serious
respect for turning out one great performance after another and was just four
years removed from winning Best Actor for Lilies
of the Field, becoming the first black man to ever win the award. Poitier
wasn’t nominated for either of his 1967 roles, but he did end up with perhaps
the most memorable line[1]
of the year: “They call me MISTER Tibbs.”
Back in the Long Long Ago, the television adaptation,
starring Carroll O’Connor, used to come on immediately before or after Jeopardy! (I can’t remember which), and
I saw several episodes of it because of that. I was worried that Rod Steiger
would seem strange in the role because of my familiarity with the TV show, but
that wasn’t the case at all. He turned in such a strong performance that I
immediately forgot about O’Connor, who was pretty good in his own right.
Maybe I liked the film so much because it took place in
Mississippi, but it certainly doesn’t present a flattering image of the state.
After a body is found in the middle of the night, Virgil Tibbs is arrested,
because why else would a black man be out at 3:30 am if he wasn’t committing a
murder? Upon questioning at the police station, he reveals that he is a
homicide detective from Philadelphia. “Philadelphia, Mississippi?” Chief
Gillespie asks. No, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Murders aren’t all that common in Sparta, the fictional town
where the film is set, so Gillespie asks him to stay and take a look at the
body. Tibbs is able to ascertain details about the murder that the Sparta
police never could have, including evidence that absolves the new suspect.
Tibbs is asked to stay on the case a little longer, and though he initially
objects, he eventually becomes so deeply invested in finding the killer that
they can’t make him leave, even though he’s risking his life every moment he
stays in town.
They gave me... MISTER Pibb! |
I won’t reveal any more about the plot because, in addition
to its political message, it’s a whodunit as much as anything else. And although it’s
often presented as a story about a racist police chief forced to get along with
a black detective, I don’t think that’s really the case. Gillespie is maybe not
the most racially enlightened person, but he is by no means a dyed-in-the-wool
racist like many of the other townsfolk.
Honestly, Gillespie comes to accept Tibbs very quickly, and
he is resistant to cave in to the community pressure to get Tibbs out of town,
at least until it becomes apparent that Tibbs’s life is in jeopardy. When
others attack Tibbs on the basis of race, Gillespie defends him.
What I appreciated most about the film is that it gets its
point across not by having characters preach about the horrors of racism, but
by showing a black man as a competent detective. We know he’s good at his job—better
than his white counterparts, in fact—because the film shows him being good at
his job. A lesser film would have made this the focal point of its plot, rather
than making it clear through the subtext.
What I appreciated second most was that the actors resisted
the urge to over-Southern, a pernicious tendency that I’m beginning to think is
a mostly modern phenomenon[2].
I checked out the biographies of the main actors, and only two, Sam the
policeman and Ralph who works at the diner, were actually from the South. So
you see, Hollywood, it is possible to
have non-native Southerners play Southern characters who aren’t total
caricatures. Two of the worst current culprits, True Blood and The Walking
Dead, would do well to learn this.
This has rapidly turned into one of the longest posts in the
history of The Oscar Project, and I think that’s a testament to how much I
liked the film. The more I wrote, the more good things about it I had to say.
Maybe it wasn’t the “best” film of the year, and it’s certainly
not the most famous, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many that are more fun to watch. I appreciated that more than I can express. There have been some
seriously great films so far in this project, but “fun” hasn’t been the
operative word for most of them. I’ll take it whenever I can get it.
[1] I
admit that maybe “What we have here is a failure to communicate” from Cool Hand Luke is more famous.
[2] I
can’t trace the origins of this exactly, but I watched a few minutes of Disney’s
Robin Hood a few days ago and was
reminded that many of the (presumably British) characters had heavy,
over-Southern accents. And that was released only a few years after In the Heat of the Night.
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