The Oscar Project #40: In the Heat of the Night (1967)

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.

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[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.