1967: In the Heat of the Night

I probably should have started the 1967 project with In the Heat of the Night, as it's the big winner of the year at the Oscars, but I wanted to get the first "Revisiting" post out. Now I can do this in a more proper order.

2) In the Heat of the Night (winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay). My first viewing

Based on what I read before Pictures at a Revolution, I viewed In the Heat of the Night as the "compromise" Best Picture: more daring than Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, not as edgy as Bonnie and Clyde or The Graduate. I also thought it was a typical black/white buddy movie, with saintly Sidney Poitier educating racist Rod Steiger (who won Best Actor).

My impressions were incorrect. In the Heat of the Night is a worthy winner, mostly eschewing sappy bonding moments in favor of biting dialogue - Stirling Silliphant adapted John Bell's novel - and uneasy relationships. Sometimes the words amuse: "What do you mean I have the wrong man? I have the motive which is money and the body which is dead!" Steiger's exasperated Chief Gillespie huffs. More often, the story sears, a murder mystery on the surface but at its core an honest look at racial interactions featuring an educated, “interloping” black detective, Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), and a long-established, wary white police chief (Steiger).

Poitier seethes in depicting the treatment Virgil receives in Sparta, Mississippi. "May I see the man I'm supposed to have killed?" the Philadelphia-based detective sneers at one point. When a white man, Endicott, bristles at being questioned and slaps him, Virgil slaps Endicott back. Poitier developed an ulcer during production, and it seems he decided Virgil had one, too. "They call me Mister Tibbs," Poitier hisses in his most famous line. The actor said Virgil is his favorite of his roles; it's an absurd oversight the Academy didn’t even nominate him.

Director Norman Jewison rarely lapses into stereotype, and he uses a great bluesy opening by Ray Charles and a Quincy Jones score a flavor to accompany the oppressive Southern summer heat. (The movie was shot in fall in Illinois, and the actors kept ice chips in their mouth so their breathe wouldn’t appear on camera.) Forty years later, In the Heat of the Night still crackles.