In a conservative Mississippi town, a man is found dead on the street. The Chief of the local Police, Gillespie (Rod Steiger) must find out who did it and why - and his first suspect is a stranger to the town, a black man named Virgil Tibbs (Sydney Poitier). Tibbs, however, turns out to be a Police Detective from the far more liberal Philadelphia who is just passing through. But on discovering that Tibbs is also the best detective in the city, Gillespie grudgingly requests Tibbs’ help in the murder investigation- and the local townsfolk are furious.
Doug says...
And we’re back to 1967 reviewing the Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night having had a short break to see all the 2018 Best Picture Nominees (wasn’t Sally Hawkins great? I loved Lady Bird etc etc).
And it’s a really interesting and painful film to come back to. The last 2018 nominee we watched was the superb Get Out, dealing with issues of race. And here - fifty-one years earlier - is a film doing exactly the same. It’s the painful realisation that too little has actually changed. And even by the end of the film, it doesn’t feel like anyone has changed or adapted except perhaps Chief Gillespie who learns to be a tiny bit less racist. Whoo.
The film uses various moments to shock - and boy do they. One very polite white man turns out to be a throwback to slave-masters and slaps Virgil Tibbs for trying to question him. There’s several scenes where gangs of white men attempt to kill Virgil, whether it’s beating him to death with iron poles or plain out pointing guns at him. And ultimately they don’t learn to do anything different, the only reason Virgil escapes is either someone saves him, or the rabble gets distracted. It’s unsatisfying purely through it not fully addressing how people could - and should - change. Let alone why they shouldn’t use the ’n’ word (which of course appears in abundance here).
It does feature a stand-out performance from Sidney Poitier. Just like in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, he presents an entirely respectable and polite man, being the centre of a maelstrom purely because of his skin colour. There’s some superb acting - not least the silent look of shock and horror in his eyes when a policeman points at cotton picking workers and asks ‘decided to go a different way did you?’ It’s horrendous, and Poitier gives us a layered, powerful performance that never lets us forget it.
The plot is a little confused and relies on some quick turning points towards the end of the film, and it doesn’t feel a particularly stand-out winner. But Poitier’s performance is superb and it’s somewhat savage that the winner of 1967’s film has almost exactly the same core issues as a nominee of 2018. Sad, but (even more sadly) unsurprising.
Highlight
Sidney Poitier does great work as a determined, undefeated black policeman surrounded by horrifically racist thugs.
Lowlight
The plot does become murky and somewhat disengaging about half way through. You don’t really care about the outcome, and who is eventually unmasked as the murderer. I think it’s because there’s no catharsis for the real villain of the film - racism.
Mark
5/10
Paul says...
1967 was quite a phenomenal year for Best Picture nominees. In the Heat of the Night beat The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Doolittle and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to the crown. The last of these also starred Sydney Poitier, with Beah Richards in a supporting role, and tackled the issue of racism in an age when civil rights was heavily in the headlines. The fact that two nominees put racial segregation into the spotlight is made all the more poignant when we discover that the Academy Awards that year was postponed by two days due to the murder of Martin Luther King in April 1968.
But while Coming to Dinner took a nuanced, tender, family-oriented study of interracial marriage, Heat of the Night takes the gritty, violent route. Enraged mobs of white men surround the one black character, the N-word is used in abundance, the villainous characters are not just verbally unpleasant- they are blood-thirsty and immoral and, at the climactic reveal, animalistic and war-faring. Most shockingly, their behaviour is not that much different from the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville last year. A 50-year-old film is usually the sort of thing we watch whilst saying things like “Thank God nothing like this happens now”, but when you get right down to it, how far have we really come?
This film displays racism with brutal honesty and viciousness, and this is by far the most compelling part. Admittedly, it doesn’t go much further than point out that everyone except Sydney Poitier and the dead man’s wife are completely bigoted and awful (which is about as insightful as a Hollyoaks storyline), and more recent films on similar subjects like The Help and Hidden Figures have delved into the psychology of racism with more depth, having had the benefit of reflecting on the level of segregation in the '50s and '60s. But, in all fairness, white people can be very bigoted and awful, so the film shouldn’t be brought down as a result.
I felt it was a shame, however, that the central murder mystery is so lacklustre. Initially I thought we were in for something along the lines of Se7en- a strong character study combined with a juicy twist-laden tale. But we never really know anything about the victim, and the mystery itself is just a series of false accusations against one suspect after another. I get the impression that the filmmakers were far more preoccupied with the social aspect of the film than with the sensationalist aspect. But I liked the final reveal because, although it’s not exactly an Agatha Christie “NO WAY!” revelation, it still reveals the allegedly superior white race to be nothing more than a pack of rampant, volatile neanderthals, and I think that’s the entire point that the film is making.
I also wasn’t entirely convinced by the character development in Gillespie, even though Rod Steiger won Best Actor for this. I think that we’re supposed to eventually see him as prejudiced but grudgingly respectful of Virgil’s Sherlock Holmes-like abilities. We are meant to perceive him with a combination of exasperation for his ill-conceived self-importance, and amusement for his difficulty to overcome this white-skinned superiority. To be honest, I saw him as a bit of a dickhead who picks and chooses when he listens to Virgil, and when he dismisses him. To modern eyes, I would argue that he is far less sympathetic and supportable.
In the Heat of the Night is the first instance of the dark, sexy crime thrillers that will permeate the late '60s and most of the '70s. With youth rebellion, sexual liberation and civil rights on the tip of everyone’s tongue, it’s a welcome departure from the fluffy comfort of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. Audiences want to see the real world now- not the one Rodgers and Hammerstein made up. But this is not the most exciting nor the most powerful of films in the Oscars canon.
Highlight
The scene in which Virgil is pursued by a group of Confederate-flag-waving thugs is pretty intense. The pirouetting gangs of West Side Story are replaced with, well, real gangs.
Lowlight
Gillespie is an outdated character for me. Nowadays, someone like him needs to display much more regret and redemption for audiences to like him.
Mark
4/10
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