***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, and Larry Gates
Directed by Norman Jewison & written by Stirling Silliphant, from the novel by John Ball
1967
109 min PG
“In the Heat of the Night” is a semi-classic Civil Rights Era police procedural with a social agendum. That was a mouthful. I got to start thinking of better opening paragraphs.
A black detective from Philadelphia named Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is wrangled into investigating a murder in backwater Mississippi, but only after being arrested as a suspect, i.e., an “uppity Negro.” The movie is a fine procedural, given clean lines and uncluttered framing by director Norman Jewison. There’s a hypnotic precision to how Tibbs slowly and silently inspects the murdered man’s body. But what the movie is more interested in is creating a palpable time and place, enlivened by strong performances.
Sparta, Mississippi is as living and breathing as any place in the movies. We see diners, factories, dilapidation, both sides of the tracks, cotton fields, and hear so much crackling as cars roll over dirt roads. Everyone shines with sweat. Jewison often places his camera so that we see through bushes and doorways, emphasizing the haphazard criss-crossing of Southern cities, and the empty spaces that have never been filled. It is a city of economic waste, perhaps never great but certainly once better than it is now. The character of Sparta feels that insult has been added to injury when it sees a black guy who’s outdoing everyone in town: smarter, better spoken, better educated, better paid, and handsome to the point of being godlike.
Sparta is embodied by Gillespie, its chief of police (Rod Steiger). He is intelligent but blustery and spiteful because his world is limited. When he discovers that Tibbs is not the killer but a fellow police officer, Jewison emphasizes the cramped confines of his office—if Gillespie is the big fish, he is in a very little pond. He is lonely and unmarried, and remarks that no one ever sets foot in his house. Even the town doesn’t much like him either; he is not the wise old Carroll O’Connor of the 1980s “In the Heat of the Night” television show.
Poitier acted in “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” in the same year, and his character in both films could almost be the same man under different circumstances. If “Heat of the Night” is the Civil Rights procedural, then “Guess Who” is the Civil Rights comedy of manners, very much in the style of the ’50s and early ‘60s. He is respected and liked in “Guess Who” and is therefore talkative, friendly, and animated, even gangly. But “Heat’s” gritty locations, shadows, and Ray Charles’ gravelly singing predicts the Coppolas and Scorseses of the 1970s. Tibbs is met with outright belligerence and Poitier plays him contained and cold, with minimal movement. He is, in fact, so contained and seething that he damages the elements of the procedural by keeping so much information to himself. In both films, Poitier is required to be of nearly genius intelligence before he can rub shoulders with white men as his equals. African-Americans of average intelligence were not permitted in mainstream American movies until…oh, I dunno sometime between when Native Americans became holier-than-thou nature gods and when they became real humans.
“In the Heat of the Night” is not without its flaws. The back-and-forth between the black detective and the white police chief may get wearisome after a while. The chief learns his lesson again and again, only to come back barking “boy!” a few minutes later. The detective threatens to leave so often you almost wish he would. The plot mechanics used to keep Tibbs in town may seem to stretch things a bit, too. By no fault of its own the movie has lost some of its edge by severe copying, not just by the TV show of the same name, but by just about every cop show since.
“In the Heat of the Night” is also a classic example of how topical subject matter may get you contemporary popularity but artistic daring is more likely to guarantee a longer shelf-life. Self-consciously IMPORTANT dramas, like “In the Heat of the Night,” splash big when they’re first released (“Heat” won fives Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Steiger). But they also tend to date faster than genre pictures that covertly address the same subject matter.
George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” was released a year after “In the Heat of the Night” (“In the Heat of the Night of the Living Dead?” Whoa!) and explored similar images of a lone black man, smarter than his white associates, threatened by mindless rural conformity. And I would argue that—while it may not have been true ten or fifteen years after the films were released—it’s probably true now that more people have seen and studied Romero’s “Night” than Jewison’s. “In the Heat of the Night” also lost its nomination for Best Director to Mike Nichols of “The Graduate,” a considerably lighter film whose artistry has helped it better stand the last three-and-a-half decades.
Finished Monday, November 14, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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