Holly Woodlawn Takes Manhattan in Musical Comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers

SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS 

(Robert J. Kaplan, USA, 1972, 82 minutes) 

I'm not certain if Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was the first film to feature a trans woman in the lead, but it was surely one of the first to simply let her be her authentic self. 

Something similar could be said of Paul Morrissey's 1971 Andy Warhol-produced feminist satire Women in Revolt, which also features trans superstar Holly Woodlawn, in addition to Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis.

Woodlawn may have been trans in real life--though she didn't use the term--but Eve, the character she plays in this film, comes across as cisgender. She's just a Midwestern girl looking to make her name in the Big Apple.

 

As with its star, the cast came primarily from Warhol's Factory, Off-Broadway, burlesque revues, and the world of bathhouse entertainment. 

Bette Midler associate Jerry Blatt composed the music, and Midler sings most of the songs: "Get It On" and "Nothin Goin' Down at All" (both with Mike Lincoln), "Love Theme," and the lovely "Strawberry, Lilac and Lime."

 

In her breathless 1991 memoir, A Low Life in High Heels (with Jeffrey Kenneth Copeland), Woodlawn describes her third feature as "a riotous romp of oddities and mishaps" that took three months to shoot. There were ups and downs, but for the most part she had a blast, though director Robert J. Kaplan did tell her that if she didn't stop drinking, he would pull the plug, and so she did…though she reverted to her old ways once filming wrapped. 

 

Predicting the loopy suburbanites of John Waters' filmography, the cheeky comedy–pun intended–opens with a set of clueless parents looking down at the camera, and wishing their unseen daughter well as she leaves home. As they turn to enter the house behind them, Kaplan reveals that they aren't wearing any pants or skirts or even underwear. Just two bare bottoms. 

 

Significantly, the film was released the same year as Lou Reed's ode to some of the Factory's brightest lights, "Walk on the Wild Side," which immortalized Woodlawn, Darling, and Curtis and would become better known than Kaplan's film, which also follows a young-woman-in-the-big-city story line. 

"Holly," as Reed spoke-sang, "Came from Miami, F-L-A, hitch-hiked her way across the USA, plucked her eyebrows along the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she…she says, 'Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side'...said, 'Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side'."

 

While Emmaretta Marks, an original Hair cast member, sings the title song, "Scarecrow," a bus makes its way from Topeka, Kansas to New York City where Eve gets off with her luggage. Instead of a cab, she grabs a ride with a nun who predicts the ride-hailing drivers of more recent vintage. She's driving a cab (poorly) in order to earn enough money to take the orphanage to see Jesus Christ Superstar. After swearing at another driver, she drops Eve off at the Chelsea Hotel, where much of the filming took place. 

 

After settling in, Eve connects with her fashionable friend, "Margo Channing" (Yafa Lerner), who has a side line in sex work, so men assume Eve does, too, but she just wants to act. She's also pretty naïve, but not stupid, and quickly figures out why strange men keep referring to Margo as "$5.95"--it's the price she charges for blow jobs (the equivalent of $45.52 today). 

 

At this point, you can probably guess Eve's last name. That’s right, it's Harrington, though Woodlawn's acting style reflects an even earlier era, since she has screwball energy. She's a very physical performer, a little like Shelley Duvall. She doesn't seem capable of standing still or keeping quiet for very long, and the expression on her elastic face is constantly changing. 

These qualities apply to Woodlawn's other early performances, too, like Holly in Morrissey's 1970 film Trash, except that's a darker work overall, even if Woodlawn brings the light. In Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay's insightful 2024 book, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, the authors describe her as "wildly expressive." Though they don't cover Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, they do discuss Trash and Women in Revolt in a section titled "The Warhol Superstars: Pioneers Without a Frontier."

 

As Eve explores NYC, she keeps running into a woman named "Mary Poppins" (actress and nightclub singer Tally Brown, another Factory figure) traveling with a harem of hunky men. While Eve is thin, awkward, and discreet, Mary is zaftig, confident, and extravagant. She also has some of the highest hair and thickest false eyelashes I've ever seen. Though in part because of the era in which it was made and the milieu in which it takes place, the makeup and costuming throughout are truly show-stopping. 

 

Margo, who is preparing to leave town, introduces Eve to Mary in hopes she can help her find an apartment. She also encourages her to spiff up her look, so Eve gives herself a glam makeover, except no one notices until she meets "Rhett Butler" (Woodlawn in male drag). Their meet-cute at a snooty party is truly cute--and pre-dates Oscar-nominated trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón's male drag in last year's Emilia Pérez by a whopping 52 years.  

Rhett, a producer who speaks with a Bela Lugosi accent, invites Eve to his brownstone. She's thinking about her career, while he's thinking about…something else. This sequence, which begins in total darkness, takes a brief swerve into horror territory before Eve makes her escape. 

 

Once the dust settles, she meets up with Mary, after which Brown sings a number on screen. Her throwback aesthetic lies somewhere between Bessy Smith and Janis Joplin, though more kittenish than either. In the lyrics, she says she came to NYC from Texas. 

Eve sings, too, and though Woodlawn has less of a voice, her charisma combined with the sparkly outfits, pretty boys, and Busby Berkeley-on-a-budget set design goes a long way. That sequence plays out in black and white. Another plays out in shades of brown, like a daguerreotype, and yet another plays out in still images, like Chris Marker's La Jetée--but faster. 

 

If there's a theme to Sandra Scoppettone's sole screenplay, it's that all these women came to the city to make a name for themselves, and that straight men can be a real pain in the ass (the men surrounding Mary appear to be gay). As two potential roommates, "Baby" and "Jane Hudson" (Kathryn and Margaret Howell), put it, "Men are nothing but little boys who have never grown up. They're selfish, evil, egotistical, sex crazy, and repressed." 

Eve and Mary both have some pretty not-so-great encounters with heterosexual men, though the last straight guy Eve meets, a diminutive wrestler named "Joe Buck" (Sonny Boy Hayes) is not so bad...though his sister is another story.

 

Scoppettone, a playwright and author of YA and mystery novels, was already out, more or less, when she got involved with the project. When Holly's boozing got out of control, Kaplan extricated her from the Chelsea Hotel, and sent her off to stay with Sandra, a former alcoholic, and her girlfriend. 

Not so coincidentally, one of Scoppettone's best known novels, 1976's The Late Great Me, dramatizes a teen's battle with the bottle. The book proved such a sensation that it was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning ABC After School Special, The Late Great Me! Story of a Teenage Alcoholic, in 1979. 

 

Eve's adventures in roommate-wrangling continue until the very end of the picture, at which point she decides to move to Hollywood, which seems to come from out of nowhere, though Holly's name seems to insist upon it.  

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was designed for maximum enjoyment, and that's what it delivers. Kaplan, by way of Scoppettone, doesn't appear to be trying to deliver a political message, though presenting a trans performer in such an unconflicted, uncomplicated way is political by its very nature. 

 

The film has been compared to the work of Robert Downey, Sr., and that makes sense in terms of his anything-goes approach to race, rather than gender or sexual orientation, in 1969's Putney Swope. Or the human form itself in 1970's Pound, in which actors play different breeds of dog. 

 

I was also reminded of Milos Forman's 1971 countercultural comedy Taking Off, and there's a degree to which all of these films and filmmakers intersect, beyond the fact that they're all set or based in NYC, since Forman would adapt Hair into a feature, and Hair co-writer Gerome Ragni--spelled "Jerome" in her memoir--was among Woodlawn's Chelsea Hotel social set.

 

Not all of it works–or works perfectly–but that's no crime when it comes to by-the-seat-of-your-pants lunacy. Instead of a pie fight, for instance, there's an ice cream brawl in Central Park, an improv class taught by sexist wackadoo "Walter Mitty" (David Margulies in his film debut), pigtailed health food nut "Ninotchka" (Suzanne Skillen), and other zaniness of that ilk. 

 

What the film reflects in 2025, however, is freedom. There was a time in American life when anything seemed possible, and this was one of those times, but life would not be easy for some of these players. Though Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, who has an audio cameo as Laugh-In phone operator Ernestine, would go on to bigger things, not everyone would follow suit.

Robert J. Kaplan, for instance, who followed up with a 1976 softcore Jaws parody called Gums, never made another film. After serving as production manager on Henry Jaglom's 1976 Tracks, he virtually disappeared. 

 

By the time of her death in 2022, Emmaretta Marks, who made an impression on rockers from Jimi Hendrix to Deep Purple--they even wrote a song about her--had lived with dementia for several years. As Margaret Hall noted in her 2022 Playbill obituary, "Ms. Marks had no formal retirement or life insurance plan; her family is currently taking donations to cover her funeral and burial expenses."

 

Seven years before, playwright and performance artist Penny Arcade had set up a GoFundMe for her friend, Holly Woodlawn, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died that same year. As Arcade put it in her appeal, "Holly gave visibility long before it was comfortable to do so and also gave thousands of people both hope and pleasure." Among those pleasures is this sweet and goofy film in which her ebullient spirit takes full flight. 

 

 

If you missed it when it played, for one night only, at this year's SIFF, the Academy Film Archive's new 4K restoration of Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers plays the Beacon Cinema on June 13. Images: the IMDb (Holly Woodlawn in closeup and in B&W with sausages), Cinema 5 Distributing / Slant (Woodlawn in Trash), Hari Nef's Instagram (Tally Brown), Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Woodlawn's big musical number), and Lost Classics of Teen Lit: 1939-1989 (The Late Great Me book cover).  

Stranger Flashback: Doom Metal Pioneer Bobby Liebling Rises from the Grave in Last Days Here

Here is a revived version of a 2012 Line Out post about Last Days Here (these posts were purged from the internet some time after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

Doom Metal Pioneer Rises from the Grave 

Posted by Kathy Fennessy on Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:23 PM 

LAST DAYS HERE 

(Don Argott and Demian Fenton, USA, 2012, 91 minutes) 

Liebling: German for "darling."

Don Argott and Demian Fenton's Last Days Here joins the ranks of documentaries about artists who've kept the dream alive against all odds. 

Depending on your point of view, that makes Bobby Liebling, lead singer of Pentagram, an admirable figure or a delusional one. It's also a cautionary tale about a rocker who never picked up a second trade—you too could end up in the family basement, subsisting on Fig Newtons and crack. 

Author Ian Christie (Sound of the Beast) describes Pentagram's music as "harrowing and bone-chilling," while Blue Öyster Cult producer Murray Krugman feels that the Alexandria, Virginia quartet provided the missing link between heavy metal and punk rock, like a "street Black Sabbath," but their flirtations with the big boys—KISS, Sandy Pearlman, Columbia Records, etc.—always fell flat. Sometimes they were to blame, sometimes not. 

Right: Greg Mayne, Bobby Liebling, Geof O'Keefe, and Pentagram 

At the film's outset, the rail-thin, grey-haired, crazy-eyed Liebling appears to be nearing the end of the line. If you thought Ozzy Osbourne has been looking wobbly lately, you haven't seen what 53-year-old Liebling looked like in 2007 (the film ends in 2010). 

Though he dresses like a young man in jeans and hard-rock t-shirts, there's clearly something wrong with him. His drawn face and twisted mouth could only be the result of long-term drug use or chronic illness—more likely a combination of the two. 

Bobby proceeds to acknowledge 44 years of substance abuse; 39 addicted to heroin. Bandages cover his arms and his hands bear puncture wounds. 

Accused of enabling their son, Diane and Joe Liebling, a nightclub singer and a former White House security adviser, believe in his talent, but worry that his best days are behind him. Despite evidence to the contrary, Bobby's manager, Sean "Pellet" Pelletier, who has released two collections of Pentagram material on Relapse Records, First Daze Here (The Vintage Collection) and First Daze Here Too, refuses to write him off as a lost cause. 

Pellet believes Bobby has one record left, and he wants it to receive a proper release. While he attempts to negotiate a contract with Pantera's Phil Anselmo, who runs Housecore Records, Bobby goes to detox, and events take a surprising turn: he meets a beautiful young woman, falls in love, and moves to Philadelphia--at which point, the filmmakers abandon the record-making storyline in favor of Bobby's misadventures in domesticity. 

If it seems too good to be true, it is, and his circumstances change again. And again. 

Says Pellet, "Anything that is bad for his heart, he'll do it: love, drugs, bacon." Liebling, as it turns out, has a thing for bacon pizza.

Until Bobby met Hallie, I didn't think this documentary could get more depressing, and it doesn't, but Last Days Here will try even the more hardened metal heads. I've seen a few scary movies in my time, but even David Cronenberg would recoil at the sight of Bobby's un-bandaged arms. 

A lot of recent music docs have taken on subjects who've persevered through adversity. Rock School co-directors and metal musicians Argott and Fenton don't break the mold, but they do depict a version of bottom that puts most others to shame. In that sense, it's more like Brother's Keeper. 

If it wasn't for the parents who gave him shelter and kept him fed, Liebling wouldn't still be alive, and the film ends on a high that justifies their support and that of Pellet, the best friend a guy like Bobby could ever have. 

*I found no evidence that this alignment came to fruition. 

Last Days Here plays the Grand Illusion Cinema through Thurs, June 21. The theater is located at 1403 NE 50th St in the University District. 

In an interview with Christopher Campbell, Don Argott talked about his next project: "We're working with this heavy metal band called Lamb of God. They’re embarking on a world tour that we're documenting. The film is less about the band and more about their fans around the world. Places including more troubled spots like Israel and India and Mexico. We're in the early stages of shooting, but we’re really excited about it." Images from The Film Stage (Bobby Liebling) and the IMDb (Pentagram on and off the stage).

Stranger Flashback: A Peek Inside Jonathan Furmanski's The Weird World of Blowfly

This is a revived version of a 2011 Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

Film/TV  |  Nov 26, 2011 at 9:05 am 

Blowfly's On-Screen Freak Party 

KATHY FENNESSY

THE WEIRD WORLD OF BLOWFLY
(Jonathan Furmanski, USA, 2010, 89 minutes)

Clarence Reid, aka Blowfly, was an odd-looking Miami cat with bizarre taste in clothes—especially his signature, sparkly, luchador-like outfit—and a fine feel for a funky groove (he had the flattened facial features of an ex-boxer). 

With his teddy bear-like growl, Reid sang stuff so unbelievably filthy that it's hard to take too much offense. After repeated exposure, it starts to sound like a low-level hum, the rantings of a street-corner crazy, or a sustained Tourette's attack. And if you don't take it literally, it can be pretty funny.

The husband and father began by writing and producing safe-for-radio Miami Sound classics like Betty Wright's "Clean Up Woman" and Gwen McCrae's "Rockin' Chair." It wasn't until 1971 that he introduced the Blowfly alter ego. At which point, he left his wife and children, and never looked back.

For his feature debut, cinematographer-turned-director Jonathan Furmanski (loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies) focuses on Blowfly's relationship with drummer/manager Tom Bowker, a super-fan who made it his business to put the entertainer back in the spotlight. 

Over the year that unfurls in the film, Blowfly lays down new tracks and goes on the road from Florida to Germany with backup players including Fishbone singer and bass player Norwood Fisher, but it's always clear who's calling the shots.

Bowker looks after Blowfly, but he also tells him what to do and when to do it. It's hard to tell if he really cares or whether he just sees the 69-year-old as a profitable "brand" (his term). Blowfly clearly resents his orders, but complies anyway, much like a child tethered to a domineering guardian.

Further, it soon becomes clear that Blowfly, despite the explicit imagery, has no interest in sex. He may brag about his prowess, but he's a drug-free Christian who finds women fundamentally unclean, much like Terrence Howard, contributing to an impression of stunted adolescence. And coming from a man with long, spindly fingernails, that's pretty rich. To be fair, though, he's got harsh words for queer, Black, and white people, too.

If you're looking for 89 minutes of fun, The Weird World of Blowfly won't be the documentary to fill that need. Though high-profile admirers, like Ice-T and Jello Biafra, testify to his influence and importance, Furmanski tells a pretty sad story, though I enjoyed the footage of Henry Rollins rocking out at a live gig and Isaac Hayes providing piano accompaniment for Reid's infamous Otis Redding parody "Shittin' on the Dock of the Bay." 

Other speakers include songwriting partners, session musicians, record label representatives, and his ex-wife, who describes Reid as "a loner person."

After Blowfly sold the rights to his catalog in 2003, he paid his debts, and bid goodbye to any future royalties. Without Bowker, he'd probably be holed up in a motel, watching television, and filling up on fast food, but this trained-seal act can be hard to watch. Still, there's something to be said for Furmanski's clear-eyed approach when most other music documentaries cling to the rise-fall-and-rise model, though there's no mention of predecessors and protégés, including Redd Foxx, Rudy Ray Moore, Wu-Tang Clan's Ol' Dirty Bastard, and 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell.

If it isn't the raunchy comedy I was expecting, it isn't a full-blown tragedy either. Instead, the aptly-titled Weird World of Blowfly is more like a Dave Chappelle-produced horror movie where the monster lives on and Dr. Frankenstein caters to his every whim until the money runs out.

       Chuck D: "Rap Dirty" was my inspiration when I wrote "Fight the Power."

6/4/25 update: Clarence "Blowfly" Reid passed away in 2016 at 76.

The Weird World of Blowfly continues at SIFF Cinema at the Film Center through Thurs, Dec 1. For more information: (206) 633-7151. 

Images from Rotten Tomatoes (Blowfly in sparkly outfit) and Wikipedia (cover art for Betty Wright's 1972 Alston Records single "Clean Up Woman" and the 1973 Weird World Records album The Weird World of Blow Fly).

A Thriller with Purpose: Norman Jewison's Best Picture Winner In the Heat of the Night

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT 

(Norman Jewison, USA, 1967, 110 minutes) 

“We talk a lot about freedom, but it's a country based on slavery."--Norman Jewison in Lee Grant's 2000 Sidney Poitier profile One Bright Light 

Norman Jewison (1926-2024) knew exactly what he was doing when he made In the Heat of the Night. Concerned about race relations in his adopted country, the Canadian director set out to make a thriller bursting with local flavor, set to a scintillating score, and toplined by experienced actors who generated a crackling chemistry. No speechifying, no sadism. 

The movie has all the tropes of the conventional murder mystery–dead body, colorful suspects, potential coverup–but everything leads back to the way this small-minded Southern town treats a Black detective from the North. 

The film begins in a roadside diner where a beat cop (the great Warren Oates) refuels before making his late-night rounds. Ralph, the counterman (inexperienced actor Anthony James), is a tall, gangly guy who enjoys the more rollicking tunes on the jukebox. Jewison had hoped to include Sam the Sham's menacing "Little Red Riding Hood," but it was too expensive, and to be clear, many things were. The director was no fool, and he knew full well that United Artists wasn't funding his so-called Black Movie as generously as they could have–by 1967, he had already made six major motion pictures.

Fortunately, resourcefulness was among Jewison's finest qualities, and he tasked Oscar-winning composer Quincy Jones with the diegetic songs, like "Bowlegged Polly," that appear in the film, in addition to the country and blues-saturated score. There's no funk here, and nor does there need to be. That would come later.

This sequence sets the tone for the film, and I would imagine some Southerners weren't all that thrilled, because it's filled with sweaty faces and hair-trigger tempers--starting with Officer Wood and Ralph--and even a few flies buzzing around the greasy spoon, which gives off health hazard vibes. 

Granted, I don't believe Jewison was trying to paint all Southerners with the same brush, but the narrative never leaves this backwater Mississippi town. 

On the other hand, he made it in Sparta, Illinois, because Poitier who had had run-ins with the Klan, refused to risk a protracted stay below the Mason-Dixon Line, and during the brief period they filmed in Tennessee--where he slept with a gun under his pillow--they were made to feel most unwelcome. At least they didn't have to paint over the Sparta town signs. 

During his rounds, Wood drives past 16-year-old Delores's house knowing she has a predilection for lounging around without a top--hey, it's hot at night. 

The officer gawks for a bit before going on his way. Haskell Wexler, who would win an Oscar for his expressive work, uses window panes to avoid anything too risqué, but he gets the point across: Wood is a voyeur and Delores is an exhibitionist. 

Though Ralph and Delores come across as "local color," both will factor into the larger storyline, and though Corinne Margolin, aka Quentin Dean, would receive Golden Globe consideration for her destabilizing performance, she would retire from acting only three years later. She was 58 when she died. 

Shortly afterward, Wood finds the body of Chicago industrialist Phillip Colbert lying facedown in an alley, and the plot begins in earnest. He could follow proper police procedure, but nope. He spots an unfamiliar Black man at the train station, and assumes he's looking to get out of dodge after doing the deed. Beyond the overt racism, he fails to note that Sidney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs is professionally dressed, and nothing about his behavior suggests that he just murdered another man. He explains that he was in town to visit his mother, and that he's waiting for the train to take him back to Philadelphia. 

While any dispassionate officer of the law might give him the benefit of the doubt, Wood notices he has a roll of crisp dollar bills in his wallet–unusual for Sparta's Black citizenry–and that he's non-deferential in affect, so Wood clocks him for a defiant, remorseless, murderering thief, and hauls him to the station. 

I won't say too much about the ensuing investigation, not least since Jewison considered the relationship between Tibbs and Rod Steiger's Chief Gillespie of primary importance, and that's what proves most memorable. 

At the station house, Tibbs meets Gillespie, a more intelligent character than the doltish Wood–Oates really is a treat in the role–but one susceptible to the same prejudices. The chief is taken aback when Tibbs explains that he's a cop and flashes his badge, but it only gives him momentary pause, and he locks him up. He'll eventually set him free, only to lock him up again. 

While he's able, Tibbs does what he can to aid the investigation. It's in his best interest, to be sure, but it's also what he was born to do (there's a subtext here that big cities provide more opportunities for murder-solving). Gillespie grudgingly allows it, because the Philly detective is clearly better at his job. Even his knowledge of forensic science puts the coroner to shame. 

It wouldn't be the first time Poitier had to prove himself superior to white characters just to get by, but as both Steiger and Lee Grant, who plays the industrialist's widow, note on the Criterion commentary track, the actor felt the same way in real life. As popular as he was, and as much as he opened doors for other Black performers, he knew that even a minor misstep would reflect on an entire people. It was fundamentally unfair, but hardly a fictional construct. 

Grant, who had been blacklisted for 12 years, was so affected by the pressures Poitier faced that she made a documentary about her friend, One Bright Light, which premiered on PBS's American Masters in 2000. It's no wonder, after the terrible way Hollywood treated her, that she would shift from acting to directing. You can find her film on Max. It's quite moving.

En route to solving the crime, and winning the freedom that always should have been his, Tibbs questions a squirrely Wood, a petulant Delores, Harvey, the young man who swiped Colbert's wallet (In Cold Blood's Scott Wilson), and Mama Caleba, a shopkeeper and abortionist (Beah Richards, an Oscar nominee as Poitier's mother in 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?).

If there's anything about this film that proves especially surprising now, it's the matter-of-fact way Jewison handles abortion. After all, the production code was still in effect–though facing challenges–and Roe v. Wade was five years away. That said, no one terminates a pregnancy. 

When cornered by rednecks in a garage, Tibbs also proves himself handy with a metal pole he finds lying around, wielding it like a samurai sword. It's probably the closest the film comes to full-on fantasy, but I can imagine audiences cheering when he goes to town on those miscreants, though that wasn't the sequence that would make the film instantly infamous. 

There's another in which Tibbs, Gillespie at his side, questions Colbert rival--and cotton plantation owner--Endicott (Larry Gates). It's little surprise when Endicott slaps him, but what shocked audiences in 1967, and surely provoked even more cheering: Tibbs doesn't hesitate to slap him right back. So hard he nearly knocks the guy off his feet and makes his eyes water. 

That was a first. Blaxploitation hadn't happened yet, and even if off-screen Poitier came across as a temperate individual, he had done the damn thing. 

As the civil rights movement, with which Poitier was heavily involved, gathered steam in the 1970s, In the Heat of the Night came to be seen as too tame by more radical observers. It wasn't as pointed or as cynical as the angrier, low-budget films that arrived in its wake, attracting fewer customers, but growing in admiration, like William Wyler's final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, which is also very good, but much less optimistic. 

That perception suggests the film as wish fulfillment writ large, except it really isn't. If Jewison, working from an Oscar-winning screenplay by Naked City and Perry Mason creator Stirling Silliphant, flirts with the mismatched buddy cop formula, Oscar-winning actor Steiger's Gillespie remains an antagonist until the very end, at which point the clouds briefly part, as it were, and Jewison leaves us with the impression that Tibbs just happened to join forces with the one man in Sparta who was redeemable, and even that isn't guaranteed, unless you take the film's long afterlife into consideration. 

Silliphant adapted his screenplay from 1965's In the Heat of the Night, the first of John Ball's seven Virgil Tibbs novels, though he made several changes: Ball set the original story in North Carolina, the victim was a conductor named Enrico Mantoli, and Tibbs hailed from Pasadena. 

As Robert Altman used to say, films don't end, they just have a stopping point. Life goes on. Having put the case to bed, Tibbs will presumably return to Philadelphia, and Gillespie will remain in Sparta. Both single men at the time, they might fall in love, get married, and have kids, though that's less likely in Gillespie's case, because he admits to Tibbs, in an unguarded, booze-fueled moment, that he's a loner. Though the 42-year-old Steiger looks older than Poitier, they were only two years apart in age. 

That said, the movie was such a sensation that it led to two sequels, neither directed by Norman Jewison, and a television series starring Howard Rollins, Jr. and Carroll O'Connor, that ran for eight seasons on NBC and CBS. As you can imagine, Tibbs and Gillespie really did become buddy cops. Tibbs was also presented as a married man with children, while Gillespie has a Black girlfriend he marries in the series finale. The show was set in the 1980s and '90s, and shot on location in Louisiana and Georgia. 

I'm sure all three have their merits, but I've never felt the need to follow Tibbs beyond his entrance into the train heading toward more hospitable territory. Poitier is terrific from beginning to end, but Tibbs doesn't really change. When tested, he proves his mettle, but I can't imagine expecting anything less. Gillespie, on the other hand, gains respect, and possibly even a little affection, for the detective, though that doesn't make them friends. 

Beyond Jewison, Poitier, Steiger, Grant, and Wexler, the creative team included other talents known for their dedication to civil rights, like Quincy Jones, who considered Poitier a friend and called on Ray Charles to sing the theme song, and editor Hal Ashby, who considered Jewison a mentor.

When Jewison dropped out of 1970's gentrification satire The Landlord to direct 1971 musical Fiddler on the Roof, he gave Ashby the chance to direct his first feature–it was the least he could do after Ashby's innovative work on The Cincinnati Kid, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for which he received an Oscar for Best Editing. 

The Landlord also tackles race relations in America–the North in this case–but from a more comedic and sexualized perspective. The writing also came from two Black talents, novelist Kristin Hunter and writer/director/actor Bill Gunn. Times were continuing to change, and Ashby's debut plays like a companion to In the Heat of the Night, the farcical light to its noirish dark. 

All of the principals involved with the latter film, which won five Oscars including Best Picture, would go on to do work of merit for years to come. Just as Lee Grant would turn to directing in the early-1970s, Sidney Poitier would do the same. Now he was the guy literally calling the shots. 

As for Norman Jewison, he made a lot of terrific pictures during his filmmaking career, three of which form a trilogy about race relations in America, exemplifying the fact that this was a lifelong concern: In the Heat of the Night, 1984's A Soldier's Story, starring Rollins, Jr. and a 29-year-old up-and-comer named Denzel Washington, and 1999's Hurricane, his triumphant reunion with Washington–one of the highlights of my filmgoing life was attending the Toronto International Film Festival premiere with Jewison, Washington, and former middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in person. 

The film that launched the trilogy was a success on every level, reportedly making 12 times its cost, and yet Sidney Poitier received no recognition from the Academy. It's an odd oversight, and not necessarily a racist one, but if there was no Poitier, there would have been no film, because no other actor in 1967 could have replaced him. He was singular, unique, groundbreaking, and one of the finest actors this nation ever produced.

In the Heat of the Night is out now on The Criterion Collection in a 4K restoration on Blu-ray + UHD with several archival features, including an interview with Norman Jewison and Poitier biographer Aram Goudsouzian.

Images: Ann Arbor Observer (Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger), The Oklahoman (Warren Oates and Anthony James), the IMDb (Quentin Dean, Poitier with Oates, Poitier with Arthur Malet, Fred Stewart, and Jack Teter, Poitier with Scott Wilson, Lee Grant with Beau Bridges in The Landlord, and Poitier with Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor in Uptown Saturday Night), EyeFilmmuseum (Poitier with Steiger and Larry Gates), and Amazon.