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.