Following Murder on the Orient Express, Charles and I watched In the Heat of the Night, which I’d seen at least twice before, once in its original theatrical release when I was 14, and again on a previous occasion with Charles (my journal entry on it is dated January 26, 2003, which means we probably watched it together the night before, though my file is blocked because it was created with an old, incompatible version of Microsoft Word). On the second go-round the film seemed awfully dated; the casting of Sidney Poitier as Black Northern super-cop Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger as white cracker police chief Bill gillespie in Sparta, Mississippi made the film seem like just another one of Poitier’s “super-Black” roles. Here, as in his other Academy Award-nominated Best Picture for 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, he’s playing the sort of Black man your average white family would want their daughter to marry – and of Poitier’s three films that year I liked the third one, To Sir, with Love, best because there was nothing in the story that required Poitier’s character to be Black. He was a tough teacher winning over a class of loutish students in a British proletarian town, and the only reason the character is Black is because the actor playing him is.
Seen in 2023, In the Heat of the Night has re-acquired the chilling relevance director Norman Jewison and writers John Ball (author of the original novel on which the film was based) and StirlilNg Silliphant (who did the screenplay) intended it to have, as racial and gender politics in the South and elsewhere have gone so far backwards in the age of Donald Trump. The horror Trump has wreaked on American history is such that the openly racist attitudes of Chief Gillespie and, even more so, the other white characters in this film have become open, blatant parts of American political discourse, and people who think that way once again feel emboldened to express them with a sense of pride. In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery, though as Ben Mankiewicz said in his introduction to TCM’s showing of the film, there have been few (if any) films ostensibly in the mystery-suspense genre in which the question of “whodunit” has been less relevant or audience-involving.
The film opens with Virgil Tobbs sitting at the railway station, alone and waiting for the night train to take him from Sparta, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee on his way back to his home town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,where he’s a homicide detective. Suddenly he’s accosted by a gun-wielding white police officer and arrested for a crime he had no idea had even happened, the murder of a rich white Northerner named Colbert who was planning to build a factory in Sparta that would have created 1,000 jobs, half of them for Black people. As I observed about the film in 2003, in many ways the relationship between Tibbs and Gillespie is Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson all over again – though perhaps the better parallel is Holmes and Inspector Lestrade, the bumbling official detective who comes to the obvious (and wrong) conclusions versus the big-city consultant who figures it out and comes up with the right answer.
But In the Heat of the Night is a deeper, richer film than most of Poitier’s liberal racial caricature roles in this period. It’s also a film about capitalism and how the dying traditions of the South live on in the character of Eric Endicott (Larry Gates), the super-rich white guy who owns the town’s cotton plantation that is Sparta’s only source of income nd who thought of Colbert’s factory as a threat not only to his income but his whole ability to run Sparta as his own private fiefdom. Through much of the film I w3as thinking of Mississippi-born author William Faulkner’s famous line about the traditions that gripped the South: “The past isn’t over; it’s not even past.” When Tibbs, accompanied by Gillespie, visits Endicott and questions him about whether Endicott ordered Colbert’s murder,gets slapped by Endicott and slaps him back, Endicott turns to Gillespie and says, “Did you see that?” and Gillespie says, “In another time I could have shot you dead on the spot.”
There’s also a crittique of sexism in the film in the person of Dolores Purdy (Quentin Dean – a woman named Quentin?), a woman who likes to parade around in her house all day naked and by doing this excites the attention of various men, including Harvey Oberst (Scott Wilson), who was busted for coming on to her and later is accused of the murder of Colbert once Gillespie is convinced Tibbs didn’t do it. She’s just become pregnant and the man involved, Courtney (Peter Whitney), tok $800 from Endicott to kill Colbert in order to pay for her illegal abortion from Mama Caleba (Beah Richards, a marvelous performance that makes her one scene indelible) – the sort of person we thought would have been put out of business forever in the Roe v. Wade era but is no doubt coming back now that Roe is overturned, many states (including virtually all the South) has already made abortion illegal, and a nationwide ban is almost certain to be enacted as soon as the Republicans once again control the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
There’s also the fascianting character of Colbert’s widow (Lee Grant, who also delivers a powerful performance that remains indelible on the memory even though she’s in very few scenes), who insists that Tibbs be allowed to investigate her husband’s murder or else she’ll pu9ll the factory he was already building in Sparta and move it somewhere else. And there’s a clash between old-fashioned policing, in which the cops light on the most likely suspect they can find and browbeat him into confessing whether he’s guilty or not, and Tibbs’ more scientific approach. He personally takes over the autopsy from the disinterested town doctor, and he deduces Harvey cannot have been the murderer because Harvey is left-handed and it was clear theblow that linked Colbert was struck by a right-handed person – though there’s a major glitch in the portrayal of Tibbs’s character: even in 1967 it seemed unbelievable to me that an experienced homicide detective would conduct a forensic examination of a car without wearing gloves or putting any evidence he gathered in plastic bags. I also liked the clear bit of status envy when Tibbs tells Gillespie that he makes $162.50 perwek for being a Philadelphia homicide cop and it’s obvious from gillespies reaction that that’s far more than what he makes for what amounts to the same job.
In the Heat of the Night has its flaws, including a musical score by Quincy Jones that is far better than the pastiche with wich Rodney Russell Bennett scored Murder on the Orient Express but still reaches for some pretty obvious cues (did we really need a cue that evokes Delta blues and reprises the title song when we see Endicott’s Black workforce harvesting his coton?), but for the most part it’s a stunning piece of filmmaking that only shows how far backwards we’ve gone. And I liked the fact that the film uses what’s come to be called “the ‘N’-word” several times, always in the spirit of condemning racism rather than expressing it; these people have stewed in their own racist contempt for so long we really need to hear them say that word!
