Directed by Norman Jewison. Written by Stirling Silliphant.
Some nights blood runs hot and life goes slow, and on one of those nights in small town Sparta, Mississippi, a local business tycoon is murdered, found by a patrolman as a small shape crumpled up on the sidewalk of Main Street.
Across town, waiting for a train to Memphis, sits Virgil Tibbs, a cut-rate murder detective from Philadelphia on his way to see family down south. A cop swings by the station looking for suspects, and casting eyes on Tibbs’ black skin, he’s already got the cuffs out. The police chief must later let Tibbs go, much to his chagrin, and worse yet, ask, pretty please, if Tibbs won’t help them out with the case. They don’t get a lot of murders down this way. Murders with white victims, at least.
So begins In the Heat of the Night, an unlikely not-buddy cop story about a man’s commitment to the job, disdain of racist good ol’ boys, and confrontation with a town full of them as Tibbs sets to solve the mystery of who killed the man who was going to revitalize this backwater berg with the factory he was going to build here.
Sidney Poitier stars as Virgil Tibbs, and immediately proves why he’s the right man for the job of solving murders as a Black man in Biggotsville. Ramrod straight back, unapologetic but mannered in his conduct, alert to a world that hates him but unmoved. Damn satisfying. Poitier’s calm demeanor belies the intensity of his eyes and you’re fully convinced there’s some Old Testament destruction hiding within him. Tibbs definitely doesn’t suffer fools, and they’re getting off easy when he just coolly looks down his nose at them.
Opposite him is Rod Steiger as police chief Gillespie. He’s a racist, but not belligerently so, and must try to juggle local big-wigs who want Tibbs out and his own prejudices. Steiger manages to slightly humanize Gillespie, but his real feat is how he peels away the lazy bravado of Gillespie’s big fish in small pond stature to reveal the much more insecure man beneath it all. An assured racist had not called on Tibbs for help, but Gillespie does.
The chemistry between Steiger and Poitier is undeniable, and they’re helped along by an immaculate script by Stirling Silliphant, based on the novel by John Ball. There are some beautiful exchanges throughout In the Heat of the Night, and a late-night confessional between the two policemen where they discuss their private lives feels like out of another universe. The guarded vulnerability Poitier and Steiger so delectably let slip is tremendous.
It’s joined by several other standout moments where Jewison shows some real style and flair for the evocative. Life simmers to a breathless halt as a cruising police officer pulls up outside a house wherein a woman stands naked, teasing the curious eyes of any voyeuristic passerby at this late hour. The next day, an intense manhunt through the woods is paused just for a second so we can watch the falling leaves spiral through air before we cut to a close-up of an angry bloodhound’s snout, and not long after a man’s silhouette throws itself along the bridge leading into Arkansas, a desperate shadow outlined by the precipice he finds himself over. Indelible stuff.
Couple this with some stunning cinematography by Haskell Wexler that fuses Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell in how it captures smalltown America with gorgeously lit long shots of buildings, streets and the characters within them. The film not only looks better than 95% of movies released today (which isn’t saying much, as greenscreen has spelled doom for artful cinematography), but it looks better than most films, period.
So disregarding the ugly racism of its subject matter, you’ll like what you see and you’ll like what you hear in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night, a transfixing murder mystery headlined by ironclad, intelligent and engaged performances. A soulful story about dirty deeds in a soulless place.
Mikkel Frederiksen 