IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

“They call me Mr. Tibbs!”

Though I had never seen the movie or the long-running TV-series based on it, I was familiar with what the overall premise was. That didn’t matter in the least. The 1968 Oscar-winning Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night, was a tour de force of acting skill as Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger are superbly matched head-to-head.

Steiger plays small-town (fictitious Sparta, Mississippi) Police Chief Bill Gillespie. Gillespie is a somewhat lazy and very bigoted man, steeped in the numerous privileges his skin color and bravado provide him in a southern town where desegregation is barely a decade old. Sidney Poitier plays Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs. Tibbs is initially hauled into the Sparta Police Station because he happens to be at the local train station early on the same morning a murder occurs. Oh, and because, well… he happens to be a black man with a large amount of cash on him. For Gillespie’s deputy, that’s reason enough to accuse him of murder.

Once Virgil’s status as a big-city police officer is discovered, events lead to him and Chief Gillespie being reluctantly forced to work together to solve the murder. The whodunit quickly takes a back seat though, as issues of race and preconceived notions related to race eclipse the film. Quincy Jones provides a score that eloquently supports the film and often drives it. Some of Sidney Poitier’s best moments are when he is telling a story through his facial expressions alone, devoid of any dialogue. Rod Steiger takes a role that easily could have fallen into caricature or stereotype and provides it with just the right smidgeon of humility that you can actually buy into the hesitant mutual respect that they each express at the film’s satisfying finale. Steiger would win the Oscar for Best Male Dramatic Performance for his role.

From a historical perspective, it was fantastic seeing Tibbs return a backhanded face slap to the local white cotton plantation owner, Mr. Endicott. Endicott says, “There was a time when I could have had you shot,” and as a viewer, I couldn’t help but think, “Well those days are over.” Ironically, during a later scene when Officer Tibbs is questioning a local woman of color, he tells her, “There’s white time in jail and there’s colored time in jail, and the worst kind of time you can do is colored time”.  At that moment, as a viewer, I had to acknowledge that I guess we haven’t come that far after all.