![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2021\/02\/intheheatofthenight-a.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe latest in a month-long series of re-posts from my Facebook marathon in April 2020.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Sidney Poitier marathon part 12 (1967b + 1970 + 1971b):<\/b><\/p>\n
In the Heat of the Night<\/i> (1967)<\/b> plays like a fusion of the social-commentary movies that Sidney Poitier made earlier in his career and the more straightforward genre movies that he began to focus on in the mid-1960s. On the one hand, it\u2019s a police procedural and a murder mystery \u2014 but it uses the trappings of those genres to explore race relations in the United States. And it tosses in a few other issues, besides.<\/p>\n
Poitier plays a Philadelphia cop who happens to be between trains at a small-town Mississippi station when a local cop \u2014 not knowing that he and Poitier are in the same profession \u2014 accuses him of killing a white man and takes him in to the local police station. (Poitier is black and<\/i> an outsider, and therefore, from the local cop\u2019s point of view, the perfect scapegoat.)<\/p>\n
Fortunately, it doesn\u2019t take long for the police chief (a gum-chewing Rod Steiger) to acknowledge that Poitier isn\u2019t the man they\u2019re looking for, and the chief ends up putting his own bigotry aside, sort of, when he realizes that Poitier is not only a cop but a homicide expert who can help him with the case.<\/p>\n
Once again, Poitier is called upon to play a character who challenges racism partly by being so perfect, so dignified, so flawless at what he does, that the only way someone could have a problem with him is if that someone really is<\/i> a racist. But Poitier\u2019s character has an inner life, too, and part of the genius of Poitier\u2019s performance is that he never lets you forget that his character is outraged and seething with resentment at the way he has been treated, no matter how well he suppresses those emotions.<\/p>\n
For example, Poitier is initially reluctant to help Steiger and the others when his chief in Philadelphia tells him, over the phone, to do so. (We don\u2019t hear the chief\u2019s side of the phone conversation, but there\u2019s an amusing bit where Poitier, still resisting his orders, says, \u201cNo sir, I\u2019m<\/i> not prejudiced\u2026\u201d)<\/p>\n
And of course, there\u2019s the famous moment where a rich white man slaps Poitier across the face for asking him if he has an alibi, and Poitier slaps the man right back. (The second slap was Poitier\u2019s idea, and he says he refused to be in the movie if his character couldn\u2019t slap the guy back. Poitier says he intended this not as a social comment but as a reflection of the character\u2019s humanity<\/i>; it was how the cop would have reacted to anyone<\/i> who treated him that way.)<\/p>\n
Interestingly, the Poitier character\u2019s detachment from the Mississippi setting extends to the local black people, too. The scene where he and Steiger drive through a cotton field underscores how Poitier, a northerner, has never had to think about living that kind of life (shades of a similar scene in 2018\u2019s Green Book<\/i>); and in another scene, Steiger tells Poitier the local black people could suffer economically if the murder isn\u2019t solved (the murder victim was going to build a factory there), and when Steiger says, \u201cThey\u2019re your people,\u201d Poitier replies, \u201cNot mine, yours! You made this scene!\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Poitier character does take advantage of his racial background when it is helpful to the case. It turns out that, as a black man, he can go \u201cwhere whitey ain\u2019t allowed\u201d and speak to the black people there \u2014 and so he gets results that Steiger and the others can\u2019t, or wouldn\u2019t think to get.<\/p>\n
The movie cycles through a few suspects before revealing who the actual killer was, and it turns out not to be a particularly big reveal \u2014 but that\u2019s because this film is far more interested in its social milieu than it is in the plot, per se. Presumably a modern screenwriter would feel the need to throw in a big twist or something, and to make the movie\u2019s Big Statement hinge on that, but the film is better off without that kind of gimmick.<\/p>\n
A few other quick points:<\/p>\n
\u2014 The Steiger character comes to appreciate the Poitier character over the course of the movie, but he doesn\u2019t follow a completely linear redemptive trajectory. Late in the film, when Steiger and Poitier begin to bond over the fact that neither of them ever got married, Steiger suddenly feels that Poitier is beginning to \u201cpity\u201d him, and he reacts by throwing a racist slur Poitier\u2019s way. Change doesn\u2019t happen overnight, and it might never be complete, but you work with what you can.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Director Norman Jewison and cinematographer Haskell Wexler underscore the racial aspects of the story quite cinematically when, e.g., Poitier examines the body of the murder victim, and we see his skin probing the victim\u2019s skin, his hands removing the victim\u2019s shoes, etc.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Racism isn\u2019t the only social issue that comes up in this film: It turns out the plot was motivated by someone\u2019s need to get money for an abortion. Wikipedia says Mississippi made abortion legal in cases of rape in 1966, one year before the film came out. The pregnant woman in the film is only 16 years old, and one of the other characters says that the man who impregnated her committed \u201cstatutory rape\u201d \u2014 but the age of consent in Mississippi is 16 nowadays, so when did it change? Or was it actually 16 back then, and the film got its facts wrong?<\/p>\n
\u2014 I\u2019ve been wondering when Poitier\u2019s films would begin to reflect the loosening of the Production Code when it came to sex, violence, language and so on. This film edges in that direction when one of the cops drives past a house to spy on the naked teenaged girl within \u2014 though the truly naughty bits are obscured by the window frame. (The teenaged character is 16, but the actress who plays her turned 23 the year the film came out.)<\/p>\n
\u2014 There has been much talk about the fact that In the Heat of the Night<\/i> was a film about a black protagonist made by a white director (in the bonus features, John Singleton says Norman Jewison is \u201cthree for three\u201d as far as he\u2019s concerned, his other successful black-protagonist films being 1984\u2019s A Soldier\u2019s Story<\/i> and 1999\u2019s The Hurricane<\/i>). I find myself thinking that it was also a movie about American racism in the deep south made by a Canadian. Which, in turn, gets me thinking about how 1961\u2019s A Raisin in the Sun<\/a><\/i> was also directed by a Canadian.<\/p>\n \u2014 Reunions: One of the local racists is played by William Schallert, who previously played a Union Army officer in 1957\u2019s Band of Angels<\/a><\/i>. (You might not know his name, but you\u2019d recognize him if you saw him; among other things, he played an annoying administrator in Star Trek<\/a><\/i>\u2019s \u2018The Trouble with Tribbles\u2019 the same year this movie came out.) This is also the second of six Poitier films to be scored by Quincy Jones, following 1965\u2019s The Slender Thread<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Four Poitier films were nominated for best picture; this is the only one that won. (The others were: 1958\u2019s The Defiant Ones<\/a><\/i>, which lost to Gigi<\/i>; 1963\u2019s Lilies of the Field<\/a><\/i>, which lost to Tom Jones<\/i>; and 1967\u2019s Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner<\/a><\/i>, which lost to In the Heat of the Night<\/i>.)<\/p>\n \u2014 In the Heat of the Night<\/i> also won Oscars for film editing (Hal Ashby!), sound, screenplay and best actor (Rod Steiger). It was also nominated for best director and sound effects but lost in those categories to The Graduate<\/i> (Mike Nichols) and The Dirty Dozen<\/i>, respectively.<\/p>\n The ceremony where In the Heat of the Night<\/i> won best picture was originally scheduled for April 8, 1968, but alas, it had to be postponed after Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated a few days earlier. So the ceremony that honoured a film about civil-rights issues was overshadowed by one of the darkest moments of the civil-rights era.<\/p>\n It has been said that Poitier\u2019s movie-star status began to fade after MLK\u2019s death, too, as black Americans turned to heroes who embodied their frustrations, gave them catharsis, and were generally perceived as more \u201cdangerous\u201d than Poitier\u2019s characters had been.<\/p>\n This shift in the culture would soon be reflected in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, which revolved around heroes who were more overtly sexual and violent than the characters Poitier had played. But Poitier tried to nudge his persona in that direction, too \u2014 and you can see this in the two sequels that were made to In the Heat of the Night<\/i>, though the sequels also lost a lot of what made the original film so potent and relevant.<\/p>\n Truth be told, the sequels don\u2019t have a lot in common with the original film.<\/p>\n For starters, They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> (1970)<\/b>, which concerns the murder of a prostitute, and The Organization<\/b><\/i> (1971), which concerns drug smuggling, take place in San Francisco. They thus have nothing to say about the politics of the American south, and they also ignore the fact that Tibbs, the Poitier character, was supposed to be from Philadelphia.<\/p>\n The sequels also depict Tibbs as a married father of two \u2014 the older child is played by a boy who was born in 1958 \u2014 even though Tibbs clearly told the Steiger character in the 1967 film that he had never been married. You can argue, if you want, that Tibbs moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco between movies, but this other retcon is a bit harder to explain away.<\/p>\n The sequels are also basically just straightforward cop-genre movies. They do touch on social issues of one sort or another, but not racism \u2014 and so the Poitier character seems less personally invested in these cases.<\/p>\n The writers certainly try<\/i> to make the stories more personally relevant to the Poitier character. One of the prime suspects in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> is a \u201cpolitical preacher\u201d, played by Martin Landau, who is a personal friend of Tibbs\u2019. And in The Organization<\/i>, Tibbs offers to help<\/i> a group of urban revolutionaries who are trying to expose a heroin-dealing mob.<\/p>\n But the movies themselves feel increasingly irrelevant \u2014 and that slide towards irrelevance is reflected in the movies\u2019 credits: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> keeps Quincy Jones as the composer, and it co-stars Martin Landau; it was also directed by Gordon Douglas, who was nearing the end of a career that included films like 1954\u2019s Them!<\/a><\/i>, 1967\u2019s In Like Flint<\/i> and 1968\u2019s The Detective<\/i>. So it still feels kind of<\/i> like a big deal, movie-industry-wise, if not quite as top-tier as the original film. But The Organization<\/i> feels like a film made with fewer resources at its disposal: Jones did not take part in the film at all; the director was a guy who worked almost exclusively in television; and the only actor who stands out now, in hindsight, is a young Raul Julia, in one of his very first movies, as one of the urban revolutionaries.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Tibbs himself is less of an icon and more of a character, warts and all \u2014 and some of those warts are pretty ugly. On the one hand, he enjoys a healthy sexual relationship with his wife, which is good (is They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> the first Poitier film with a bed scene? I haven\u2019t seen his 1968 or 1969 films yet). On the other hand, he hits his son and tells his daughter she was \u201casking for it\u201d when her brother hit her. (He even tells his son he\u2019s hitting him for his own good, to prevent<\/i> him from becoming \u201csullen and rebellious\u201d.)<\/p>\n So Poitier was evidently trying to shake things up, by not only subverting his persona in general but subverting one of his most famous characters. Or at any rate, it feels like a subversion to me<\/i>. It may or may not have felt like that to the audiences who saw these sequels back in the day.<\/p>\n A few other quick points:<\/p>\n \u2014 Neither of the sequels is as remotely \u201ccinematic\u201d as In the Heat of the Night<\/i>. I found it particularly off-putting how They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> kept using alternating head-on close-ups of people\u2019s faces, speaking to the camera, in some of the conversation scenes.<\/p>\n \u2014 They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> begins with a naked woman being strangled to death after she mocks one of her clients\u2019 sexual deficiencies, and the entire scene is shot from the killer\u2019s point of view. This is the first R-rated nudity that I have seen in a Poitier film (though again, I have not yet seen his films from 1968 or 1969), and it feels rather typical of the early 1970s.<\/p>\n \u2014 The only other sign I can see of the loosening of the Production Code is the occasional use of \u201cfor Christ\u2019s sake\u201d in both sequels.<\/p>\n \u2014 Both of the sequels feature religious leaders of one sort or another. Landau\u2019s character in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> is a politically-active preacher who is campaigning for greater local community control (\u201cneighbourhood city halls\u201d and the like), while one of the multi-ethnic urban revolutionaries in The Organization<\/i> self-identifies as a \u201cminister\u201d of some sort.<\/p>\n \u2014 In They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i>, a woman calls her pimp a \u201cswitch-hitter\u201d, which I believe is meant to refer to his bisexuality, though I can\u2019t recall if the film actually demonstrated<\/i> any bisexual tendencies on his part. A couple of Poitier\u2019s earlier films (1961\u2019s A Raisin in the Sun<\/a><\/i>, 1967\u2019s To Sir with Love<\/a><\/i>) have featured gay slurs, but none have featured any gay characters, as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n \u2014 The big chase scene in The Organization<\/i> runs through the Montgomery Street Station, which was still under construction at the time. (It opened in November 1973, a little over two years after the film came out.) If I was remotely familiar with San Francisco geography, I\u2019m sure I would find this sequence tremendously exciting. I love how even the most conventional dramatic films can end up becoming \u201cdocumentaries\u201d of the past like this.<\/p>\n \u2014 Reunions: One of the suspects in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<\/i> is played by Ed Asner, who played a cop in 1965\u2019s The Slender Thread<\/i>, and the janitor who discovers the prostitute\u2019s body is played by Juano Hern\u00e1ndez, who appeared in 1957\u2019s Something of Value<\/a><\/i> and The Mark of the Hawk<\/a><\/i>. Pointing in the other direction: One of the cops in The Organization<\/i> is played by Daniel J. Travanti, who would eventually co-star with Poitier in 1996\u2019s To Sir with Love II<\/a><\/i> (another sequel!).<\/p>\n \u2013<\/p>\n The image above shows Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in <\/i>In the Heat of the Night.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A classic and deeply penetrating look at American racism is followed by two increasingly pedestrian sequels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":69088,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5446,5725,5627,5722,5704,5716,5707,5336,5710,5428,775,2843,677,5701,347,5633,5719,5695,4940,5698,5644,5713],"class_list":["post-68872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-band-of-angels","tag-daniel-j-travanti","tag-ed-asner","tag-gordon-douglas","tag-green-book-2018","tag-hal-ashby","tag-haskell-wexler","tag-in-the-heat-of-the-night-1967","tag-john-singleton","tag-juano-hernandez","tag-martin-landau","tag-martin-luther-king-jr","tag-norman-jewison","tag-organization-1971","tag-oscars","tag-quincy-jones","tag-raul-julia","tag-rod-steiger","tag-sidney-poitier","tag-they-call-me-mister-tibbs","tag-to-sir-with-love-ii","tag-william-schallert"],"yoast_head":"\n