PG-13 | 1h 53min | Drama, Mystery | 1967
Norman Jewison’s classic “In the Heat of the Night” is a towering tribute to how self-assessment is key to embracing our shared humanity. It’s based on Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay, which in turn is based on John Ball’s novel.
A homicide detective from Philadelphia, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), waits for his night train at a small town in Mississippi. In spite of his impeccable grooming, he’s mistaken for a robber. Patrol cop Wood, looking for the killer of wealthy businessman Colbert, sees Virgil’s loaded wallet as evidence of guilt and arrests him.
On seeing Virgil’s credentials, police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) puts his town’s blowhards on a leash and grudgingly allows Virgil to help on the case. Now partners of a sort, they reluctantly set aside obvious differences and build on less obvious common ground: Both want the truth. In the bargain, they learn more from each other than they’d imagined possible.
Gillespie learns from Virgil’s inherent decency, professional integrity, and quiet dignity. When Gillespie is screaming his head off to have his way, Virgil stays softly insistent. When Gillespie boasts to Colbert’s widow (Lee Grant) that he’s nabbed her husband’s killer (this time, another man, Harvey), Virgil has to explain why, for the second time, Gillespie has the wrong man.
Virgil learns from Gillespie, too. And it’s in these scenes that Jewison’s uncanny sense of “the moment” stands out.
Virgil suspects a plantation-owner who’d publicly opposed Colbert’s plan to build a factory. Soon after, sheriff and detective are leaning forward, growling at each other, across the hood of a car. Fearing reprisal from the plantation owner’s thugs, a furious Gillespie wants Virgil gone. But an even more furious Virgil pleads for a day or two more to rustle up evidence to nail the culprit.
Stunned, Gillespie cocks his head and leans further forward to say, “Man, you’re just like the rest of us.” Jewison’s camera swivels to Virgil who’s instantly compelled to self-critique. Silent, open-mouthed, Virgil blinks, looks down, and swallows hard. He’s stunned, too, at his own blind rage, his fuming ego, and his hunger to get back at the suspect out of vindictiveness rather than out of any proof of guilt.
More Habit Than Hate
The elegant Poitier brings a burning intensity to his role. What isn’t said in his heated verbal fencing with Gillespie is as interesting as what is. Watch Poitier’s apparently still face; there’s shock, rage, and righteous indignation. But in his narrowing eyes, his twitching cheek, his upturned lip, there’s also a recognition of his own bias the second it rears its head.The hulking Steiger meets Poitier’s fire with his own. Legend has it that it was Jewison who nudged Steiger into chewing gum on set; Steiger first balked, then embraced the idea, and reportedly ran through over 200 gum packs during filming. Either way, his incessantly tightening jaw, gives his Gillespie an edginess, reflecting his internal struggle, and his relative apathy.
When they’re at Gillespie’s place tying up loose ends, he confides that he’s utterly alone: no wife, no kids, and a town that “don’t want me.” He tells a shocked Virgil that he’s the first “human” that’s ever been in that house; Virgil realizes that Gillespie is as much an outsider as he is.
Audiences, used to onscreen stereotypes of bigoted police chiefs, warm to Gillespie’s fairness because it overrides turf issues that rankle him early on. His ways, unlike the more hardened in his town, seem more habit than hate, more mindless than malicious.
Quincy Jones’s soundtrack lends an eerie Southern authenticity. He also marshalled some of that era’s best talent, including Glen Campbell and Ray Charles.
Jewison’s tight shots in the police station force you to share the claustrophobia that cops feel. You’re as frustrated as Gillespie that his wretched air conditioner is always in need of oiling. When it’s deathly quiet, even a ticking clock sounds like a siren. And lights bounce off perpetually sweaty faces, amplifying their sense of suffocation.
Producer Walter Mirisch ran a small company. So, dealt with a lower than ideal budget, Jewison couldn’t afford ideal gear. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler came up with solutions. To illuminate the police station set, Wexler stretched a silk overhead, typical of the silent era, and allowed massive light to shine down. To follow police hounds chasing a fugitive in the grass, he placed his little camera on a bracket atop a bicycle wheel. And he used airplane landing-lights instead of car headlights to accentuate that sense of alarm at night.
Jewison’s film was prophetic in more ways than one; it was written, produced, directed and edited by whites, supported by a nearly all-white lead cast and crew. At a time when the world blamed whites for racial tensions running high, it was Hollywood’s whites who, in an inspired partnership with the most respected black actor ever, powered one of the most perceptive films on prejudice.
