...a thoughtful moral drama, an absorbing character study, an enjoyable comedy, and a mystery thriller all rolled into one.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
"They call me MR. Tibbs!" Who can forget Sidney Poitier's rejoinder to Rod Steiger's redneck sheriff in the Academy Award-winning motion picture, "In the Heat of the Night." Directed by Norman Jewison ("Fiddler on the Roof," "Moonstruck," "The Hurricane"), the film is a thoughtful moral drama, an absorbing character study, an enjoyable comedy, and a mystery thriller all rolled into one. It won five Oscars in 1967: Best Picture, Best Actor (Steiger), Best Screenplay (Stirling Silliphant), Best Editing (Hal Ashby), and Best Sound. Factor in the cinematography by Haskell Wexler, the musical score by Quincy Jones, and the title song sung by Ray Charles, and how could the film lose?
Poitier would go on to reprise the character of Detective Virgil Tibbs two more times, and the movie would be followed up years later by a popular and long-running television series. MGM now offer the film on DVD in their "Contemporary Classics" series, an apt designation for a movie that still holds its own nearly three-and-a-half decades after its release.
The scene is Sparta, Mississippi, a small, sleepy Southern town whose main industry is cotton, but whose hope is with a new factory being financed by industrialist Philip Colbert. You can imagine how Sheriff Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) reacts, then, when Colbert is found in an alley one night, clubbed to death. The Sheriff wants every suspicious character in town rounded up. Waiting peacefully in the local train station is Virgil Tibbs, crack homicide detective for the Philadelphia, PA, police force, visiting relatives in Sparta and on his way home. Or so he thought. Overzealous Deputy Sam Wood (Warren Oates) finds Tibbs, an Afro-American, alone in the station and immediately arrests him, no questions asked. This brings about the first of many times Sheriff Gillespie must apologize to Tibbs, and it begins a series of comic reverse discriminations as the racist white folk of Sparta are made to heed the more perceptive and resourceful black man.
Reluctantly, and after much misadventure, Gillespie asks Tibbs for his help in solving the case. Initially, you see, Gillespie gets another wrong man, and when Tibbs tells him so, it ticks off the Sheriff no end. He hates to be one-upped, especially by a black man. At its center, the story is a battle of wits between Tibbs and Gillespie, with Tibbs almost always coming up winner. The clincher is that the victim's wife, Mrs. Leslie Colbert (Lee Grant), impressed by Tibbs' credentials and his examination of the crime scene, insists that he be allowed to continue investigating the case. With the permission of Tibbs' chief, and much to the annoyance of Sheriff Gillespie, Tibbs tracks down the murderer. Gillespie hates every minute of it.
Lest you think these two main characters stereotyped, however, let me assure you they are not. Sheriff Gillespie is more than an arrogant, pigheaded, racist cop. He is those things, to be sure ("Yeah, talk to me!" is Gillespie's normal way of answering the phone and responding to people in general), but he's also clever and respectful. As we learn more about him, we come to see him as a very solitary man, a lonely man, yet one who will accept no pity. Moreover, he may be racist to the core, but he comes to admire Tibbs quite a lot by the end of the film. In the closing shot, we even see him playing porter to Tibbs, carrying his suitcase for him to the train.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]6003[/release]