In the Heat of the Night (Movie)

"It’s a really startling film. I often show Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , which is also a 1967 film with Sidney Poitier (as well as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn). In the book, I write about these two films as representative of this era where Hollywood was trying to put people of colour into leading roles and giving them as much of their dignity as the white writers and filmmakers were capable of. They were represented in a much more profound and humane way. In the Heat of the Night is really interesting to compare to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , which is the more popular and more watched film. Not just because Sidney Poitier is in both films, but because many of the things that Sidney Poitier’s character does in In the Heat of the Night are more startling culturally and politically than just the simple, startling trope in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —that a black man is dating a white woman. In the Heat of the Night contains a couple of cultural touchpoints that were so radical for 1967 that I always want to let audiences know about them, because both of these films seem a little bit tame to us, 50+ years later. In the Heat of the Night features Sidney Poitier, an actor from the Bahamas with incredible dignity and beauty and intelligence. I often quote my friend Kelly Brown Douglas in the book. She’s an African American theologian who talks about how her experience of seeing Sidney Poitier on-screen was life-changing for her. This was the first person of colour that she had ever seen in a leading role in a movie in a theatre. Sidney Poitier filled that role for a lot of people in the 1950s and 1960s. Sidney Poitier’s character is the most intelligent and competent person in the film. It’s a murder mystery on its surface, but the other genre it falls into is it’s a buddy film—or, as James Baldwin would have it, a love story between Sidney Poitier’s Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger’s Mississippi town police chief Gillespie. “there is this really powerful cultural tidal wave that Sidney Poitier brings into American filmmaking” There’s a murder of a prominent white businessman, who was going to build a huge factory and bring wealth to this small town. Virgil Tibbs is waiting for a train on the night this businessman is killed, and Chief Gillespie has Tibbs thrown in jail for the murder. Then he discovers that Tibbs is a homicide detective. That’s the conceit of the story and everything proceeds from that. There is a running gag as Chief Gillespie and his men throw a number of suspects into jail who are not the murderer. Over and over again Virgil Tibbs has to say, ‘no, he can’t possibly have done it.’ There is one scene in the film that really stands out for me and stood out for audiences. It was a gasp-worthy moment in 1967. Chief Gillespie and Detective Tibbs go to visit the most prominent white man in town, what we would think of as the plantation owner. He is this decadent person who is breeding orchids in a hothouse. (It’s straight out of Hollywood central casting: ‘What could our bad guy do? He loves orchids. Let’s do that.’) There is a moment where he realizes that Virgil Tibbs is actually interrogating him for the murder and he is incensed. He slaps Virgil Tibbs and Tibbs slaps him back. In 1967, particularly in a primarily white audience, they would have sat there and their eyes would have gone wide, because this is a Black power moment. Sidney Poitier was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but he wasn’t thought of as a radical, he was not a black-fist-in-the-air sort of person. But this is a moment in Hollywood films where a Black character says, ‘I will not be treated in this way anymore. You do not have the right to direct violence at me.’ One of the signs that was carried at a lot of the civil rights marches in the 1960s was ‘I am a man,’ and that is basically what this moment is. The other really powerful moment is at the end of the movie. It becomes clear, during the course of the story, that Chief Gillespie, who is an ardent southern racist, has developed an incredible respect for Tibbs. Chief Gillespie takes Virgil Tibbs to catch the train and carries his bag. And there is this moment between them. James Baldwin says that in a love story, this would be the kiss. At that time, of course, a white man and a black man are not going to kiss at the train station, but it is this moment of acknowledgement of their common humanity and this recognition of the respect that Gillespie has grown to have for Virgil Tibbs. And so when I look at those films from 1967— In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —there is this really powerful cultural tidal wave that Sidney Poitier brings into American filmmaking, because not only does he embody every positive myth, but he participates in all of these powerful dramatic moments, whether it’s the kiss with his fiancée in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —which had not been done in a mainstream American film—or the slap in In the Heat of the Night . The film also won best picture and Rod Steiger won best actor at the Academy Awards that year. It’s another of these films that had incredible cultural currency, not just because it was seen by a lot of people, but because it was recognized as a film with a lot of value. It’s like a Monty Python police force. It’s not at all strange to say that you know Virgil Tibbs is the smartest person in the room. I think what makes the movie work is that Chief Gillespie wants to be a good policeman and he wants to be an honourable man and that is the arc of his character. When the plantation owner turns to Gillespie and asks, ‘What are you going to do?’ Gillespie says, ‘I’m going to take it under advisement’ and the plantation owner says, ‘you know, in the old days, the last police chief would have shot him.’ And for us watching this—and I hope for audiences in 1967— this is the moment when you think, ‘thank God we are not in the old days.’ We are in some ways—George Floyd’s murder proves that—but we hope that, as Dr. King used to say, there are people of good conscience who want to be better and to do better in regard to racial questions. It’s a little bit of both. I’ve been doing these cultural studies for the past 30 years and it is rare that you find a direct correlation—a Hollywood star does this and America follows. In an earlier film, It Happened One Night , Clark Gable, who is the male lead in Gone with the Wind, is shown in a hotel room with Claudette Colbert. He takes off his shirt and he’s not wearing an undershirt, as was the practice in the United States at that time. That is one of the few quantifiable Hollywood effects, because we know sales of undershirts declined precipitously after Clark Gable took off his shirt and revealed his bare chest. Most of the time, what we look at is anecdotal effects. I mention in the book that I showed Get Out at Washington National Cathedral a couple of years ago. One of my white female students from Baylor University was there watching and discussing these films and talking about race. After we watched Get Out, she turned to me in tears and said, ‘I’ve never before in my life understood what white people do to Black people.’ In Get Out we are invited to participate in Daniel Kaluuya’s character’s life. He is our point of view character for the film. My student had been insulated from many of the horrible things that happen in our culture because of her privilege and her wealth. In the course of her everyday life, she was not going to have this realisation, but a Hollywood film shaped her response in a way that she might not otherwise have had. Powerful stories can transform us. “I’ve been doing these cultural studies for the past 30 years and it is rare that you find a direct correlation—a Hollywood star does this and America follows.” The other thing that I will say about Hollywood is that artists, and thought leaders in general, are often more progressive, because they’re looking for the next thing, the next understanding, the next bit of wisdom. They don’t want to lie in the road and do what has always been done. For me, as an artist, when I write a novel or a nonfiction book, I don’t want to do what I’ve already done. I want to do something new. I want to learn something new and Hollywood has traditionally been a leader, at least in terms of pushing America to move forward on race. In my book, I talk about these different phases. Hollywood started in this place of abject racism and then began taking little baby steps toward more profound and powerful representation, until at last we came to the point where not only were people of colour making their own movies and starring in their own movies, but using Hollywood storytelling traditions to push back against racism and prejudice."