IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT
I’ll be spending the weekend rewatching the greatest hits of Sidney Poitier’s incredible career, mourning his passing. If you’re planning to do the same, start with 1967, a pretty incredible year for the actor, who starred in TO SIR, WITH LOVE; GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER; and Best Picture-winner IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (trailer here). Released near the end of the summer of 1967, which was marked by racial violence in many major American cities, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT features Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, an accomplished homicide detective from Philadelphia passing through Sparta, Mississippi. When a wealthy industrialist building a factory in Sparta is murdered, Tibbs begrudgingly agrees to work with racist police chief Bill Gillespie to solve the case. In addition to Poitier, the film’s credits are littered with greats—directed by Norman Jewison (!), edited by Hal Ashby (!!), scored by Quincy Jones (!!!)—and all that talent shows up in a simmering murder mystery that sweats with the Southern heat and the danger of Tibbs’ position as a Black man among racist hostility. Thematically the film is more conservative than you might expect from that summer, with its suggestion that racism can be extirpated at a personal level, that a police chief overcoming his prejudices by working with a Black man is a story of progress. Even so, the movie works, especially as a showcase for Poitier’s performance as a reserved detective, frustrated by the people around him yet determined in his work.
—Nolan Russell, Executive Assistant
