Watching The Detectives: In the Heat of the Night (Dir. Norman Jewison, 2h23m, 1967)

The detective movie, by its very nature, is a vehicle of social commentary; the social thriller, in which detectives take on social inequality as much as the criminals it has so often created, saw their heyday in the late 1950s to early 1970s, with Detroit, Get Out(both 2017) and Knives Out (2019) being superb examples of the genre's recent resurgence. Key among these are Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Vertigo (1958), Victim (1961), In Cold Blood (1967) and, above all, In the Heat of the Night, in which Sidney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs arrives in a racist southern town, and is thrust into investigating a murder.

1967 was a busy year for Sidney Poitier; having come to prominence in 1958's The Defiant Ones, a film that directly confronts racism in the Deep South as Poitier's convict is chained to Tony Curtis, he would quickly become a stage star, with 1959's A Raisin in the Sun being the first Broadway show to appeal to an Afro-American audience, with Poitier's Oscar win for Lilies of the Field (1963) undercut by Poitier's sense that he had become a token figure in an otherwise white field. 1963 would also see Poitier become a more political figure, joining the March on Washington. 1967, thus would see Poitier appear in three films, all of them confronting race and social issues.

The first, and the most overlooked, remains To Sir, With Love; here, Poitier's London secondary school teacher confronts British inner city racism; against this would come arguably the equal to In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a film that does not so much consider the racial divide in its depiction of a wealthy white family forced to confront their prejudices, as storm across it, being one of the first American films to depict a mixed race couple in a positive light, mere months after much of the US South, seventeen states in all, decriminalised interracial marriage.

Mere months before, In the Heat of the Night considers, in abstraction, the civil rights movement, and the idea of co-operation and coexistence, especially in the South, through the figures of Pennsylvanian detective Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), and the chief of police in Sparta, Mississippi, Gillespie (Rod Stieger, who would win an Academy Award for his performance).Much of this; the film is otherwise a well-made detective/murder mystery that stops short of considering the deprivation and resistance to industrialisation that lingers around the edges of the film, is down to this consideration, this dissection, of the racist white population of Sparta. Moreover, with the work of Haskell Wexler as cinematographer, the film also directly confronts the inherent racial bias in something as fundamental as how a film is lit with In the Heat of the Night the first Hollywood production to take into account its black protagonist when lighting for the film.

With the body of wealthy industrialist Phillip Colbert discovered in the street, the police department immediately arrest Tibbs, passing through the area and with a suspiciously full wallet; Tibbs' own arrival, over the credits, typify Quincy Jones' score-the composer's other film work in 1967, In Cold Blood, would be one of his two nominations for scoring at the 1968 Academy Awards-with Ray Charles' theme-song, propelled by his piano and Billy Preston's gospel organ. The rest of the score will hew closer to the blues of the deep south, the place that Tibbs will find himself marooned in, as he follows the Colbert case to its conclusion. No sooner has he been arrested than, brought face-to-face with Stieger, who, realising the man his officers have arrested is a homicide detective, he is set free and recruited to the case.

What follows is a film that directly confronts its subject matter; Stieger does not make Gillespie a man swayed by mere social justice, but by the actions of Tibbs, whilst Tibbs directly critiques and challenges the racism of the officers and the town in general. When Gillespie mocks him in front of Colbert's widow, (Lee Grant), it is Poitier who comes out with the defiant "They call me Mister Tibbs!", before proving the Sparta Police Department have arrested the wrong man, and that Harvey Oberst (Scott Wilson, who would also appear in In Cold Blood) must be innocent because he is left handed, and the murderer is right-handed. Even when the film is not focusing upon its social commentary, it remains an excellent detective film, Tibbs determined to find the real murderer

When Tibbs is face-to-face with racist plantation owner, Edicott, who he suspects as having a hand in the murder, as his business, and reliance on black labour, is threatened by Colbert's factory, he reacts immediately to Edicott's racist jabs and slap to slap him straight back, a sequence that understandably shocked contemporary audiences. It is this sensibility, this sense of Poitier's protagonist standing up against the white aggressors, even as he has to contend with two lynch mobs, as he slowly uncovers the truth of Colbert's murder; one sequence sees Tibbs meet with a black mechanic who at once fears for his fellow man, and is astonished by the detective rising to this role in his native Pennsylvania, whilst, towards the end of the film, it is the unexpected friendship, or, at the least, respect between Tibbs and Stieger that drives the film.

Yet, whilst director Norman Jewison's films never shirked from discussing, and confronting social inequality across his career, it is In the Heat of the Night that he, and Sidney Poitier most successfully capture the changing face of America, against which Stieger's white chief of police, and the murder they must work together to solve, plays out and changes cinema. In the Heat of the Night continues to resonate today; a sterling example of detective cinema acting as vehicle to confront racism and enact social change.

Rating: Must See

In the Heat of the Night is available via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD from MGM in the UK and USA

Next week, we complete our season on detective cinema in the 1990s, with Michael Mann's slickly stylish cat and mouse chase between Pacino's dective and De Niro's crook in Heat. 

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