In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Wow… As Dinah Wash­ing­ton once sang, ​“what a dif­fer­ence a day makes”. It would be disin­gen­u­ous to say that Nor­man Jewison’s sweat-dap­pled south­ern polici­er gains a chill­ing rel­e­vance at a time when then the White House is being pop­u­lat­ed with white suprema­cist yahoos, because the film’s pow­er was evi­dent long pri­or to the world going very wrong indeed.

In the Heat of the Night, from 1967, is the sto­ry of nor­malised big­otry, set in the dead-end burg of Spar­ta, Mis­sis­sip­pi. It depicts racism as a way of life, show­ing peo­ple locked into a sys­tem which is being propped up with benign seg­re­ga­tion and arro­gant atti­tudes. The towns­folk har­bour an insid­i­ous hatred that has come to fuel a quaint, accept­ed notion of polite south­ern society.

A busi­ness­man has been found dead on the streets, the promise of a new fac­to­ry and eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty now dashed. At the behest of Rod Steiger’s gum-chew­ing sher­iff Bill Gille­spie, enforcers are told to sweep the area for sus­pects. Nat­u­ral­ly, at the top of the list is Sid­ney Poitier’s moody, out-of-town detec­tive who just hap­pens to have found him­self pass­ing through. Going against his nat­ur­al impuls­es, he decides to help them inves­ti­gate the case once they realise he’s an inno­cent man. And yet in doing so, he realis­es that he’s not mere­ly set­ting out to find a mur­der­er, but to con­front gen­er­a­tions of ingrained racist tra­di­tion. He is Sparta’s worst nightmare.

As Vir­gil Tibbs, Poiti­er unleash­es a mess of right­eous moral con­fu­sion. Should he just let the mouth-breath­ing, chain-swing­ing scum wal­low in their own filth? Should he risk life and limb to deliv­er a peace­able human­ist les­son to his slather­ing aggres­sors? And is there a hap­py end­ing for either course of action? One of the film’s most fas­ci­nat­ing and ambigu­ous ele­ments is the sug­ges­tion that Tibbs sees racism as a nat­ur­al exten­sion of vio­lent crime, and so his prime sus­pects are all old guard grandees whose for­tunes were built on cot­ton plan­ta­tions and black slav­ery. What’s great about the film (and Poitier’s per­for­mance) is that it’s nev­er stressed that he’s a hero or a sav­iour. His sta­tus is far more ambigu­ous and inter­est­ing than that.

The film’s duti­ful thriller mechan­ics are far less impor­tant than its pol­i­tics – it has passed the test of time more for the small ges­tures and the icon­ic lines of dia­logue. One moment that still sends shiv­ers down the spine is when Tibbs con­fronts Lar­ry Gates’ rich landown­er Eric Endi­cott. He ques­tions whether this avowed and open­ly racist fop might have had motive for mur­der, for which he is slapped. Almost as a nat­ur­al reac­tion, Tibbs slaps him back. This sin­gle moment encap­su­lates the resis­tance, the fight back. What’s most telling, though, is how phys­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly shak­en Endi­cott is by the trans­ac­tion. He knows his time is up.