Screenshot of the Fortnight: "IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT" (1967)

Larry Gates, Rod Steiger, and Sidney Poitier in
In the Heat of the Night.

In the 1960s in the U.S. south, Black people couldn't drink from the same water fountains as Whites.  They couldn't use the same public restrooms, sleep in the same hotels, swim in the same pools, eat in the same restaurants, or attend the same schools.

When any of them violated any racial dos or don'ts, the punishment would not be a jail sentence. It would be terror in the form of violence meted out by the Klan or the local White "citizens' council."

When, for example, a Black youth would get into a Whites-only pool, the pool would be drained and scrubbed before Whites were allowed back in.  Simultaneously, the Black youth would be tracked to his home, and he, his family, and the entire Black community would be sent a message—Black people cannot act like White people or think they are as good as Whites, and breaches of this rule will result in violence.  This message would be delivered by a burning cross on the family's front lawn, or by the family's home being burned with the family inside, or by dragging the father up and down main street, chained to the back of a pickup truck, until he became a bloody pulp.  Looking a White woman in the eye would be considered a capital offense and frequently punished by lynching. 

White "citizen councils" put a public face on Klan activity, and they included men from all walks of life, but mostly local business men and law enforcement.  Citizens' councils enforced White supremacy with terror.  Any White man or woman on the street could begin shouting at a Black man, and that man would soon be surrounded by White men, questioned loudly, accused of an offense, and then whisked away in a vehicle.

The delusional superiority of Whites was so ingrained in them and their culture, so deeply-seated, and so central to their own identities ("If you ain't better than a N_____, who are you better than?") that tens of thousands of illiterate, penniless farmboys clamored to fight against the Union in the Civil War.  These young Whites had no vested economic interest in maintaining slavery.  Their vested interest was personal, emotional, and struck at the core of who they were.  For them, and thus for the fighting itself, the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about the protection and enforcement of southern White supremacy and its unwritten but unmistakable codes of conduct, including total deference and submission to any White person.

White supremacy was the reason for the Ku Klux Klan, which Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest formed after the south's defeat.  The Klan didn't go after the south's vanquisher, the U.S. government or even the north generally, seeking retribution, which it could've done with guerilla attacks on railroads and on remote military outposts.  Instead, it went after southern Blacks, to scare the populace into submission and to punish specific individuals for thinking on some level that they were entitled to the same things, the same everyday privileges, that White people had.

For nearly four hundred years, slavery was a means for slaveowners to lighten their daily physical burden of putting food on the table by "wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces."  But I'm convinced that the motive of maintaining slavery and slave-trading was limited to the owner class.  The masses didn't own slaves, and for them, slavery was about keeping Blacks in the lowest spot in the pecking order. For the mass of Whites, the fight was always about White supremacy.

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In this landmark film, Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs arrives in a foreign country: Mississippi, a far cry and a century and a half from modern-day Pennsylvania.  White Mississippians haven't moved beyond the antebellum era in their racial attitudes and assumptions.  One White character, looking at Tibbs wearing a nice suit, says "What you doin' wearin' White man's clothes?"  In another scene, Tibbs is dropped off at the home and car-repair business of a Black man.  The man asks Tibbs where he's staying.  Tibbs says he's going to find a hotel room.  The man laughs and turns to his wife and says "We've got company!"

There is a scene in which we see Tibbs trotting up some steps leading from the sidewalk to the entrance of a hotel.  Again he's dressed in a suit.  The scene was filmed in 1966, two years after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in hotels and other places of public accommodation like restaurants, restrooms, trains, etc.  The scene was shot from across the street and a little ways down the block, and we can see the entire front of the hotel and the area near the hotel entrance.

We see Tibbs briskly mount the steps, passing two White men.  One of them looks toward Tibbs, turns and looks at his friend with incredulity on his face, and then says something to his friend that we can't hear or lipread.  His reaction to Tibbs is so realistic that it must have been real.  Perhaps the man was a local, out and about for the morning, and the production crew used him as a paid extra.  It's possible he might've said, "That was Sidney Poitier, can you believe it!"  But more likely he said something like, "Did you see that N_____  goin' in there all high and mighty like he was a White man!"

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Sidney Poitier had been making movies and paying his dues for twenty years when he starred in In the Heat of the Night.  He landed his first credited role in 1950 as a prison doctor threatened by racist prisoners in No Way Out.  He impressed audiences and critics in 1954 as a troubled but gifted student in The Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford as one of his teachers.  He outshined his White co-star Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones (1958).  In the film adaptation of Porgy and Bess (1959), Poitier received top billing for the first time. In 1961 he took top billing in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's Broadway classic, A Raisin in the Sun.  And he won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as a day laborer working for nuns in Lilies of the Field (1963).

Between December 1965 and December 1967, four films were released starring Poitier—A Patch of Blue (1965); To Sir, with Love (1966); In the Heat of the Night (1967); and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).

In the Heat of the Night won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor.  For his work in this film, Rod Steiger was nominated for the Oscar.  Sidney Poitier was not.  Steiger won the golden statuette, but Poitier owned this movie.  He plays the central character, and his performance is riveting.  Virgil Tibbs is the straw that stirs the drink here.  Almost every word in the film is spoken by Tibbs, to Tibbs, or about Tibbs.  Nearly all actions by other characters are reactions to Tibbs.

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The cinematographer for In the Heat of the Night was Haskell Wexler, a two-time Oscar-winner, a true artist behind the camera, and one of the greatest cinematographers of the modern era.

Wexler did fantastic work on many films of inferior quality.  But some of the best include The Best Man (1964); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) [Oscar]; In the Heat of the Night (1967); The Conversation (1974); One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); Bound for Glory (1976) [Oscar]; Coming Home (1978); and Matewan (1987).

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In the Heat of the Night was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.  It is part of The Criterion Collection, spine #959.  I have ranked it #12 on my list of 101 Favorite Films.

Screenshot for a Fortnight: "IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT" (1934) (26 October-08 November 2020)

 

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in
It Happened One Night (1934).
C: Joseph Walker.  D: Frank Capra.

Joseph Walker was one of the best and luckiest cinematographers in Hollywood history.  His list of credits would have been any cinematographer's dream, and they included Platinum Blonde (1931);  Lady for a Day (1933); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Lost Horizon (1937); The Awful Truth (1937); You Can't Take It With You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); His Girl Friday (1940); Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941); It's a Wonderful Life (1946); The Lady from Shanghai (1947); and Born Yesterday (1950).  He was Frank Capra's favorite cameraman.  They worked together on eighteen films.

It Happened One Night showcases Walker's talent perfectly.  Watch his subtle camerawork in these scenes—at the bus stop on the road when Peter Warne (Clark Gable) chases a thief; Warne carrying Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) over a moving creek; at the haystacks; and at the wedding venue.  It is beautiful work that doesn't scream, "Look at me!  See what I can do with a camera!"

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Clark Gable worked on this movie as a punishment.  He was an up-and-coming matinee idol at MGM when he filmed Dancing Lady with Joan Crawford in 1933.  During filming he developed a life-threatening case of pyorrhea and was rushed to the hospital where he had all his teeth removed.  After surgery, he had to wait two weeks for his dentures to be made.  Instead of laying about Hollywood he took his wife on a two-week Alaskan cruise and did so without getting the approval of studio boss Louis B. Mayer nor of the head of production Irving Thalberg.

Filming of Dancing Lady continued in Gable's absence.  When he showed up on set again, Mayer docked him two weeks' salary.  But that wasn't punishment enough.  It was customary for Mayer to show his displeasure with an actor by lending him out to Columbia Pictures, one of the "poverty row" studios.  Everyone, including Gable, would know why he'd been temporarily demoted to "poverty row."  And everyone, including Gable, would read it as a career insult.  When he arrived on the set of It Happened One Night he said, "Let's get this over with."

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Paramount Pictures didn't lend Claudette Colbert to Columbia for punishment.  She had four weeks free between movies, and she became aware that Capra was making a movie during those weeks.  After a quick negotiation, Capra promised her work would be done in four weeks, and Harry Cohn offered her $50,000 for it, roughly $975,000 in today's money.

She complained every day of filming.  She didn't get along well with Gable.  She didn't get along with Capra at all.  After her last day on set  she told a friend, "I just finished making the worst movie I've ever made."

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It Happened One Night marked a major turning point in Hollywood.  It was the first romantic comedy to win the Oscar for Best Picture.  It singlehandedly lifted Columbia Pictures out of "poverty row."  It made major stars out of both Gable and Colbert.  (Gable and Colbert reprised their roles for Lux Radio Theatre in 1939).  And it became the first of only three movies to win all five of the top Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony—Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.  (The others were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [1975] and The Silence of the Lambs [1991].) 

Screenshot for the Week of 19 October 2020: "THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI" (1957)

 

Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  C: Jack Hildyard.  D: David Lean.

[SPOILER ALERT!]  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) has been a controversial film in the UK since its premiere.  British film critics and war veterans excoriated it for its portrayal of a British officer who collaborates with the enemy under the delusion he's actually advancing the British war effort.  British audiences, however, loved the film, making it the box-office winner in the UK in 1958.

The film was based on a French novel by Pierre Boulle and told a fictional version of the real-life wartime saga of British Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey and the forced construction of the Burma-Siam railway.  Survivors of the brutal project swore that any senior allied officer who behaved as Nicholson behaves in the film would have been "eliminated."  Toosey in fact made it his constant goal to sabotage the project, one way or another, even resorting to planting termites in the bridge stanchions. [END OF SPOLIER ALERT!]

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Jack Hildyard won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  It was his only Oscar.  He had worked for director David Lean three times before, and I'm curious why the pair never made another movie together.  Lean's next three films won Oscars for his new cinematographer, Freddie Young—Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Ryan's Daughter (1970).

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Alec Guinness was reluctant to make this movie.  There are all sorts of stories out there that other actors had first been offered the role of Colonel Nicholson, including Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles, all of whom supposedly turned it down before it was offered to Guinness.  But there's another story which I choose to believe, namely, that Guinness was always the first choice for the role of Colonel Nicholson, the role that earned Guinness his only Oscar (Actor in a Leading Role).

And Guinness himself initially turned it down.  He thought the French novel on which the film was based was anti-British, which by all accounts it was.  He also thought no one in their right mind would sit and watch a stiff-upper-lip British officer for 2½ hours.  Producer Sam Spiegel, a born salesman, took Guinness and David Lean to dinner, and by the end of the meal, Guinness was sold.

Even after filming began, however, Guinness continued to have doubts.  Lean invited Guinness and his family to watch some rough cuts of the early footage.  After having watched them, the group stood up and walked out of the screening room without saying a word.  Lean didn't know what to think.  Later, Guinness returned to Lean and told him that he and his family agreed Nicholson was the finest work he had ever done.

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William Holden was brought into the project to give it a solid box-office earning potential and to bring a little sex appeal to the film.  Holden was apparently the only person on the film shoot in Ceylon—cast, crew, extras—who got along with director David Lean.  And by Lean's own account, Holden was the only person there that he liked.

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Sessue Hayakawa was a legendary silent film star and producer, in America and Japan, before William Holden had been born and while Alec Guinness was still in nappies.  In fact he was one of the highest-paid film stars between 1910 and 1920.  In the early 1920s, with the rise of racism in Europe and the U.S., the flow of Hayakawa's career slowed to a trickle.  He went back to Japan for a several years, acting in and producing films and staging Japanese-language productions of Shakespeare's plays.  His career never again reached the heights of the period 1910-1920.

While filming that scene near the beginning of the movie, when Nicholson meets Colonel Saito and Saito strikes him with a pocket-size copy of the Geneva Convention,  Hayakawa did in fact accidentally strike Guinness and draw genuine blood.  Guinness never broke character, the camera kept rolling, and the footage stayed in the film.

Current imdb fans rank: #181/250.

C: Jack Hildyard   D: David Lean

Screenshot for the Week of 12 October 2020: "THE PHILADELPHIA STORY" (1940)

 

James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940).  C: Joseph Ruttenberg  D: George Cukor

Question: What do The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Gaslight (1944), That Forsyte Woman (1949), Julius Caesar (1953), Brigadoon (1954), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Gigi (1958), and BUtterfield 8 (1960) have in common?  Answer: They were all filmed by Joseph Ruttenberg, one of the greatest cinematographers of the Golden Age.  He was known for his black and white photography and for his talent with lighting.  Until the breakup of the old studio system, he worked his entire career at MGM.

Ruttenberg worked with the great directors and actors of the Golden Era—John Ford, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, George Stevens, George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, plus Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and many others.  He won four Oscars for his work, more than any other cinematographer.

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James Stewart won a Best Actor Oscar for his leading performance in this film.  Stewart had made twenty-five feature films before The Philadelphia Story (1940).  But only one of them allowed him to show his true talent: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which he gave a career-making performance as the junior Senator from Missouri, Jefferson Smith.

Stewart spent the World War 2 years as a flight instructor for the U.S. Army Air Corps, forerunner of the Air Force.  Afterward, he picked up where he left off in Hollywood and continued to ride high for the next twenty years, starring in films like It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Call Northside 777 (1948), Rope (1948), The Stratton Story (1949), Winchester '73 (1950), Harvey (1950), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Rear Window (1954), Strategic Air Command (1955), The Man from Laramie (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), Vertigo (1958), Bell Book and Candle (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), How the West Was Won (1963), and Shenandoah (1965).  

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The Oscar for Best Actress of 1940 went to Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle.  I would have given it to Katharine Hepburn.  But she had been labeled "box office poison" within the industry in 1938, despite three Oscar-nominated performances and one win for Morning Glory (1933).  She was a great actress whom the public hadn't warmed up to.

Her performance as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story changed the public perception of her.  (Hepburn, Stewart, and Cary Grant reprised their roles in a radio play of The Philadelphia Story for Lux Radio Theatre in 1942.) Her popularity went up—it couldn't have gotten any lower—and then began to soar with  Woman of the Year (1942), playing opposite Spencer Tracy.

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George Cukor directed Hepburn in Woman of the Year.  He directed her in The Philadelphia Story.  He directed her in her debut film, Bill of Divorcement (1932).  In fact, he directed her ten times and was Hepburn's favorite director.  He directed the early Hepburn-Tracy films.  In addition to those, Cukor directed Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), Holiday (1938) with Hepburn and Cary Grant, The Women (1939), Gaslight (1944), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady (1964).  Ten of his films were nominated for Best Picture Oscars.  And he was one of six directors to work on The Wizard of Oz (1939), five of whose work went uncredited, including his.

Screenshot for the Week of 05 July 2020: "HIGH NOON" (1952)

Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon (1952)

The Year 1952 was rife with paradox, irony, and fear in the movie industry.  That year yielded seven great films, none of which won the Oscar for Best Picture.  It was the year of High Noon; The Bad and the Beautiful; Viva Zapata!; The Quiet Man; Come Back, Little Sheba; Forbidden Games; and Singin' in the Rain.  The Oscar for Best Picture of 1952 went to a good but not great film, The Greatest Show on Earth.

Carl Foreman's script for High Noon is a classic.  It was nominated for an Oscar but lost to The Bad and the Beautiful.  I think Foreman's script was better, but the loss wasn't a miscarriage of justice.  After all, The Bad and the Beautiful won 5 Oscars, more than any other film that year.

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High Noon is an allegory for the "red scare" in postwar America and for the way Hollywood—actors, producers, writers, directors, studio bosses—failed to rise up, stand united, and protect their own in the face of Congressional bullying.  In trying to find and root out Communists and Communist influence in Hollywood, the House Committee on Un-American Activities menaced witnesses who did not unabashedly and unhesitatingly cooperate and "name names"—i. e., expose members of the film industry that had even a remote connection to Communism.

If it were discovered that you had taken a leaflet from someone on the street that turned out to be Communist propaganda—even if you had immediately shoved it into your pocket without looking at it and thrown it away when you got home—you would be labeled a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.  If you had eaten a meal one time in a restaurant that was later identified as a Communist hangout; if a distant relative had been labeled a Communist or sympathizer; if you had gone to a party where Communists or sympathizers had been present, you would be labeled a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.  In or out of Hollywood you would lose your job.  Friends and colleagues would shun and avoid you.

The film industry was complicit in the bullying by way of its off-the-record "blacklist."  The "Hollywood Blacklist" was a poorly-kept secret that, for decades, Hollywood insiders denied ever existed.  But too many memoirs and first-person accounts of the blacklist have put that canard in its grave.  Indeed there was a blacklist and it was enforced.

It was the age of widespread fear.  It was the age of the second "red scare" of the 20th century.  It was the age of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Whitaker Chambers, the "atom bomb" and the soul-killing fear of "World War III."  It was the age of Joseph R. McCarthy, his henchman Roy Cohn, and Congressman Richard Nixon.  Few dared to stand up to the bullying.  Carl Foreman was one who did, and in return he was blacklisted from working in Hollywood.  But before he was blacklisted, he wrote High Noon.

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Floyd Crosby (father of rocker David Crosby [The Byrds; Buffalo Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young]) was the Director of Photography on this film.  What's the difference between a cinematographer and a director of photography?  Answer: the level of artistic control over the cinematography.

The high-contrast black-and-white of High Noon was conceived and executed by Crosby and makes the visual imagery as stark as the story and action.  Director Fred Zinnemann had a vivid mental storyboard of how the action should play out.  His firm grasp on his subject no doubt helped Crosby tremendously.  If only ….  If only High Noon had been Crosby's lone film credit, he might have been considered among the world's greatest cinematographers.  Alas, it wasn't and he isn't.

Crosby's resume is unimpressive.  And thus his credit for High Noon stands out as if it were in all caps or red letters.  His work on that film is the work of a true artist at the top of his game.  I spent the time to take screenshots of High Noon from start to finish, following Crosby around, shooting what he shot.  I ended up taking only 57, but nearly every one is perfectly framed.  Here are a few examples.

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Gary Cooper was a lifelong conservative Republican.  I don't know whether he hesitated in taking the role of Will Kane and whether the hesitation, if it happened, was political.  But Fred Zinnemann's first choice—Gregory Peck—turned the role down and it was then offered to Cooper.  His popularity had dropped in the previous seven or eight years.  Perhaps he saw this as a comeback opportunity.  It most certainly was.

Many critics and, doubtless, many filmgoers were disturbed by the age gap between Cooper and Grace Kelly.  Cooper was 51 and Kelly was 21.  Cooper and Kelly had no problem with it.  In fact they carried on an affair during the entirety of the filming.

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Some blacklisted writers continued to work in Hollywood off-the-record, literally.  Their screen credits were given over to fake names.  At least four of their screenplays won Oscars: Roman Holiday (1953), written by Dalton Trumbo; The Brave One (1956), also by Trumbo; The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), co-written by Carl Foreman and another blacklisted writer, Michael Wilson; and The Defiant Ones (1958), co-written by Nedrick Young.  Decades later, they finally received their credits when their real names were restored to the films and to the official records.

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High Noon director Fred Zinnemann's next movie was From Here to Eternity (1953).  It won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1953 and he won an Oscar for his direction.

DoP: Floyd Crosby.  D: Fred Zinnemann.