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| 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.
