Dir. Norman Jewison
Starring: Sidney Poitier, Rod
Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant
In a small Southern town a murder
is committed. The quest to find the killer brings two very different police
officers into a temporary and uneasy alliance. And it is this relationship that
defines In the Heat of the Night.
Following the discovery of the
murder Chief of Police Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger, who won the Academy Award for his performance as the prickly police chief) orders a search be carried
out for hitch-hikers. One of his officers finds a black stranger at the
railroad station and takes him in. This man is Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier),
and it turns out that he too is a policeman from Philadelphia – a homicide
expert no less. Tibbs is urbane and well-dressed, clever and educated,
Northern, black, and considerably better paid than Gillespie. He also has a
touch of arrogance about him. In short, he is everything that Gillespie is not. He seems almost tailor-made to antagonise the
swaggering Southern police chief. One of the best examples is early on when
Gillespie is still convinced that Virgil killed Mr Colbert. “Whatcha hit him with?” “Hit whom?” “WHOM?” Frankly, folks from Sparta don’t use the word ‘whom’.
Sparta, Mississippi, is a town in
which the racial divides of the ‘60s are not far away. The town authorities are
all white, and the whites are distrustful of blacks. Blacks are routinely
referred to as “boy”. Gillespie at
first refuses to believe that a black man could come by $100 honestly. Harvey
(Scott Wilson, yet another murder suspect after his turn in In Cold Blood) asks the suited Virgil
how come he is wearing white man’s clothes. Endicott (Larry Gates) runs the
cotton plantation; he is cultured and seemingly paternalistic, but he believes
that “negros” need to be cultivated
over time and mourns the fact that he could once have had Virgil shot. The town
mayor also comments that Gillespie’s predecessor would have shot Virgil. The
diner refuses to serve Virgil, and car loads of good ol’ boys come to give him
a taste of Southern hospitality.
But they are not the only ones
holding prejudices. Virgil too clearly dislikes these sweaty rednecks; his
chief in Philadelphia asks him whether he is prejudiced against the locals.
When Gillespie realises that he does need Tibbs’ help he goads him cleverly,
betting that he would just love to get one over on the Sparta police: “you’re just so damn smart. You’re smarter
than any white man. You’re just gonna stay here and show us all. You’ve got
such a big head you could never live with yourself unless you could put us all
to shame. You wanna know something, Virgil? I don’t think you could let a
chance like that pass by.” For a long time Virgil holds to the belief that
Endicott is the eminence gris behind
the murder, only to admit that he just wanted that to be the case. But he, a
wealthy and educated Northerner, is further away from the local black
population than the white townsfolk are. Quite simply, he has nothing in common
with them other than his skin colour.
The relationship between him and
Gillespie is hence firmly rooted in dislike. But Gillespie is not a homicide
expert, so he needs Tibbs’ expertise. Tibbs is calm and methodical; Gillespie
has a hair-trigger temper and is prone to locking people up on the slightest
provocation and then looking to make the facts fit the judgement (he arrests
three innocent men before Virgil brings him the right one). He collects Virgil
from the station. When he next tells his new partner to get out of town it is
motivated by concern for the man’s safety. By the time Virgil does finally
leave the culprit has confessed and a mutual respect has been forged. And in
the mean time a blow has been struck for civil rights. Literally. When Endicott
slaps Virgil, Virgil slaps him right back. This was unprecedented for the time:
the black man raising a fist against his oppressors. There may well have been a
lot of communities like Sparta that suddenly felt very nervous about that…
 |
| "One - two - three - four - I declare thumb war..." |
What have I learnt about
Mississippi?
Mississippi in the 1960s was no
place to be black. Wages were even lower than those of whites, they might not
be served in certain establishments and they were liable to be arrested on
spurious charges. “There’s white time in
jail and there’s coloured time in jail. The worst kind of time you can do is
coloured time.” Meanwhile town authorities were racist and mobs of white
locals could be trusted to put uppity blacks in their place. A Confederate
bumper sticker means trouble for any passing non-white.
The state abuts the Mississippi
River, across which is Arkansas. The Gulf, Mobile & Ohio railroad links the
South up to Memphis. And it gets sticky, sweaty and humid… particularly during
the heat of the night…
Can we go there?
There is a Sparta in Mississippi,
in Chickasaw County to the north-east of the state. This is not the Sparta of
the movie. The real Sparta is a mere village, and certainly would not be a spot
for transferring trains. The fictional Sparta seems to be fairly sizeable, and
has a bridge across the Mississippi to Arkansas.
In the Heat of the Night was filmed in Sparta – Sparta, Illinois. Due to its contentious subject matter Sidney Poitier was reluctant to
film in Mississippi. Sparta is in the south of Illinois. Nearby can be found
Chester, where a bridge that actually does cross the Mississippi was used for
the police chase. Compton’s Diner was filmed in Freeburg further north and was
a genuine greasy spoon before it was torn down. Endicott’s plantation house
was located on Pennell Lane in Dyersburg in
north-west Tennessee. The greenhouses added specifically for filming were
demolished by a tornado in 1997. The cotton fields at Boals’ Brothers Farm in
Tiger Tail nearby were also used in the film.
The Old G.M.O Depot in Sparta is
now the Misselhorn Art Gallery; it has a permanent display on the filming of the
movie.
Overall Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment