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Rated: PG
Starring: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, et al.
Director: Norman Jewison Review
This 1967 film took home lots of Oscars for its fascinating drama about a
Philadelphia detective (Sidney Poitier) who assists a redneck Southern
sheriff (Rod Steiger) in solving a murder. A study in racism that ebbs a
bit through the collective and shared need between a black man and a white
man who don't want to be working together, the film continues to strike a
chord today. Steiger is a mass of snarling danger, Poitier a bundle of
nerves covered in class. Norman Jewison (Moonstruck) directs with a keen
feeling for the cultural and social atmosphere of the setting. --Tom Keogh
----------- Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger almost set the
screen afire in this film that deservedly won the Academy Award for Best
Picture in 1967. Superbly directed by Norman Jewison, the movie brings us
into deepest Mississippi one summer midnight, when a northern
industrialist with plans to build a new factory is found murdered in the
middle of Sparta's main street. At the same time, Virgil Tibbs, a black
detective from Los Angeles, is waiting at the station for the train that
will take him back home from visiting his mother. This being Mississippi,
and a black man out after dark, it must have been the black man who
committed the murder, right? Tibbs is hauled into the sheriff's office and
brought face to face with Bill Gillespie, the epitome of every redneck law
officer south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Gillespie's reaction to Tibbs is
first contempt (this is a black man after all), suspicion at his full
wallet ("Boy, that's more in a week than I make in a month, now where did
you earn that?"), and finally shock, when Tibbs hurls the response into
his face, "I'm a police officer." Gillespie is further stunned to realize
that Tibbs' contempt for him is at least as great as his for Tibbs, when
he hears Tibbs telling his superiors over the phone "They got a murder on
their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Tibbs' boss volunteers
Tibbs's services as a homicide expert to Gillespie, who doesn't
particularly want to accept, but he doesn't have much of a choice; the
industrialist's widow says if her husband's murder isn't solved and fast,
there won't be any factory anywhere. The resulting reluctant partnership
between the two men is a pairing unlike any seen on screen; they resent
each other but they can't solve the crime without each other; Gillespie
needs Tibbs' expertise, and Tibbs needs Gillespie's protection from the
local rednecks who want him dead. The movie wonderfully evokes the
atmosphere of a small town in the deep south, the abject poverty in which
most of the blacks in the area lived, and the attitudes of the whites in
town that made it dangerous for any black man to stand tall as a man. At
the movie's end, Gillespie hasn't changed his views about blacks, but he
has come to respect Tibbs as a lawman and as a human being; and Tibbs
comes to realize that inside of Gillespie's hardshell racist attitudes is
a decent man struggling to show himself. The acting, the directing, and
above all, Quincy Jones's magnificent score, made this one of the best
movies of the 1960's and for years beyond.
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