In the Heat of the Night (1967): Shira's Take

While "They call me MISTER Tibbs!" has clearly become the most quoted and memorable line in this movie, I must say that my favorite was when Gillespie (Rod Steiger) said, "I got the motive which is money and the body which is dead." Priceless.

For such a well-acted, well-written, well-shot, well-directed movie, In the Heat of the Night's plot was definitely lacking. I know it's based on a book, so I theoretically have no right to complain about the plot, but to me PLOT MAKES A MOVIE. And this movie's plot felt like a bad episode of Law and Order. The last twenty minutes or so are paced so poorly that I'm not totally sure I even understood them. It didn't help that all the tall, lanky yokel-y guys looked exactly alike, and I mistook part of the story for incest. And did they explain why the bit of fern or whatever the orchids grew in was in the car? You can tell by how inarticulate I am in writing about this movie that I didn't really follow what happened in it. And, I'm sorry, maybe if I had seen this in 1967 I would have liked it, but it can't compare to a later movie (that I had already seen) about heat waves and crazy racism--Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

I loved Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. I've always wondered about the fact that Steiger won an Oscar for this performance and Poitier wasn't even nominated. I think it's fair. Poitier was good, but Steiger was way better. Plus, the idiotic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner came out in '67 as well, and I think the two Poitier performances probably split the votes and he didn't end up nominated. The photography was awesome. 1967 was a year for good cinematography (with Bonnie and Clyde winning the Oscar). In the Heat of the Night wasn't even nominated, but it totally had that hip, funky New Hollywood vibe. 7/10

In the Heat of the Night (1967): Eitan's Take

Released in the thick of the Summer of Love, Norman Jewison's truly incendiary In the Heat of the Night is the first Best Picture winner we've seen that has felt really immediate, really visceral, and really contemporary. Its brilliant social critiques are obvious (or, at least they are now) and its central mystery is hardly worth blinking an eye at, but the atmosphere of the film -- Poitier's tough and intelligent performance, the classy jazz and blues score, and the crisp writing, to name just a few elements -- is soulful, rich, and thrilling. Nowadays, a hack like Paul Haggis could probably take the same material and turn it into a hodgepodge of liberal guilt-inducing malaise, but it's tough not to admire the risks this film took in 1967.

Of course, watching a slightly preachy detective film about a black man coming into a town of redneck racists and saving them from themselves (Blazing Saddles, anyone?) requires a bit of patience and some acquiescence to the shopworn cliches of both the film noir and the racial reconciliation drama. But as with so many great genre pics, it's easy to forget about the hamminess of this approach when the performances and the dialogue are so unforgettable. Poitier's performance is a brilliant melange of passionate anger, soul, grit, and jazzy coolness. Rod Steiger (pre-bald-creepiness) matches him note-for-note, imbuing what could have been a tacky caricature with just enough emotional depth and hurt to believe his willing partnership with a mostly despised black detective. We know that they'll eventually solve the crime, and a film this complex cannot rest on a simple, "Law and Order"-style investigative framework. At the same time, it cannot be content with only busting taboos and failing to provide an exciting story. That it manages to do nearly all these things at once, while remaining edgy and thrilling, is a great testament to the artists behind it.

It would be easy to criticize this film for being a simplistic, easily-digestible apologia for middle-class, white liberals to stand up and pat themselves on the back for enjoying. If I was more cynical, I might very dismiss it as that myself. But within this film's historical context -- it was released at the dawn of New Hollywood, and is the subject, along with the four other Best Picture nominees that year, of the supposedly excellent "Pictures at a Revolution" -- I refuse to write it off and ignore the new, edgy, ambitious cinematic aesthetic that it embodies. I certainly don't enjoy or even admire it as much as my two favorite 1967 Best Picture nominees, The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde, but it was a worthy winner nonetheless. It's too bad that 2004's winner, Crash, took a similar set of narrative ideas and morphed it into an absurd after-school special.

8/10.