Norman Jewison (1967)

I’d seen the picture two or three times on television but not at the cinema before.  Watching it at the BFI made me realise it’s not easy for a twenty-first century audience to know how to react.   (The very poor quality of the BFI’s print must have made this an even more basic difficulty for those who were new to the film:  there were half a dozen bad ‘jumps’, with dialogue lost as a result.)  The racism of the people of Sparta, Mississippi, the small town where the action takes place, is startling in its verbal expression, let alone in the physical threats to the main black character, Virgil Tibbs.  This is shocking now not because we suppose that violently aggressive racial prejudice has since disappeared from the American South but because it permeates the Spartan culture to such an extent that its presentation in the film can seem matter of fact.  It’s not surprising that laughter in the NFT2 audience – the script, which Stirling Silliphant adapted from a novel by John Ball, has plenty of witty lines – was often uncertain and mixed with gasps of incredulity at the racism on display.

Virgil Tibbs is a Philadelphia detective, passing through Sparta to visit his mother.  In the early hours of a Wednesday morning, Tibbs is waiting for a train out of town at the otherwise deserted rail station.  He’s picked up by patrolman Sam Wood (Warren Oates) as prime suspect for the killing of Philip Colbert, a businessman come to Sparta from Chicago to set up a factory with plenty of jobs for blacks as well as whites.  Once he’s explained to the local police chief Bill Gillespie who he is and why he’s in Sparta, Tibbs ceases to be a suspect.  His own chief in the North suggests that he stick around to help the Sparta police solve the crime:  Tibbs is the top homicide detective in the Philadelphia force.  (Gillespie, after laughing at Tibbs’s forename and his excellent grammar, has the smile wiped off his face when he learns how much Tibbs earns.  He’s so stunned that he has to repeat the figure several times.)   Gillespie naturally loathes the idea of Tibbs doing his job for him but isn’t quite in a position to reject the offer.  The murdered man’s widow threatens to stop construction of the factory unless Tibbs is kept on the case.  The main dynamic of what follows is – as much as the process of solving the murder – the tension between how much Gillespie resents and how much he needs Tibbs.  In the Heat of the Night is a police procedural-cum-thriller with several comic elements in its structure – Gillespie’s arrests of a succession of wrong men, the repeated postponement of Tibbs’s leaving town – and Tibbs’s sleuthing supremacy is conveyed in pretty broad terms.    Norman Jewison manages an adroit balancing act between the racial melodrama and racial comedy in the material:  he sustains a distinctive and pretty consistent tone.  With the help of his cinematographer (Haskell Wexler) and editor (Hal Ashby) and the music (by Quincy Jones – with Ray Charles singing the theme song), Jewison also skilfully gets across the stupefied rhythm of life in Sparta (and the even slower thought processes of most of its inhabitants) without letting the tempo of the thriller storytelling drag.

Actors playing characters with only one substantial scene will naturally tend to make the most of that scene.  This applies to several roles in Heat of the Night and Jewison doesn’t do enough to control some of the supporting cast.  By no means all of them: Larry Gates is fine as Endicott, the owner of a cotton plantation; Beah Richards is good as the local abortionist; and when the performer is as watchable as Lee Grant, playing the widow, you don’t really mind that she seems to be doing a solo turn.  But this is a real problem in the scene when Gillespie is questioning Delores Purdy, the young woman (a minor) who parades naked in her lit room when it’s dark outside, drives Sam Wood wild (he watches her from his patrol car) and comes to the station with her elder brother (he works nights), claiming that she’s pregnant by Sam.  Quentin Dean as Delores certainly dictates the rhythm of her big scene but it’s the wrong rhythm.  If getting information from Delores were a blood-out-of-a-stone job that would make sense of Gillespie’s frustration but Quentin Dean reads her lines in a slow, self-conscious singsong.

A larger problem, given the importance of the character, is Anthony James as Ralph Henshaw, a young man who works late shifts in a diner.   James is extraordinary looking to start with (his Adam’s apple is one of the most worrying things I’ve ever seen on screen).  Jewison has him act creepy and the effect is grotesque.   It’s possible that Jewison does this to throw the audience, making the character of Ralph so obviously suspicious that we never suspect him of the crime.  Even if this is what was intended, it doesn’t eventually make sense.  When it turns out Ralph is the murderer and, in his confession, says that he didn’t mean to kill Colbert, Anthony James acts much more naturally – in a way that doesn’t fit at all with the earlier sequence of Ralph putting a comedy spooky record on the diner jukebox and moving round to it with madly glinting eyes.   This part would have worked much better played more realistically – the level at which Scott Wilson (in his cinema debut here – the film was released a few months before In Cold Blood) plays Harvey Oberst, the second suspect (after Tibbs).   There is, though, a nice detail involving Ralph.  In the opening scene in the diner, he uses a rubber band to try to kill a fly that’s crawling slowly over the remains of the day’s desserts.  After his arrest, he fiddles nervously with a rubber band on a desk in the police station.

As Virgil Tibbs, Sidney Poitier is mostly very good when he’s not speaking.   When Tibbs is first arrested and Sam Wood is frisking him, we see Poitier’s feelings of furious humiliation at the same time as his determined self-control.  In the scene in the cotton magnate’s orchid house, when he returns the racist Endicott’s slap in the face and storms out, Poitier does well to suggest a petulant edge to Tibbs’s outrage.   And although Poitier’s status in Hollywood at the time meant he was the obvious choice for the part of Tibbs, his looks and his super-urbanity do make him right for the role.  He’s a superior being to an almost comical degree (and Tibbs’s large suitcase, which Gillespie eventually lugs down the railway platform for him, is spectacularly sleek).  The performance is less completely successful when Poitier opens his mouth.   His delivery of the famous line ‘I’m a police officer!’ is fine.  The cadence of the equally famous ‘They call me Mr Tibbs!’ is rather too similar – and the line is more declaimed.  When Tibbs asks Gillespie for a little more time in which to solve the case, Poitier’s ‘I’m this close’ is overly theatrical.  He does better whenever he has the chance to show Tibbs’s smart-aleck side; and he’s very effective – at one moment, almost gigglingly insinuating – in the scene in which the detective wins the confidence of Harvey Oberst.  Poitier’s weakest silent moment is his final look at Gillespie as he prepares to leave Sparta.  It reflects too simply the we’ve-learned-to-respect-each-other message of the story and compares deeply unfavourably with the complexity of what Rod Steiger as Gillespie does at this point.

Steiger’s portrait is wonderfully complete and layered – he gets right into the body and the mind of the paunchy, gum-chewing Gillespie.   His crack timing means that he’s often very funny – the repetition of Tibbs’s salary (‘One hundred and sixty-two dollars and thirty-nine cents a week’) is one of many highlights.   The chief’s relief when he can get return to his comfort zone of bawling out his dim subordinates and complaining about non-criminal malfunctions at the police station – the air conditioning, a gate that won’t open properly – is palpable.  Steiger shows Gillespie on a knife edge between derision and defensiveness and he doesn’t make him simply dim.  He suggests a mind that’s always at work even if it’s often not working very effectively. When Tibbs visits his home, Gillespie says he’s the only other person who’s set foot in there.   Gillespie asks if Tibbs is married and, when he’s told no, asks ‘Don’t you ever get just a bit lonely?’  Your heart sinks at the prospect of a softer side being exposed to show what the redneck is like ‘deep down’.  It’s fortunate that, as soon as Tibbs answers, ‘No more than you’, Steiger reacts as if he has been slapped in the face as fully as Endicott was.  Gillespie tells Tibbs he doesn’t want his sympathy and appends ‘boy’ to make the point more clearly.  Steiger’s face in that parting exchange of looks at the station is a miraculous blend and sequence of expressions – it’s like the whole course of the relationship between Gillespie and Tibbs passing before our eyes in its final moment.   You can see – inter alia – the residue of racist antipathy, a recognition of the moment when Gillespie nearly opened up emotionally, how grudging the Southerner’s respect is even now, and that Tibbs has somehow made a difference (although Gillespie is not sure how).   This is one of those performances so good that you think the actor must have died happy knowing he’d given it – even if Steiger, according to Robert Osborne’s history of the Academy Awards, didn’t think it was even his best work to date.  (He preferred The Pawnbroker.)

5 September 2009