In the Heat of the Night

Innovative and Groundbreaking Film

The personnel involved in the making of In the Heat of the Night ensured it would be innovative. Predating “blaxploitation” films such as Shaft (Richard Roundtree, 1972), with its Quincy [Page 1158]Jones score and signature song performed by Ray Charles, it was one of the first films to have a predominantly African American soundtrack. In the Heat of the Night was one of three films on race relations Poitier made during 1967, although the London-set To Sir, With Love in which he plays a schoolteacher and the interracial romance Guess Who's Coming to Dinner are far less challenging.

The Academy Award-winning editor of In the Heat of the Night, Hal Ashby, soon became a leading director of the trailblazing “New Hollywood” movement and it is his dynamic work that generates much of the film's tension. At the outset, when Tibbs is hauled from the railway station to Gillespie's police station, it is several minutes before both men are seen together in the frame; the perpetual cross-cutting from face to face sets up the crackling atmosphere of antagonism. Similarly, Steiger's technique of chewing gum faster and faster to denote his nervousness as he discovers Tibbs is his career superior is contrasted with the stillness of Poitier's style in establishing the power relations between the characters.

Playing a chain-gang escapee in The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1957), Poitier, insisting that he and fellow convict Joker (Tony Curtis) head north, says: “I'm a strange colored man in a white southern town. How long before they pick me up?” Moving forward 10 years to In the Heat of the Night, these seem to be prophetic words for Virgil Tibbs. However, much has in fact changed. Virgil is a well-paid, high-ranking police officer; in Sparta, he is still addressed as “boy,” but in Philadelphia, they call him “Mr. Tibbs.” In this light, In the Heat of the Night is not so much an exploration of race relations across America as a critique of an American south that is seen to be out of step with the north, which apparently affords equal opportunities to all.

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