Sidney Poitier:
“For the first 10 years of my life in the Bahamas there were no mirrors or glass, so I never had the chance to see a reflection of myself. I saw myself in a mirror in a Florida store and my heart actually started racing. I was particularly happy with my teeth. I looked at myself for a very long time.“
In The Heat Of The Night (1967) stars Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a Black Philadelphia homicide detective stranded in the simmering summer in the sleepy town of Sparta, Mississippi, working with, or against, the bigoted white sheriff played by Rod Steiger, as they try to solve the murder of a white businessman. Along the way, a white cotton plantation owner named Endicott (Larry Gates) objects to being considered a suspect. He slaps Tibbs, and in a reactive flash that shocked audiences, Tibbs delivers a fiercer, harder slap back to Endicott, and it became the slap heard around the world.
In The Heat Of The Night is a well-made tense detective story with an innovative score by Quincy Jones, directed by Norman Jewison from a screenplay by the groovy-named Stirling Silliphant. The film’s poster tagline proclaimed: “They got a murder on their hands. They don’t know what to do with it.“
It was shot in sultry color by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who had just filmed the black and white Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The film was a milestone in 1960s America. A movie with a non-white actor in a lead role, was so controversial that it couldn’t be filmed in the South, so the sets were recreated in various small towns in Illinois. Besides, Poitier refused to film below the Mason-Dixon line, since he and Harry Belafonte had recently been harassed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi while marching for Civil Rights. They did film one weekend in Tennessee for the scene at the cotton plantation. When the film crew got to Tennessee, only the Holiday Inn would accept Blacks and whites together. The local sheriff said:
“Keep your people at the hotel. I don’t want them around town.”
United Artists were concerned. They feared the film might lead to unrest in the south, even riots.
Shocking for the era, In The Heat Of The Night was nominated for seven Academy Awards and received five: Best Picture, Best Actor for Steiger, Best Screenplay, Best Sound, and Best Editing. It won over Bonnie And Clyde and director Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate, and the other Poitier project, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, another controversial liberal-minded film, this one about interracial marriage which was still illegal in 17 States until that year. Poitier didn’t receive a nomination for either film. Steiger had stiff competition from Warren Beatty in Bonnie And Clyde, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Jewison failed to take home the Best Director Oscar, instead, Nichols won, presumably because he had failed to win the previous year for Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. The film’s other losing nomination was for Best Sound Effects for James A. Richard, despite the impact of that slap.
My point is, as always with the Academy Awards, the right people win for the wrong picture in the wrong year. Poitier gave the most nuanced and inventive performance of 1967.
In The Heat Of The Night was something new in films set in the American South. It offered a tough, edgy vision of a town that seemed to hate outsiders more than itself, reflecting the uncertain mood of the country as the Civil Rights Movement took hold. It was a surprise box-office and critical hit. My parental units took me to see it at a drive-in theatre, so I missed the audience reaction, but I was still stunned seeing a top Black actor physically strike back at a white guy.
More astonishing, Poitier had three films playing that year. To Sir, With Love had been released just two months earlier, with Poitier as a teacher winning respect in a tough London school.
Poitier reprised his Virgil Tibbs character in two other films: They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) and The Organization (1971). In The Heat Of The Night was adapted into a television series in 1988, with Carroll O’Connor as the sheriff and gay actor Howard Rollins as Tibbs.
Poitier will always be noted for being the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, winning for the nun flick Lilies Of The Field (1963). When Poitier went on stage to collect his Oscar, Anne Bancroft, presenting him the award, gave him a kiss. Conservatives were outraged.
Another Black man wouldn’t win again until Denzel Washington in 2001. 2002 was a landmark Academy Award ceremony: It was the first time two African-Americans both took home two acting Oscars, and the only time a Black woman has won Best Actress (Halle Berry). It was also the year that the Academy decided to give Poitier an honorary Oscar. Washington thanked the icon later in the evening, after Poitier paid homage to those who broke down barriers in the film industry: “… others who have had a hand in altering the odds, for me and for others”. An entire era of struggle in a single five-minute speech.
Yet, it was the current of open racism at the time and the controversial aspects of simply being a black man that Poitier put to the test in that one remarkable year, 1967.
For a while, Poitier was the only Black male being cast in major roles. Poitier:
“It is hard to imagine now how different life was then. Many hospitals in the American South refused even to admit black patients in those days. And later in life I had run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan and all the segregation. But I refused to become bitter. It was a fact of life at that time and I knew in my heart that things would change for the better.“
