When Mr. Virgil Tibbs steps off a train into the rural town of Sparta, Mississippi, he doesn’t expect he’ll be arrested for having a big wallet on the night that a wealthy industrialist is killed. He may have expected something, given his tense resignation suggesting he’s been down this route before. When he’s dragged down to the police station, the police officer who arrested him and Gillespie, the local sheriff, scoff at the idea that he just happens to be paid $162.39 weekly. It isn’t until he flashes his police badge that Gillespie shuts up. Up until this point, Virgil was a Black man. Now, he’s Mr. Tibbs.

The late 1960s represented a turning point for Hollywood. Musicals and the studio system were falling by the wayside. Audiences didn’t want to see films that provided an escape from the real world–they were extremely disillusioned by what they were seeing on television and in the streets, and wanted films that represented the boiling anger they were seeing at how their societies were failing them. Everyone was getting angry. In The Heat of the Night was a few of those films to try and capture that feeling of anger.

For it’s day, it did a good job.

Sidney Poitier dominates the screen every minute the camera’s on him. Even when he’s silent, his micro-expressions say so much . As he endures every “boy” directed at him, every remark at how he shouldn’t be in the room, you can feel the pain threatening to break his steel composure. There’s two people that Poitier is playing within one character: the forced-to-be-deferential boy Virgil, and the man they call Mr. Tibbs. Many white people in this film refer to Virgil as “boy,” condescendingly placing him on a lower position compared to the rest of the “respectable” folk. As a result, Mr. Tibbs tries to be as stoic and as silently commanding as he can be. But that also doesn’t negate the fact that many people still see him as Virgil. As much as Mr. Tibbs wants to be respected as just a police officer, he has to contend with the fact that most people will just see him as a dangerous Black man.

At first I didn’t know how to feel about this film, since it seemed to prioritize interpersonal interactions with race over how it’s implemented in institutions. However, upon further thought, In The Heat of the Night is more than just about racism, but about how race intersects with other cultural identities. Mr. Tibbs is a Black man in a predominately white town in Mississippi, but he’s also wealthier than most of the inhabitants, which gets under the blue-collar Gillespie’s skin. Both men want to prove to themselves they are worth more than the other man; Mr. Tibbs wants to prove he can be Black and respected, and Gillespie wants to prove he can be blue-collar and capable. Both men are caught at the intersection of race and class, where they are both hindered and bolstered by their respective places in society.

We get brief glimpses of the broader town of Sparta, and we see lonely Black children on the side of a dusty road and a wealthy plantation, where sharecroppers still pick at cotton. The death of a wealthy industrialist in Sparta is contrasted with the way people treat Endicott, a plantation owner with sharecroppers out in the fields. The Civil War might be a century old at this point, but the legacy of the Confederacy still lingers in the Mississippi air. When Mr. Tibbs slaps Endicott for uttering a racial slur, it’s not just a shock for upsetting Mr. Tibbs’ cool demeanor; it’s a shock for a Black man challenging a powerful white man in the South. If an ordinary person were to do that at the time this film was released, they would have been arrested or worse. But with In The Heat of the Night, Poitier was allowed to break the rules. No wonder this would launch a new wave of Black heroes and antiheroes in cinema for decades to come.

That being said, this film didn’t totally do it for me. My main problem is at the end, which seems to wrap things up a little bit too nicely. Maybe since it’s a Southern Gothic in the 1960s, I would have preferred things with a little bit more cynicism. That’s partly why I didn’t close out the film with a smile on my face–I was confused as to what the film was trying to say about race. But it deserves its place in history as a significant turning point. As In The Heat of the Night unfurls its mystery, you can see the seams of 20th century racial hegemony coming apart. The winds were already changing. Sidney Poitier helped light the match.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

• I wish the dead man’s wife got more screentime.
• I do love how everyone is just consistently hot in this film. Like, each character is on the verge of collapsing from heat stroke.
• I don’t know why, but this film feels like it deserves its own Ethel Cain cover.