On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South


Hey, y’all. Welcome to our second open thread on the Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 1967. Tonight’s feature is In The Heat Of The Night starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. The thread officially opens at 10 PM Eastern, but if you’ve arrived a little early, don’t worry yourselves none. Take the time to register for the new comments system here, then grab yourselves a cherry coke from the cooler, set yourselves down on the front porch, and make yourselves at home. Our fearless leader Tom Watson and our favorite film blogger the Self-Styled Siren will be along shortly to get the party started. I’ll be along a bit later. But don’t wait on us. If you’ve got something on your mind already, shout it right out. Drop your thoughts in the comment box and hit your refresh button all night long.Probably nobody working on The Graduate thought they were making a generational statement. They just thought they were filming a satire based on a novel that had been published early in the decade, early enough to be really a product of the 1950s and not the 60s, certainly not The Sixties as they’ve come to be defined in the popular imagination. The targets of the satire were timeless, too. Hypocrisy, conformity, materialism. Whatever “revolutionary” edginess they might have intended was in the movie’s attitudes towards sex- in the non-judgmental, almost objective acceptance of Mrs Robinson’s aggressive sexual desire, in the frankness with which her affair with Ben is portrayed, in the flashes of nudity. If the movie has a message, it’s not rebellion but the importance of moral integrity.

It’s almost old-fashioned that way.

But In The Heat Of The Night is very much a statement in response to its time. It is a product of the Civil Rights Movement and it delivers some very definite, and defiant, messages about race and prejudice and the brotherhood of man. It is not a protest film, though.

It’s a triumphalist film.

The filmmakers aren’t joining hands to sing We Shall Overcome. Their song is We Have Already Overcome…Get Used To It.

Rod SteigerIn The Heat of the Night is about how the Old Segregationist South was being swept away to make way for a New South very much like the New North and the New West. The New South would be a place where pragmatism replaced prejudice, where money made the rules, and where competence and intelligence made the money.

The new elite wouldn’t be white or black. It would just be people who were very good at their jobs.

This was a very optimistic view, considering that within a year of the film’s completion the country would see the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Presidential campaign of George Wallace, and the first applications of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which would eventually bring about thirty years of Republican dominance in national politics based on the GOP’s incorporation of the old Dixiecratic South within its base.

It was an optimistic view but it was a realistic one and in large areas of the South it has turned out to have been what has happened.

Before the movie even gets underway the power in the town of Sparta, Mississippi has shifted, out of the hands of the old Southern aristocracy and segregationists who had run the place for generations and into the hands of the murder victim, the Northern industrialist who came to town to open a new factory there. Even dead he still wields power, through his widow and through his money which she now controls.

When we first meet Philadelphia Detective Virgil Tibbs - in one of the best introductory shots in movie history, ranking up there with Humphrey Bogart’s first appearance in Casablanca - he is an outsider and seemingly in a very vulnerable situation. All the power in the scene would seem to belong to the police officer arresting him and we should expect things to get worse for him when he’s brought into the station.

But no character played by Sidney Poitier can ever be without authority and it doesn’t take long before by the sheer force of his glare he has most of the white characters backing away from him, if not backing down. Nobody knows how to deal with him, because Tibbs represents something they have no experience with - a black man with political clout. The North has invaded, and it doesn’t take long for the North in the person of Virgil Tibbs to establish its authority based on competence.

Shortly after that, Tibbs is invested with even more authority. The murdered industrialist’s widow recognizes him immediately as the one man in town who knows how to get the job she wants done done and she puts him in charge of solving her husband’s murder.

Once he becomes the agent of the new powers that be, Tibbs is the ultimate Insider.

The outsiders are now the representatives of the old South, the plantation owner up on the hill, the good old boys who chase Tibbs into the abandoned warehouse, the stupid counterman at the diner who refuses to serve him, and, especially, Chief Gillespie.

And Gillespie, it turns out, can’t afford any more added outsiderness.

It’s a beautiful job of expositionary economy: we’re never told it explicitly but Gillespie is not just new to the job of Chief, he’s new in town. He’s been brought in from outside to reshape the department, make it more professional, and so far he’s not had much success. His cops are in passive revolt against his authority. Nothing he wants done, gets done the first or even the second time he gives an order. His broken air conditioner, which he finally sets about fixing himself, is the symbol of his weakness.

Gillespie is a racist and he doesn’t want to believe that a black man can be a better cop than he is. But his real problem with Tibbs is more practical and would be a problem even if Tibbs was white—just by being there, Tibbs, the big city detective, is an argument against Gillespie’s competence. Gillespie’s already afraid for his job when we first meet him at the crime scene, and he doesn’t even know about Tibbs yet. He’s nervous and full of self-doubt to begin with. If Tibbs solves the case then what does the town need Gillespie for? It would be worse for him, if a black man proves to be better at his job than he is, worse for his position among other racist whites, worse for his pride, but the effect will be the same—he will lose so much face as chief that he’ll never gain control of the department. It won’t be long before he’s out of the job.

On one level In The Heat of the Night is about how a bigoted white man learns to accept a black man as his equal, even as his superior. But on another level, the level that I think resonates most today, it’s about how a proud man learns how to accept his own limitations and who learns how to make-do given those limitations.

This particular murder mystery is an interesting side-trip in the life story of Virgil Tibbs. But it is the adventure of Bill Gillespie’s life. This is make or break for him. If he fails in Sparta he has nothing left ahead for him. He’s through, as through as the Old South.

That’s why, as great as Poitier is as Tibbs, this is Rod Steiger’s film and why he deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

So that might be the best place to start our discussion, with Steiger’s performance.

What do you think? In his first scene, does he overdo it with gum-chewing?

A few more points to consider, courtesy of our fearless leader Tom Watson who ranks In The Heat Of The Night as his favorite of the five films in this series. Tom’s points:

- I like the noir pacing, design and camera work - in my memory it’s B&W - so much fear of violence
- I love the accents - Poitier doesn’t talk “black” which is such a key to the movie’s tension
- The Quincy Jones music which is sooooo TV detective-ish, and cool (not to mention both Ray Charles AND Glenn Campbell on the soundtrack)
- Rod Steiger - man, what range that man had…
-The face slap, to this this day I go “yeah!”
- The fact they couldn’t actually film this in Mississippi - what a country we live in.

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June 19th, 2008
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