"In the Heat of the Night" Review: A Gritty Crime Classic With More Bark Than Bite

1967's Best Picture Winner isn't what it believes, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have something to offer.

November 23, 2023

For the half-century leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, Kansas was, quite literally, at the heart of racial politics. The Sunflower State is the country's center and was the middle of a nation sharply divided along racial lines. It made segregation in the public school system permissible but not required, symbolic of American socio-political geography: the states branching out to the West Coast and the North either forbade it, permitted it, or had not passed legislation addressing it. The southern states had mandated it.

But when Oliver Brown’s daughter got forced to travel to an all-black elementary school instead of enrolling in the nearby white school, the Topeka NAACP branch recruited Brown and a dozen other parents to file a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education.

The suit eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that even if the separate facilities were qualitatively equal, segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and sending shockwaves through the American South.

Sadly, the ruling provided no plan for integration, only saying that states had to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” In the Deep South, that meant all possible resistance would get exhausted before they bent the knee.

One year later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger and got arrested, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott mere months after Emmet Till got murdered in Mississippi. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. In 1965, the Selma Voting Rights Marches culminated in Bloody Sunday, where white officers attacked unarmed black marchers with clubs and tear gas.

The nation, though slow to progress, was changing. People would not accept oppression in defense of archaic, racist “values” that kept people in power who cited the nation's founding to defend all the privileges those “values” afforded them.

In this light, 1967's Best Picture winner seems hollow. It follows a Black detective named Virgil Tibbs as he teams with a bigoted white police Chief to solve the murder of a wealthy factory owner in a film directed by a white man that feels like a good-hearted but misinformed perception of race relations and prejudice.

For all the death and brutality that came before it, the decades of social oppression and political erasure, a movie whose ambitions amount to futuristically quoting Rodney King’s infamous “Can’t we all just get along?” rings false.

It does little to cut to the heart of social injustice and expose the underlying biases that fuel it. It never shows how microaggressions and ignorance can be just as damaging to social causes as outright bigotry.

It splits its focus between involving murder mystery and a scathing appraisal of racial prejudice while taking half-hearted aims at showing that overcoming differences is a matter of will, not ability. By committing to two things simultaneously, it fails to weave the stories well enough to be taken seriously as either.

It looks gritty and dirty, like the ethics gripping the South are the lens through which we view the film. It understands our disdain for intellectualism and how we feel more comfortable mocking people for effectively speaking on their behalf instead of striving to meet their standard. It understands how damaging these generalities can be when applied to social biases, creating a resentment that "justifies" our prejudice.

But it does not understand that stories like this must build from the inside out. We view a movie from all walks of life, from different socioeconomic backgrounds and political perspectives. We see movies through the eyes of our world but also from the specifics of our view. We create the world around us because it causes us to shape it; prejudice has always been cyclical.

For a film to make us look inward, it has to be more than surface-level. It must understand us deeply enough to force acceptance that our resistance is of our own making. Endicott doesn’t seethe over Tibb’s retaliation to his assault; he tearfully mourns the passage of time, the changing of our collective moral guard, where black people have the right to defy without getting smacked, hanged, or shot. It knows that racists are less angry than they appear. Anger is a product of surprise. We will always feel shocked at opposing viewpoints because we willingly lock ourselves in echo chambers. If we routinely exposed ourselves to the world we hide from, we would rarely get angry.

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The truth of racism is sadness. We become accustomed to our circumstances regardless of their nature, but we only mourn their passing if they were advantageous to us. It is not easy for a person to accept losing Shangri-La. No one will rejoice in getting made legal equals to those they have exploited. The movie could use this to crucify racism and the people who fight to retain its judicial sanctity, but In the Heat of the Night spends too much time toeing the line to do this. It should have made race a facet of the investigation so roadblocks feel more organic instead of creating race-related consequences for the characters.

When it gets it right, it gets it very right. Tibbs is too knowledgeable for a detective, but he is sharp and measured, devoted to his work, and intent on doing it well. However, whether a product of society or his ego, he must be victorious.

Gillespie is a typical indignant white man, bellowing at his irritations and insulted by a black man’s success in America. Despite himself, his professional intentions prove to be in the right place. He is a worker with a sense of morals that are tainted with racism but shaded with objectivity.

Neither man can abandon who they are to accomplish a common goal. They are not brothers in arms once they commit to working together, and their burgeoning respect isn’t a product of a forced environment. Thus, their negotiations and the kinship born from them feel organic. They are opposites in as many ways as they are similar, and their differences prove the only thing that allows them to come together. Gillespie cannot grovel to Tibbs to get him to stay, just as Tibbs cannot break his steely reserve in choosing to stay. Without the former’s directness and the latter’s stubbornness, they cannot come to respect one another.

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It is the truth of all relationships, whether they cross racial or ethnic boundaries, violate some archaic social order, or upend what we expect of people so they can embrace something entirely their own. We cannot be who we are not; the most authentic relationships come not from people molding themselves to fit another but from collaborating to connect. We can love people who change for us, but we rarely respect them.

These are two lawmen, cemented in their ways for different reasons, forced to solve a murder. They cannot love or feel: they must respect and nothing more. In the Heat of the Night overcomes its narrative deficiencies on the strength of that respect. As that respect is difficult to earn, so is the film's pedigree.

Tibbs and Gillespie are the pilots of the movie, and thus it's never a seamless ride. It sets a gritty aesthetic, almost like it is sweating as much as the officers trapped in Mississippi, but then knocks itself down by struggling to find its narrative footing. It hits at some foundational human truths that speak both to how superficial we are and what we need to work on to achieve what we want, but it never dives deep enough to prove it understands what it purports as well as it should.

But In the Heat of the Night succeeds more often than it fails, ultimately leaving a lasting impression. We cannot always quantify the why of our attachments. Sometimes we can only point to specific things and know they make an impact.

In the Heat of the Night doesn’t do what a movie released after all that happened in the years before should have done. It doesn’t do justice to Rosa Parks, Oliver Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Emmet Till. But it does succeed at being an enjoyable, compelling movie. It is gripping drama and productive, if safe, commentary. It is worth visiting and pondering, even if it is never as hot as the summertime South or as dark as its night.

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