#75 ‘In the Heat of the Night’
Sweat, Southern Guilt, and the Black Man Who Solved Racism (For a Minute)
In the Heat of the Night (1967) is a pressure cooker of a film—racism simmering under the surface, then boiling over every time a Black man refuses to apologize for existing. Directed by Norman Jewison and anchored by Sidney Poitier’s razor-wire dignity, the film wants to be a social thriller. What it often is, though, is a morality play where a Black man proves his worth by performing unpaid labor for a town that wants him dead before breakfast.
Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia homicide detective who just happens to be passing through a fictional Mississippi town when a murder drops into the plot like a body into a well-lit frame. The local sheriff, Gillespie (Rod Steiger, all sweat and spittle), arrests him on sight—because of course he does. Tibbs isn’t just wrongly accused. He’s presumed guilty by default, because his skin is a crime scene.
What follows is part murder mystery, part reluctant buddy cop drama, and part cinematic therapy session for Southern white men who want to be reassured they’re not all that bad. Tibbs, despite being insulted, threatened, slapped, and generally treated like an invasive species, stays to solve the murder. Not because anyone deserves it—but because the script demands he play the better man.
Poitier’s performance is transcendent. He holds every line like it’s loaded. His most famous retort—“They call me Mister Tibbs!”—isn’t just iconic, it’s volcanic. A demand for humanity in a world that still confuses civility with submission. But the film is less interested in his interior world than in how his presence catalyzes Gillespie’s moral awakening.
Ah yes, the sheriff. Gillespie starts as a racist caricature and ends as… a slightly more polite racist caricature. He’s given a redemption arc powered entirely by proximity to Black excellence. His growth comes not from reckoning with his own violence, but from standing next to a man who keeps saving his reputation. The emotional labor is entirely Tibbs’s. Gillespie just has to stop yelling long enough to look thoughtful.
And the women? Don’t worry—you won’t miss them. They’re barely in the film. The murdered man’s widow exists to cry, the local girls exist to be ogled or scorned, and not a single woman has an interior life. It’s a man’s world, and they’re just sweating in it.
The film thinks it’s about justice. What it’s really about is decorum—about asking a Black man to dress, speak, and solve things nicely enough that white people will consider not lynching him before dinner. It’s powerful. It’s important. But it’s also built on the fantasy that racism can be undone with good manners and a solved case file.
4 out of 5 broken thermometers
(One for Poitier’s incandescent restraint. One for the tension that doesn’t let up. One for the slap heard round the world. One for daring to name the rot without flinching. The missing star? With Tibbs—because he leaves town alone, dignity intact, but still burdened with the weight of making a hostile world feel just a little less guilty.)
