It's a town populated almost exclusively with drooling future Trumpanzees......the kind of racist yahoos who, 50 years later or so, will slap on their red caps and drive 100 miles or more to attend one of Grand Wizard Trump's 'Keep America White' rallies.......
A lot of mixed feeling, revisiting this movie again.........
What's ultimately depressing.......that 52 years later, in the horrors of TrumpAmerica, things have hardly changed.......
In a random search for a murder suspect, dumb-as-a-rock cop Sam Wood (Warren Oates) wastes no time in profiling Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) a Philadelphia Homicide detective waiting for a train. It's a scene that's still repeated a thousand times today........and in Poitier's precision acting, you wince as you watch a black man go into a necessary survival protocol when encountering a white cop.......
And in the film's most vividly remembered scene, there's a preview of coming attractions......when Virgil Tibbs is slapped by the town's condescending patriarch Endicott (Larry Gates), he swiftly returns the slap - a first in American cinema. You can think of that indelible shocking moment as the first stepping stone for filmmakers........their license to begin showing racial strife in blunt, increasingly brutal terms.......
(Only 3 years later, in l970, director William Wyler's "The Liberation Of L.B.Jones" will conclude with a black man tossing a redneck into a threshing machine......)
I suppose if "In The Heat Of The Night" was re-made today, you wouldn't see the rampant racism of the original film, with almost the entire white cast insulting, intimidating and physically threatening Sidney Poitier.......
What you might see instead......the entire town calling 911 to report Poitier for walking down the street, stopping to read a street sign, or asking to use the Starbucks bathroom........(all of these callers emboldened to crawl out of the woodwork after the 2016 Presidential election...)
As I said.....seems like things have hardly changed, except for the worst, in that the leader of the Free World enjoys telling brown folks to go back where they came from......
For "In The Heat Of The Night", still a 4 star (****) movie.
For the ways thing are today......zero.
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