HYBRID PROGRAM: IN-PERSON AND STREAMING ONLINE

In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967, 110min.)

Linda DeLibero, senior lecturer and special advocate for alumni and outreach, and former director of the JHU film and media studies program

1967 was a watershed year for Sidney Poitier, during which he became Hollywood’s top box office draw and starred, astonishingly, in three of the most influential films the industry ever produced—To Sir With Love, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night. Of the three, the last is arguably the best, and features Poitier’s most iconic character: Detective Virgil Tibbs (“They call me Mister Tibbs!”). Spawning generations of interracial cop-buddy movies, the film was, unlike most of its successors, a serious exploration of racial prejudice, perhaps the most head-on treatment of the subject the actor had ever starred in. When Poitier’s homicide detective arrives in a sleepy Mississippi town from Philadelphia to visit his mother, he encounters a South still very much in the grip of Jim Crow, where “uppity Negroes” like himself are likely to be arrested—or worse—simply for being Black (sound familiar?). Tibbs’s competence and supreme sense of self are a powerful rebuke to the racism around him, and ultimately, even the racist police chief with whom he works the case (Rod Steiger, in an Academy-Award winning role) must pay him grudging respect. Wildly popular and critically acclaimed in its day (it won five Oscars), the film maintains much of its potency. The actors portray the relationship between these two unlikely partners with a delicacy and nuance that has held up well over time, and the famous scene where Tibbs delivers that “slap heard ‘round the world” still carries a galvanizing force.

ASG’s 2023 Film Series is in collaboration with the Renaissance Institute at Notre Dame of Maryland University

$10 fee for guests (No charge for ASG members, ASG subscribers and RI members)