In the Heat of the Night (1967) on Netflix
Approved19671h 50mCrimeDramaMysteryThriller
Detective Virgil Tibbs is passing through Sparta, Mississippi when an industrialist is found murdered. Tibbs is arrested, and Chief Bill Gillespie learns his prisoner is a Philadelphia detective.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.9/1092,474 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Sparta, Mississippi, industrialist Phillip Colbert is in town to oversee construction of a factory when his body is found in the street late at night. Officer Sam Wood comes upon Virgil Tibbs at the train station, a Black man carrying a large wallet, and arrests him. Chief Bill Gillespie takes him for the killer, then discovers that his prisoner belongs to the homicide division of the Philadelphia police and had only been in town to see his mother. Tibbs means to leave on the next train, but his superior in Philadelphia asks him to stay and help Gillespie, and the two men set to work on the case. Colbert's widow says she will halt the factory unless Tibbs takes charge of the investigation.
Cast
- Kermit Murdockas Henderson
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cinematographer Haskell Wexler noticed that the standard strong lighting glared off dark complexions and blurred the features, so he relit the picture around Sidney Poitier. It is held to be the first major Hollywood color film lit with proper consideration for a Black actor.
- Poitier made Virgil Tibbs slapping Endicott back a condition of doing the film, demanding a guarantee that the return slap would play in every version of it. "I try not to do things that are against nature," he said. The moment does not appear in John Ball's novel.
- John Ball's novel was set in an invented South Carolina town; the filmmakers renamed it Sparta so they could use the real signs and storefronts of Sparta, Illinois, where they shot. They had no idea a Sparta, Mississippi existed, and it looks nothing like the town in the film.
- At a San Francisco preview Norman Jewison was alarmed to hear a young audience laughing as though at a comedy. Their stunned reaction to the slap convinced him the film worked as drama, and its popularity earned it the nickname Superspade Versus the Rednecks.
- During the first run Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier amused themselves at the Capitol Theatre in New York by judging the racial mix of the house by ear: Black viewers cheered Tibbs's return slap while white viewers whispered "Oh!" in astonishment.
- Tibbs's retort "They call me Mister Tibbs!" outgrew the film. It became the title of the 1970 sequel, was ranked 16th on the American Film Institute's list of great movie quotes, and is even echoed by Pumbaa in The Lion King.
