Beah Richards – Movie Musings

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger confront racism In the Heat of the Night

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Sidney Poitier (Virgil Tibbs), Rod Steiger (Chief Bill Gillespie), Warren Oates (Sam Wood), Lee Grant (Mrs Colbert), Larry Gates (Endicott), James Patterson (Purdy), William Schallert (Mayor Schubert), Beah Richards (Mama Caleba), Peter Whitney (Courtney)

A slim, tight thriller with a social message, In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture in 1967, beating out Bonnie and Cyde and The Graduate (both films with a revolutionary impact on films making) as well as another Sidney Poitier starrer, the even-more message heavy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. An unflashy, cleanly made, efficient film, In the Heat of the Night is in some ways a surprising winner – but the shocking depiction of racism in the Deep South at the time still hits home today.

In Sparta, Mississippi a wealthy industrialist from Chicago is found murdered in the street. Who committed the crime? Well surely it’s the well-dressed black man with a wallet full of money waiting to get out of town at the train station. The man is hauled in – only for him to reveal he is an expert homicide detective from Philadelphia named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). Tibbs is sucked in to assist local police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) to investigate the crime, partly on the order of his boss, partly due to his disgust at the police department’s racism and incompetence, and partly at the pleading of the victim’s widow (Lee Grant) who recognises him as the best officer for the case. But will Tibbs’ expertise crack the case in a town where the idea of a black man in a suit, asking questions and taking no shit, is a still a surefire recipe for a lynching?

Nominally In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery, but you’ll be hard pushed to remember much about the case after you finish the film. The eventual killer emerges from left field and the steps of the investigation are often unclear. While the film is trim, it does mean the tension around the killer’s identity never really builds up and we never get a real sense of the personality of the suspects (apart from the uniform racism).

Where its real strength is, is in the mis-matched “buddy” movie structure of two men forced to work together, the difference being that both casual and violent racism underpins every interaction Tibbs has in the town. Poitier was seen as a calm and graceful figure, but In the Heat of the Night finally gave him the chance to mix dignity with resentment and anger that had never been seen in a black character on screen before. The film works due to Poitier’s inherent toughness, his lack of compromise and anger at injustice. Poitier was never more hard-edged, defiant and determined to get what he deserves. Unlike Poitier’s other racial buddy movie The Defiant Ones, you can’t imagine Tibbs jumping off the train to freedom to try and save Tony Curtis.

Tibbs isn’t just the smartest, toughest policeman on the screen – he demands to be treated like it. The film’s most famous scene – and shocking at the time – is during Tibbs’ questioning of genteel racist Endicott in his orchid greenhouse. Endicott – whose home resembles nothing more than a plantation, loaded with black workers – is well spoken but inherently racist, and slaps Tibbs when his questions go on too long – only to immediately receive a backhand from Tibbs in return. Endicott is as shocked as audiences were – the idea of a black man striking back was on unheard of.

It’s terrifying and sickening to realise however that the American South at the time was genuinely like this. The slap is a proud moment – but it marks Tibbs for retribution. There is a genuine danger Tibbs will get lynched in this film (twice he narrowly escapes murder at the hands of a gang of furious rednecks). In real life, Poitier was very hesitant to film in the South, and for the brief location shooting in Tennessee slept with a gun under his pillow. The film is littered with casually dropped racial slurs, the politest of which is “boy”. It leads to the famous line from Tibbs that back home “they call me Mister Tibbs” – but you forget that it follows from Gillespie asking him what an n-word copper is called in Philadelphia. And even after that Gillespie only calls him Virgil, as if still not quite able to compute the idea of a black man who can be a “mister”.

The relationship between Tibbs and Gillespie is the heart of the film. And the film is brave to not have this turn into “they were opponents but then they became the best of friends”. Instead there is a sort of grudging respect that grows, even though Tibbs clearly thinks Gillespie is an impulsive racist and Gillespie thinks Tibbs is a stiff-backed but brilliant n-word. Rod Steiger won the Oscar for Best Actor, and he does some fine work as the complex Gillespie. Keeping his explosive energy in check (despite the inevitable outbursts), Steiger sketches out a character who is smart enough to know he isn’t smart enough, who can respect Tibbs’ professionalism and understand on some level that racism is beyond all sense but still drop racial words with an instinctive ease.

Steiger’s Gillespie is a tough-talking, stereotypical cop but he’s also got a sad little hinterland – a late dinner at his home with Tibbs has him confess that Tibbs is his only guest for years – and while he arrests no fewer than three innocent people for the crime, there is no doubting his dedication to justice. Steiger doesn’t apologise for Gillespie’s appalling attitudes, but also does enough to suggest that his racism is learned rather than innate. While never completely sympathetic, especially today, the film lays hints of hope that a racist cop from the South could work side-by-side with a black officer – and that was considerable progress at the time.

But it’s Poitier’s movie, and while in many ways he has the simpler part (and Poitier generously ceded his admiration for Steiger’s skill and craft pushing him to a level he felt he not reached before), Tibbs is the centre of the film. Jewison skilfully shoots Poitier as always the outsider, from his looks and Sherlock Holmes style skills, to the way the camera focuses on his hands touching things – from dead bodies to door knobs – to the visible discomfort of the white men watching him. Tibbs may be arrogant but he’s right and Poitier’s refusal to compromise or offer any concessions is a striking thing – Tibbs is who he is and he won’t change a thing to be accepted by the white man. At the end, he may respect the steps Gillespie has taken – but I doubt he’d consider the man a friend and certainly not a professional equal.

In the Heat of the Night is still shocking for the openly displayed racism and menace of violence that black people faced in the Deep South in sixties America. Jewison’s film is efficiently assembled and tightly edited – not a single minute is wasted in one of the shortest Best Picture winners ever – and while its mystery is little to write home about, its portrait of racism in America is still shocking and stirring and its two lead performances are things to linger in the memory.

Hepburn, Tracy, Poitier and one awkward meal: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Director: Stanley Kramer

Cast: Spencer Tracy (Matt Drayton), Sidney Poitier (John Prentice), Katharine Heburn (Christina Drayton), Katharine Houghton (Joey Drayton), Cecil Kellaway (Monsignor Mike Ryan), Beah Richards (Mrs Prentice), Roy E Glenn (Mr Prentice), Isabel Sanford (Tillie)

Stanley Kramer’s films today are quite easy to knock. In fact, to be honest, they were pretty easy to bash back then. Kramer was a man with immense social conscience, and his films carry the same liberal agenda. They were about “Big Themes” and they had a “Message” that they very much wanted the viewer to take home with them. You can see why so many of them were littered with Oscar nominations. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is perhaps the most famous of his liberal films, and while we’d love to think the theme it covers today – interracial marriage – isn’t still an issue, I think many people would say it still was.

Joey Drayton (Katharine Houghton) returns to the home of her liberal parents – Matt (Spencer Tracy) a newspaper editor and Christina (Katharine Hepburn) an art gallery owner – with Dr John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) whom she announces as her new fiancé, after a whirlwind romance in Hawaii over the past two weeks. Her parents, Matt in particular, are hit for six – and their doubts are shared by John’s parents (Beah Richards and Roy E Glenn). Can the older generation overcome their concerns to celebrate the happiness of the younger?

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a sensitive, very carefully handled film, whose liberal earnestness practically drips off the film. It’s so hand-wringingly liberal in its outlook it’s almost impossible not to mock it a little bit. Not least because John is so ridiculously overqualified – a professor of medicine, one of the world’s leading experts on tropical diseases, a nominee for the Nobel Prize – that you can’t help but wonder what he sees in her not vice versa.

This over-qualification was, by the way, an intentional move by Kramer, who was keen that the onlypossible objections to John could be the haste of the engagement and the colour of his skin. It’s the latter point that becomes the main discussion point, with some hand-wringing concerns around the attitudes of the wider world, and Matt Drayton in particular being moved to question whether he can practise the liberal agenda he preaches. It’s no real surprise to say that eventually all the characters sit down to the eponymous dinner in blissful harmony, but the film is delivering a positive message here.

You could say that it would have been more daring to make John, at the very least, a middle ranking accountant or something at least. But, let’s be honest, at the time this film was made interracial marriages were literally illegal in 17 US states (as the film name checks). Saying that though, the possibility that a BAME male may feel uncomfortably out of place in liberal White America has hardly gone away. It’s one of the reasons why I think the film still works and carries a message today – because if we want to think that these problems have gone away completely today, we are kidding ourselves.

Therefore, however right-on the film may be, it’s still relevant today and it’s still got something to teach us. The world we live in now may well have pushed some of the views and issues expressed in this film underground – we certainly don’t (I hope!) bandy around the word “Negro” as often this film does – but they are still there. So Kramer’s hopeful message of reconciliation and overcoming knee-jerk prejudice is still one that packs a punch. It’s that message that brought such an amazing cast on board, not least Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as the Drayton parents. Tracy was extremely ill at the time of the film’s production – he died 17 days after filming completed. Tracy was so fragile – as can be clearly seen at several points – that he could only film for three hours in the morning, and only on intermittent days. The film was only made with him because Kramer, Hepburn and Tracy agreed to take no up-front fee, as Tracy could not be insured to finish the film. Hepburn in particular – Tracy’s partner for over 20 years – nursed him through the film, helping with his lines and carefully watching to make sure he was not overcommitted. Not a single shot of Tracy was taken on location due to his ill-health, and a number of scenes were cleverly shot to avoid Tracy having to be on set as often as possible.

Despite all this, Tracy is magnificent. His underlying warmth and humanity work so well for the part that you constantly warm to him, even while you are as frustrated as many of the other characters with his lukewarm reaction (bordering on hostility) to the wedding. You totally feel empathy for his situation, while at the same time wanting to give him a slap in the face. And man Tracy knows how to react – he is marvellous in a scene with Richards, where all he does is stand, half turned away from the camera and listen. But in this scene you see Drayton think and reassess everything he has considered in the last 24 hours.

But the whole film is building towards the final 10 minutes, which is nearly a complete Tracy monologue – and this is extremely emotional, not least as we are watching a great actor, aware he is dying, knowing that this is his last acting moment, talking emotionally of his love for his fictional wife, while his real life partner of 26 years sits tearfully in shot. It’s that extra level that really creates the emotional force.

Very good as Hepburn in, it’s clear in many scenes that her mind is more on Tracy than her performance – but she still has many wonderful moments, with similar emotional force. She also has one of the film’s funniest moments, where she imperiously dismisses a gallery colleague for barely hiding her racist disgust. Hepburn won the Oscar but stated she had never watched the film, finding the memory of making it far too raw.

The rest of the cast are also good – you can tell their commitment to the film – with Poitier conveying both human decency and firmness of character. Kellaway is very good as the only person in the film who expresses open-minded joy at the union. Richards has a wonderful emotional speech about the value of love, while Glenn conveys all the awkward frustration of a father who cannot understand his son.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a very worthy film – and boy it knows it – but it’s got a sort of innocent idealistic purity about it. Its makers clearly believed that they were making a film that would contribute towards changing attitudes in society. And for all its heavy-handed liberalism, you can say it did to a certain extent – but not as much as it would like to. For that reason, there is a sort of additional poignancy to watching it, knowing that an issue the film makers clearly hoped would be gone for good in 30 years would in fact still be with us 50 years on. So for all its flaws, you can’t help but respect and even feel affection for it.