Hey Y'all!
Happy Sunday! Hope everyone had an amazing week! The Cavalcade is back! Although I may go on hiatus at somepoint again this summer! Other than that, really not much of a spiel at all this week! Let's get right to it! As always links to the MRC Sign-Up Form, Cavalcade Archive, Cavalcade Categories, and MRC website password can be found below! And as always any feedback, recommendations, or any thoughts is always awesome and much appreciated! On to the Cavalcade!
(Song Of The Week: "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush, the TOTEM remix! If you want an epic start to your Sunday, here it is, LOL!)
It's a hot Mississippi summer during the year of 1967 in the town of Sparta. A town which finds itself on the verge of an epochal change. A wealthy industrialist from Chicago named Phil Colbert has come down to Sparta in order to build a new factory. One that will employ 500 people, regardless of their race or color. Upset at no longer being the big name in town is Eric Endicott, who runs an extensive cotton cropping business in-and-around Sparta. Suddenly, while on patrol one evening in the wee hours of the morning, Sparta policeman Sam Wood finds Phil Colbert strewn in a crumpled pile in a dark alley, bludgeoned to death.
This sets up the murder-mystery plot of the critically acclaimed 1967 film In The Heat Of The Night [Link to a wonderful fan-made teaser trailer, that's very entertaining but doesn't give away much of the plot! This film is available to watch for free in great 1080p quality on YouTube! And also available to watch for free in good quality on Tubi!], but it's just the beginning of this slow-burn, terrific pot boiler of a film. Which is all so much made up of cutting lines, sideways inimical stares, and evocative imagery of small-town Southern living during the 1960s. What really sets this film off is the chance arrival of Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) a cultured and refined African-American man from Philadelphia. He was just momentarily stopping at the Sparta rail station in-between trains, on his way back home to Philly after a visit to his mother, but he ends up getting roped into the murder investigation as well, much to his continual displeasure.
You have to imagine that in the late 1960s in America, race-relations could be a real tinderbox. But you also have to imagine, that for many small towns all across America, the kind of high-stakes race-related incidents that the decade of the 1960s is well-known for, like police and National Guard enforced desegregation of schools, freedom riders, boycotts, protests over voting rights, and high-profile and scandalous court cases in regards to violent hate crimes, may have just been something that for a lot of people, was relegated to only what they saw on TV and read in the papers. It probably was the case that for a lot of people and places in the 1960s, race relations stayed very much the same. That change was slow, and systemic racism just kept reinforcing itself in a myriad different ways. People may have known that the civil-rights movement was happening, but it may not have really significantly affected them or the towns they lived in just yet.
This above notion seems to embody the fictional town of Sparta, Mississippi. Where racism is casually accepted, black people have trouble getting rooms in hotels, can still be refused service at dining establishments, and where discriminatory systemic racism and employment practices lead to situations where slavery has been replaced by de-facto drudging wage-slavery, where it is still almost all black faces who are harvesting cotton for the owner of the local plantation. And amidst all this steps in Sydney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs, a living walking and talking embodiment of all the racial change that the folks of Sparta have been hearing about for years now from their television sets. The utter shock of these folks from Sparta, in seeing such a proud black person with such a high regard for himself, is distilled amazingly in this film.
Look, this movie is a classic. When I first started watching it I found it kind of boring, but it hooked me in. To the point where I really was interested in where it was going. And the film certainly delivers. My biggest complaint is that the film could be seen as picking-on small town folk. But it is probably more accurate to say that the film is just dealing with the dregs of society who would be involved in the type of low-down activities which this film investigates. In fact, about 47 minutes into In The Heat Of The Night, the director Norman Jewison finally shows the town of Sparta in broad daylight on a busy mid-afternoon, and you can see that it actually is filed with lots of everyday people, many of whom are likely the opposite of racist and who are completely respectable.
In The Heat Of The Night also contains some terrific cinematography. It's celluloid is super grainy, and the colors reminded me of the technicolor film processes of an older generation of films, but there is a brightness to the film's saturation and to the lighting of the day scenes that really evokes the heat of Mississippi and highlights the evocative and stark imagery from the fantastic camera shots and scene framing which can be found throughout this film.
And In The Heat Of The Night also contains a superbly engaging relationship between two of it's main characters in Poitier's Virgil Tibbs and the Sparta police chief Bill Gillespie (played by Rod Steiger).* They both can't stand each other at the beginning of this film, but while Gillespie might be steeped and brewed in the racist culture he has spent his life being surrounded by, he is also no fool. And while both characters eventually gain a begrudging respect for each other, it's what they learn about each other in the time in-between those two points, which constitutes this film's most surprising, revealing, and interesting moments.
What's great about In The Heat Of The Night is how nuanced it is. It acknowledges that for a lot of places, like Sparta, change won't happen overnight. That change can be a very difficult process. But if you dig down deep into this film, you could think to yourself, even if change is difficult, without any change at all, how could we ever have any chance for catharsis?
Well that's it for this week's Cavalcade! I hope everyone has amazing week! As always any feedback, recommendations, or any thoughts is always awesome and much appreciated! Much more next week and much more after that!
Peace Y'all!
-Nandhish
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*Engaging enough that TV execs tried to recapture the magic of this film through an In The Heat Of The Night television series. A series which lasted for seven seasons and then 4 additional tv movies!