New from Criterion: In the Heat of the Night and Killer of Sheep

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night. (Criterion Collection.)

Mark Harris’s wonderful book Pictures at a Revolution ingeniously uses the five 1967 films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar to chronicle the shift from the old to the new Hollywood. They covered the spectrum at the moment when a new sensibility – countercultural, free-spirited, ironic about the filmmaking shibboleths – had begun to slip in and captivate young audiences for whom the new retreads of old-fashioned movies held no appeal. Within a couple of years the studios, exasperated and baffled by filmgoers’ lack of interest in the latest expansively budgeted musicals and adventure spectacles and their preference for off-the-beaten-path items like Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, had turned the asylum over to the inmates: hipster writers and directors who shared a view of the world with their audiences. But in 1967 both Hollywoods were represented in the nominations. At one end were the leaden Doctor Dolittle, occupying the spot unofficially reserved for a lavish musical that was assumed to reflect big-studio production values (some years there were two) and the social problem drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which offered embarrassing evidence that the old ways had stopped working. At the other end were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, which the youth of America had turned into enormous hits. Bonnie and Clyde was the movie of the year, but in 1967 there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it would walk away with the statuette. However, it was already too late for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with its simple-minded civics-class approach to the topic of race. The film that won the award was Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, adapted by Stirling Silliphant from a John Ball novel about a northern Black homicide detective (Sidney Poitier) who finds himself between trains in a small Mississippi town during a murder investigation and is hauled in reflexively for questioning by the local white cops. Released after producing his badge and calling his chief in Philadelphia, he winds up helping the sheriff (Rod Steiger) solve the crime.

In the Heat of the Night is a policier with the look and feel of a film noir; the cinematographer Haskell Wexler gives it a gorgeous shadowy glimmer that is as rich in the Criterion double-disc release (Blu-ray and 4K UHD) as it was on screens nearly sixty years ago. It’s also, of course, a social problem movie, but though there’s melodrama in its DNA the filmmakers are clever enough to counter it with racial comedy that centers on the relationship between Gillespie and Tibbs. We recognize all the clichés of pictures about small Southern towns: the use of bloodhounds to chase down fleeing suspects (Steiger’s Bill Gillespie manages to charge two more innocent men before Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs locates the real killer); the local white thugs who go after the educated Black Yankee to teach him a lesson; the slutty white girl who gets a kick out of turning on young men who ogle her from their cars. Not to mention the visual ones: the run-down precinct with its ramshackle AC and the fly-bitten all-night diner. But the picture keeps kidding these tropes and even turns some of them on their heads.

And its treatment of the two protagonists undercuts our expectations. It’s easy to see that Tibbs, whose chief informs Gillespie that he’s their in-house homicide expert, is the more skillful and imaginative problem solver, but throughout the film his pride keeps imperiling him; Gillespie has to track his movements so he keep him from getting himself killed. Moreover, Tibbs’s arrogance and his banked anger about the way Black people are still being treated in the South sometimes work together to blunt his detective instincts: the suspect he’s determined to bring to account, a wealthy cracker named Endicott (Larry Gates) whose attitudes disgust him, isn’t the right man either. The worst – that is, most melodramatic – scene in the picture is the one where Endicott, realizing that Virgil is treating him as a suspect, cracks him across the face and Virgil returns the blow. What redeems it is that Gillespie’s instinct is to ignore Endicott’s rage and act confidently on the side of fairness, not racial bias. Just as Tibbs isn’t a beacon of purity, Gillespie isn’t an unregenerate racist.

The two stars work together beautifully. It’s a joy to watch Poitier employ his elegance and wit to underscore the movie’s point of view; his charisma and his technique are interwoven so tightly that they’re practically indistinguishable, and among the three films he made in 1967 this is the only one that’s worthy of him. (The others are To Sir, with Love, a rigged YA narrative about disadvantaged English high schoolers magically transformed by a novice teacher, and the preposterous Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.) But it’s Steiger’s movie, and he won the Academy Award for his performance. Poitier’s style is gilt-edged; Steiger’s is looser and juicier. And he gets the best moment in the picture, when he gives Tibbs – and us – a glimpse of his lonely life before shutting down to avoid the northerner’s pity. The suggestion that both men are loners married to their jobs isn’t followed up but it resonates through the rest of the movie. Poitier was the first Black movie star and three years after his passing he continues to be an icon, but Steiger has been gone for more than two decades and contemporary audiences don’t know him. It’s inspiriting to rewatch In the Heat of the Night to recall that he was one of the great American actors of the fifties and sixties (On the Waterfront, The Big Knife, Across the Bridge, The Pawnbroker, Doctor Zhivago, not to mention the 1953 TV version of Marty).

Norman Jewison had graduated from directing TV to making features just five years earlier, after the commercial success of his comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. He took a huge step forward with In the Heat of the Night, which is superbly put together; except for Fiddler on the Roof in 1971, I don’t think he ever made a better picture. It builds on a talent for turning his personal convictions about race into first-rate entertainment that he’d illustrated in 1960 when he filmed a marvelous Harry Belafonte variety special, Tonight with Belafonte, that, viewed now, seems stunningly ahead of its time. (You can look at it on YouTube.) He gets help from the Quincy Jones score – Ray Charles sings the title song – and a fine supporting cast that includes Warren Oates as Gillespie’s deputy, Lee Grant as the murder victim’s widow, Beah Richards as an abortionist and Scott Wilson (the same year he burned through the screen in In Cold Blood) as a thief who’s dumb enough to run off with the dead man’s wallet.

When you look at the five 1967 Best Picture nominees, it’s easy to pick out which ones belong to the old Hollywood and which ones to the new and to see Mark Harris’s point in Pictures at a Revolution that the winner occupies the middle ground. It’s best, though, not to be too smug about where the true excellence lies. Bonnie and Clyde, sure, without question. But In the Heat of the Night has it all over The Graduate, and I think it’s way hipper too.

Henry Gayle Sanders and Kaycee Moore in Killer of Sheep. (Criterion Collection.)

In Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett invented a radically alternative version of realism that focused on African American life in South Central Los Angeles and bore the imprint of the great American portrait photographers of the early decades of the twentieth century, most famously Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. It’s almost shockingly intimate yet poetic and offbeat; even the framing is continually surprising. (Killer of Sheep was Burnett’s Master’s thesis film for the UCLA film program.) His compositional sense is astonishing and his voice is as unusual as, say, that of Carroll Ballard, who was honing his own style and sensibility around the same time at the same institution. Ballard was also experimental, but he wound up in Hollywood, where he tethered his visual imagination to a coming-of-age narrative about a boy and a horse adapted from a popular children’s book, Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, a masterpiece that became a blockbuster. Killer of Sheep has achieved legendary status among critics but in style and subject matter it resides so rigorously outside the mainstream that even now, half a century after its completion, few people have seen it, and Burnett hasn’t made many subsequent pictures. The two he prepared for general release, To Sleep with Anger (1990), a family drama starring Danny Glover, and The Glass Shield (1994), about racism in the LAPD, were disappointments – the first, which attempts to find a distinctive African American cinematic narrative form inspired by fable, is mostly baffling, and the conventional storyline of the second was such a terrible fit for Burnett’s gifts that you couldn’t even make sense of the plot. (Ironically, for completely different reasons, Ballard had a short career following The Black Stallion: only five films in twenty-five years, though three are splendid and a fourth contains some spellbinding sequences.)

A beautiful restoration of Killer of Sheep is available on the new Criterion Blu-ray, along with a couple of Burnett’s earlier student films. It’s stunning. Burnett has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray as influences, and you can see it – especially with Ray – but what begins in the realm of those two masters of cinematic realism turns into something very different when it moves through Burnett’s vision. He is sui generis. The movie’s plot is spare – it’s no more developed than that of a Beckett play – but it definitely has a subject and its setting is as lyrically observed and as potently explored as the life of the village in Ray’s Pather Panchali. It’s about Stan (played by a wonderful actor named Henry Gayle Sanders), who lives with his wife (Kaycee Moore) and their two children (Jack Drummond and Burnett’s daughter Angela) in a house in constant need of repair, works in a slaughterhouse and worries about money, though he resists being categorized as poor. (He protests that anyone who gives unwanted items to the Salvation Army can’t be called poor.) Stan hates his demoralizing job, but his only other offer is from a local liquor store, and he’s wary of putting himself in danger from armed thieves; also, the brassy female proprietor seems clearly to have designs on him. He gets another kind of offer from neighbors who want to make him an accomplice in illegal activity that involves violence, but that’s not who he is.

The rambling structure of the movie is dictated by a series of small defeats that interrupt the progress of the characters. With some difficulty and the limited assistance of his young son, Stan hauls a broken motor into the back of a truck but as soon as he hits the road the motor tumbles out onto the road and Stan gives up and drives away. Three kids crowd onto a bicycle but their combined weight makes it impossible for them to steer it competently; then a pair of barking dogs get in their way and they wind up crashing. The bike, too, ends up abandoned. Stan and his wife and some friends set out on a Saturday outing to the racetrack but one of the tires goes flat. In a different sort of movie – say, a screwed-up heist story like the classic Italian film Big Deal on Madonna Street – these obstacles would be comic, but here they operate like the singular punishments of a sadistic fate that prevent these people from moving forward. The mood of Killer of Sheep is mournful. Stan is so stressed that he can’t sleep at night; the movie’s title references his dreadful job and the images of the trapped sheep comment on the way he thinks about his life in his worst moments, but I think it’s also a tossed-off allusion to the insomniac’s habit of counting sheep. He’s still capable of accepting the tenderness of his little girl, but when his wife tries to get him into bed to make love to her, he turns her down. There’s a heartbreaking scene where they dance to the magnificent Dinah Washington recording of “This Bitter Earth.” Barechested, he holds her close, but he’s so distracted and alienated that he can’t return her gaze, even while she’s moving her hands tenderly and passionately on his naked back. She wants to keep moving with him after the music disappears, but he walks away; she turns to the window, grabbing the frame in desperation, and then sits on the sill, folded in on herself. Kaycee Moore has a gorgeous face for the camera, slender and sculpted, and it’s especially expressive in this interlude.

This pas de deux reminded me of a scene from Clifford Odets’s 1935 play Waiting for Lefty where two working-class lovers, having agreed reluctantly that they have to break up because they can’t afford to marry, engage in a farewell slow dance. Killer of Sheep is set in the period when it was made, but it feels like we’re in the Depression, partly because of Burnett’s photographic influences. The soundtrack is marvelous – not just Dinah Washington (we also hear her rendition of “Unforgettable,” which is sadder than the famous Nat King Cole version) but also Paul Robeson (excerpts from “The House I Live In,” the lullaby “My Curly Headed Baby” and “Goin’ Home,” taken from the second movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony), Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Little Walter, Elmore Jones, Earth, Wind and Fire and others. Sometimes Burnett uses the songs ironically, but that works both ways. The finish to “This Bitter Earth,” where the singer suggests that love has the power to transform that bitterness, seems to ring hollow; it’s as if neither Stan nor his wife registers that ultimate lyric. Yet the movie breaks open at the end to admit a few welcome rays of hope and allow us some admiration for the resilience of the characters. Its eighty minutes have a wider emotional palette than we might guess; they’re bursting with life.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies