Winner of the Best Picture for 1967, In the Heat of the Night is the story of two men: a racist small-town police chief and an African-American police detective from Philadelphia with the misfortune to be stopped in Sparta, Mississippi, on the night a murder is committed. After being hauled to the police station and having his identity revealed, the detective reluctantly agrees to help the chief in the investigation. He is, after all, a homicide expert back in Pennsylvania--quite convenient for the movie's plot, isn't it? As the movie unfolds, the two men have to learn to work together despite their dislike for and mistrust of one another.
Rod Steiger won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Chief Gillespie, but I don't really see that he's doing anything particularly noteworthy in this performance. Any number of actors could have played this part just as well. His most distinguishing characteristic, in fact, seems to be his ability always to have gum to chew. He exercises his jaw muscles quite vigorously throughout this film. I suppose he does come to appreciate the talents of his fellow policeman by the end of the movie, but I suspect that as complicated as his reaction to a successful black detective might be, it would be overly simplistic to assume that he is no longer a racist after his encounter with this one man. The fact that he saves the detective from being attacked or that he forces some of the whites in town to cooperate with a black man in this investigation is less a sign of a growing sense of enlightenment on his part than a desperate need to solve the case so that he can go back to running the police department (and the town) in his own way.
Sidney Poitier is, of course, the detective from the North who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not a very showy part for Poitier overall; he really just has to be methodical in his investigation of the murder, demonstrating to the white police force and the racist townspeople that he is indeed smarter than they are. Given how quickly the chief jumps to conclusions each time he arrests another suspect in the case, it's not that difficult for Poitier's Virgil Tibbs to outshine Gillespie and the other officers. And, naturally, he must continue to elude the attempts by the racist townsfolk to harm him, no small feat given how outnumbered he is.
Poitier really only gets two spectacular moments in the movie, and both have been thoroughly analyzed over the years. When the chief asks, using racist language, what Virgil is called up North, Poitier replies, "They call me Mr. Tibbs." There is a fury in that line that no doubt inspired many people back when the film was released; it's still a great comeback on his part. The other moment, in my opinion, is even better, though. After the richest man in town, the orchid-growing Endicott, slaps Tibbs for implying that he was involved in the murder, Poitier slaps him right back, stunning Endicott and the police chief and a servant. That must have been a revelatory moment in 1967, akin to the appearance of Shaft just a few years later. Black characters just didn't do those kinds of things in the movies then, at least not without some retaliation, which is just what Endicott tells Tibbs after being slapped (although not in the context of it happening in a movie, of course).
The supporting cast includes the fantastic Lee Grant as the wife of the slain man. It's her insistence that keeps Tibbs on the case; she threatens to take away her husband's money that has been promised to bring new industry to the town. Warren Oates is also good as one of the police officers. He actually is key to several plot points: he finds the dead man's body, he arrests Tibbs, he is linked to a young girl who likes to walk around her house naked (and who later is relevant to the movie's outcome), he even gets accused of the murder himself at one point--all moments that allow Oates to showcase his talents for underplaying.
In his book Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris asserts that the selection of In the Heat of the Night was a middle-of-the-road option for the Academy that year. On the one hand, there were nominees like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde that were forging a new type of Hollywood film, and on the other side, there were nominees like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (which also features a performance by Poitier) and Doctor Doolittle that represented a more old-fashioned Hollywood ethos. I'm inclined to accept Harris' premise because In the Heat of the Night does represent an opportunity for its filmmakers to show the intelligence and calm thoughtfulness of a character like Virgil Tibbs, and that was particularly rare in the 1960s. Poitier's Tibbs is really the focus of the film, and the fact that he comes across as more adept at police work than a man who thinks he is Tibbs' superior is all the more admirable.
Certainly, the deck is rather stacked in the portrayal of the whites in this small town. (Isn't that always the case in movies that deal with race relations in the South?) All of the whites are insufferably racist, except (of course) for the white woman from the North whose husband has been murdered. A gang of whites tries to attack and kill Tibbs for no apparent reason other than his skin color. He's refused service at the diner where Oates' Officer Wood likes to stop for a Coke and a slice of pie. Even when he tries to inspect the body of the dead man, he gets no assistance from the funeral director, who just seems puzzled by the arrival of this black man with the police chief. He has to share a cell for a time with a man who, at least initially, spouts racist comments. To be morally and intellectually superior to people such as this is no great challenge, it seems to me. That Tibbs manages to maintain an air of dignity in the company of such people is a testament to Poitier's talents as an actor more than to the script and its use of what were tired stereotypes even then.
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