Product Description

Starring Academy AwardÂ(r) winners* Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger and Lee Grant, this provocative mystery thriller won** five 1967 OscarsÂ(r), including Best Picture. Highlighted by an evocative score from OscarÂ(r)-winning*** composer Quincy Jones, In The Heat Of The Night is a "powerful film" (The New York Times) that delivers the "highest level of exciting entertainment" (New York Daily News)! While traveling in the Deep South, Virgil Tibbs, a black Philadelphia homicide detective, becomes unwittingly embroiled in the murder investigationof a prominent businessman when he is first accused of the crimeand then asked to solve it! Finding the killer proves to be difficult, however, especially when his efforts are constantly thwarted by the bigoted town sheriff (Steiger). But neither man can solve this case alone. Putting aside their differences and prejudices, they join forces in a desperate race against time to discover the shocking truth. *Poitier: Actor, Lilies of the Field (1963); Steiger: Actor, In the Heat of the Night (1967); Grant: Supporting Actress, Shampoo (1975) **Actor (Steiger), Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Sound ***1994: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23148 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-01-09
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: French
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 109 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Both riveting murder mystery and classic fish-out-of-water yarn, Norman Jewison's Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night represents Hollywood at its wiliest, cloaking exposé in the most entertaining trappings. Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger prove the decade's most formidable antagonists. Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, an arrogant homicide detective waylaid in Sparta, Mississippi; Steiger, in his bravura Oscar-winning turn, is Bill Gillespie, the town's hardheaded, bigoted sheriff who first arrests Tibbs for murder and then begs for his expertise. As the clues and suspects mount, Gillespie and his deputies develop begrudging respect for the black officer. The first-rate supporting cast includes Lee Grant as the victim's angry widow, Warren Oates as a voyeuristic deputy, William Schallert as the pragmatic mayor, and, in his screen debut, Scott Wilson (In Cold Blood) as an unlucky fugitive. The brilliant widescreen cinematography is by Haskell Wexler, and the scat-music score is by Quincy Jones. Ray Charles wails the blues theme song. --Glenn Lovell

Customer Reviews

Two Great Actors in a Great Movie
Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger almost set the screen afire in this film that deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1967. Superbly directed by Norman Jewison, the movie brings us into deepest Mississippi one summer midnight, when a northern industrialist with plans to build a new factory is found murdered in the middle of Sparta's main street. At the same time, Virgil Tibbs, a black detective from Los Angeles, is waiting at the station for the train that will take him back home from visiting his mother. This being Mississippi, and a black man out after dark, it must have been the black man who committed the murder, right? Tibbs is hauled into the sheriff's office and brought face to face with Bill Gillespie, the epitome of every redneck law officer south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Gillespie's reaction to Tibbs is first contempt (this is a black man after all), suspicion at his full wallet ("Boy, that's more in a week than I make in a month, now where did you earn that?"), and finally shock, when Tibbs hurls the response into his face, "I'm a police officer." Gillespie is further stunned to realize that Tibbs' contempt for him is at least as great as his for Tibbs, when he hears Tibbs telling his superiors over the phone "They got a murder on their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Tibbs' boss volunteers Tibbs's services as a homicide expert to Gillespie, who doesn't particularly want to accept, but he doesn't have much of a choice; the industrialist's widow says if her husband's murder isn't solved and fast, there won't be any factory anywhere. The resulting reluctant partnership between the two men is a pairing unlike any seen on screen; they resent each other but they can't solve the crime without each other; Gillespie needs Tibbs' expertise, and Tibbs needs Gillespie's protection from the local rednecks who want him dead. The movie wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of a small town in the deep south, the abject poverty in which most of the blacks in the area lived, and the attitudes of the whites in town that made it dangerous for any black man to stand tall as a man. At the movie's end, Gillespie hasn't changed his views about blacks, but he has come to respect Tibbs as a lawman and as a human being; and Tibbs comes to realize that inside of Gillespie's hardshell racist attitudes is a decent man struggling to show himself. The acting, the directing, and above all, Quincy Jones's magnificent score, made this one of the best movies of the 1960's and for years beyond.

Cast, storytelling turns on Heat
"In the Heat of the Night" excels not only because of the story but also because of a composite cast that works so well. The acting is sometimes over the top (as the director admits during the DVD commentary), but such shenanigans fit in this type of film. Multiple viewings help in the understanding of how detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) unravels the mystery of who killed the rich Northerner in a Southern town. Though somewhat dated because of the racist subject, it still holds together as a who-done-it and deserved better recognition from the American Film Institute when that group named its 100 best films of the century. Among that Top 100 was another 1967 Poitier film, "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," which does not hold up well today. And for the record, Poitier was likely overlooked by the Academy Awards here because he starred in three box office bonanzas in '67, the third being "To Sir With Love." Instead, the Oscar went to 'Heat of the Night' co-star Rod Steiger. As for the DVD, there are some visible scratches in the film, and there is only a commentary track with no other extras. A "making of" documentary would have been nice, but the four-person commentary (director Norman Jewison, cinematographer Haskell Wexler and actors Lee Grant and Steiger) serves well. This one is worth owning for the low price attached, although the video transfer and packaging could have been handled with more repect. It deserves it.

THEY CALL ME MR TIBBS!
I lost track of how many times I've watched this movie over the years and yet, I still find it stimulating to my system. Taking place in the redneck driven byways in the Mississippi of the 1960's, not only does it make a sweeping social statement on racial bias and ignorance, but it's also one entertaining vision of cinema. Sidney Poitier is masterful as Virgil Tibbs, a "colored" homicide detective from Philadelphia, in the wrong place at the right time as a sleepy little river town comes to grips with the death of a big business man who was to be the holy grail of local commerce until his untimely death. It is Rod Steiger, however who burns brightest as a midlife police chief with no family and a metric ton of issues which he vents through misplaced anger and cools at night in a bottle of bourbon as he attempts to bring the murder case to resolution as quickly as possible, regardless of the truth."No pity. No thank YOU!" One of my all time favorites.