In the Heat of the Night: The Double Bind

Which makes for a far more taxing, tangled-up drama of racial reconciliation than I’d tended to remember. Beyond its implications for Sparta’s black public, who were promised jobs that are now up in the air, does the murder of Colbert, the northern industrialist who’d been building a factory in Sparta, even matter, really? It’s not the most pressing source of suspense here—that is the question of whether Tibbs will survive this trip unscathed, given all the varieties of hostility he will encounter. 

Virgil, his body and demeanor as trim and proper as the fine creases in his suit, is slicker than your average—cooler than Poitier had gotten to play before, with the notable exception of his white-T-shirt bad boy in Blackboard Jungle (1955). Thus what appears, on its surface, to be a mere tale of black-and-white brotherhood is, from the outset, something more original, because Poitier gets to be more original. The black-professional part isn’t new—he’d been playing those since the doctor in No Way Out (1950). What was new was this veneer of northern cool. What could be a story not too distant from, say, Poitier’s own escaped-convict trifle The Defiant Ones (1958, costarring Tony Curtis) gestures toward something far more modern and immediate. 

Namely: actual racial intimacy. And the upsetting of old codes that Virgil, by virtue of his position as a detective, gets to do. Consider the scene in which, conducting his own examination of Colbert’s body after a botched attempt by the local coroner, he takes the corpse’s pale white hands into his own. The images are discomfiting; Wexler, a master of texture, closes in on those hands, black and white, filling the screen with their jagged contrast, Virgil’s hands moving in all their living, breathing freedom. That’s the operative concept here: freedom. Something the black man has that the white man, dead, does not—a distinction the other white men in the room, including Gillespie, are undoubtedly witnessing with the same myopic hyperfocus as the rest of us, and likely the same shock. Our eyes remain on those hands. Wexler follows Virgil’s hands as, with gentle authority, they travel up to Colbert’s face and then down to his shoes, which Virgil removes to examine his feet. 

But that’s just the first such encounter. Later, Virgil will meet Colbert’s widow (Lee Grant) in Gillespie’s office, and it will play out as another story of bodies in space, this time with the fraught complication of gender. The Birth of a Nation, with its racist rape plot, comes immediately to mind. More pointedly, the real-life historical dangers of white women accusing black men and boys of rape or making threatening advances—Emmett Till being the example whose name we’re most likely to know—loom large. And so, seeing Virgil and Mrs. Colbert together, alone, in a closed room, with him reaching out to embrace her after informing her of her husband’s death, and of her throwing her hands up—out of racial fear? rejection of comfort?—makes the mind race. And the movie reminds us of why this should be so when, at its climax, Virgil has his hands on another white woman, this time as a result of her involvement in the crime, and he is met with a horrifying vision: a lynch mob, out for his blood.

We give films like 2017’s Get Out (with its explicit nods to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) credit for inventing, or at least giving a name to, the “social thriller.” But Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with its extraordinary anxiety over a white family’s reaction to their daughter’s black fiancé, was already, frankly, a social thriller. As is In the Heat of the Night, with these instances of black and white bodies colliding on-screen, dangerously, intimately. 

Poitier, in his 2000 memoir The Measure of a Man, writes that In the Heat of the Night’s central ironies—a northern black man in the South, solving the case of a dead white man; a black cop outsmarting white cops; a black lead having the advantage in a class melodrama—arose from real-life social conflicts too complex to sit easily with contemporary black radicalism, on the one hand, and white liberalism on the other. It “didn’t come from unbridled rage any more than it came from polite submission,” he wrote. “Progress then and now comes from the collision of powerful forces within the hearts of those who strive for it. Anger and charity, love and hate, pride and shame, broken down and reassembled in an igneous process that yields a fierce resolve.”

And yet it’s the anger, the pride, and the reassembly that stand out most in this film. It’s the evocative power of Poitier’s performance, in particular, that makes In the Heat of the Night feel practically like two separate films, whose extraordinary double vision can only really be appreciated from a black perspective. Because, for all its advancements, In the Heat of the Night does not represent a true sea change; it still espouses reconciliation as a social priority—just ask James Baldwin, who, in his book-length piece of film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, likens the final scene between Steiger and Poitier on the train platform to a classic Hollywood “fade-out kiss.”

Baldwin is not wrong. But Poitier’s performance brushes up dangerously against such predetermined meaning, transforming itself into another object entirely: an artifact of the black double bind. The double bind of being beholden to liberal representation, for the sake of one’s career, while also trying to satisfy an oft-belittled, underserved, complex audience. Of playing a trope, however well-written, while trying to bring a real black rage, a simmering bit of metatext about the role itself, to the movie’s politics. 

You can sum it all up in one line. It comes midway through, on a police visit to the mansion of the local bigwig, Mr. Endicott, who, unsubtly, runs a cotton plantation. “None of that for you, eh, Virgil?”—this is what Gillespie says, referencing the troubling scene, just outside their car, of lowlier blacks picking cotton. The scene was filmed on a real Tennessee estate and nearby cotton farm (for it, the only one in the film actually shot below the Mason-Dixon Line, Jewison was able to convince Poitier to travel to Tennessee for a couple of days). But you don’t need to know that to feel the question creep beyond the confines of Hollywood fiction to nudge at the fact of its black star, Poitier. “None of that for you, eh, Virgil?”: it could just as easily be a question about the real-life anonymous blacks playing those cotton pickers. None of that for you, eh, Sidney? From then on, Poitier and his career would live out the answer in all its double-edged complexity: That’s right.