In the Heat of the Night (1967): Shira’s Take

While “They call me MISTER Tibbs!” has clearly become the most quoted and memorable line in this movie, I must say that my favorite was when Gillespie (Rod Steiger) said, “I got the motive which is money and the body which is dead.” Priceless.

For such a well-acted, well-written, well-shot, well-directed movie, In the Heat of the Night’s plot was definitely lacking. I know it’s based on a book, so I theoretically have no right to complain about the plot, but to me PLOT MAKES A MOVIE. And this movie’s plot felt like a bad episode of Law and Order. The last twenty minutes or so are paced so poorly that I’m not totally sure I even understood them. It didn’t help that all the tall, lanky yokel-y guys looked exactly alike, and I mistook part of the story for incest. And did they explain why the bit of fern or whatever the orchids grew in was in the car? You can tell by how inarticulate I am in writing about this movie that I didn’t really follow what happened in it. And, I’m sorry, maybe if I had seen this in 1967 I would have liked it, but it can’t compare to a later movie (that I had already seen) about heat waves and crazy racism–Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

I loved Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. I’ve always wondered about the fact that Steiger won an Oscar for this performance and Poitier wasn’t even nominated. I think it’s fair. Poitier was good, but Steiger was way better. Plus, the idiotic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner came out in ’67 as well, and I think the two Poitier performances probably split the votes and he didn’t end up nominated. The photography was awesome. 1967 was a year for good cinematography (with Bonnie and Clyde winning the Oscar). In the Heat of the Night wasn’t even nominated, but it totally had that hip, funky New Hollywood vibe. 7/10

In the Heat of the Night (1967): Eitan’s Take

Released in the thick of the Summer of Love, Norman Jewison’s truly incendiary In the Heat of the Night is the first Best Picture winner we’ve seen that has felt really immediate, really visceral, and really contemporary. Its brilliant social critiques are obvious (or, at least they are now) and its central mystery is hardly worth blinking an eye at, but the atmosphere of the film — Poitier’s tough and intelligent performance, the classy jazz and blues score, and the crisp writing, to name just a few elements — is soulful, rich, and thrilling. Nowadays, a hack like Paul Haggis could probably take the same material and turn it into a hodgepodge of liberal guilt-inducing malaise, but it’s tough not to admire the risks this film took in 1967.

Of course, watching a slightly preachy detective film about a black man coming into a town of redneck racists and saving them from themselves (Blazing Saddles, anyone?) requires a bit of patience and some acquiescence to the shopworn cliches of both the film noir and the racial reconciliation drama. But as with so many great genre pics, it’s easy to forget about the hamminess of this approach when the performances and the dialogue are so unforgettable. Poitier’s performance is a brilliant melange of passionate anger, soul, grit, and jazzy coolness. Rod Steiger (pre-bald-creepiness) matches him note-for-note, imbuing what could have been a tacky caricature with just enough emotional depth and hurt to believe his willing partnership with a mostly despised black detective. We know that they’ll eventually solve the crime, and a film this complex cannot rest on a simple, “Law and Order”-style investigative framework. At the same time, it cannot be content with only busting taboos and failing to provide an exciting story. That it manages to do nearly all these things at once, while remaining edgy and thrilling, is a great testament to the artists behind it.

It would be easy to criticize this film for being a simplistic, easily-digestible apologia for middle-class, white liberals to stand up and pat themselves on the back for enjoying. If I was more cynical, I might very dismiss it as that myself. But within this film’s historical context — it was released at the dawn of New Hollywood, and is the subject, along with the four other Best Picture nominees that year, of the supposedly excellent “Pictures at a Revolution” — I refuse to write it off and ignore the new, edgy, ambitious cinematic aesthetic that it embodies. I certainly don’t enjoy or even admire it as much as my two favorite 1967 Best Picture nominees, The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde, but it was a worthy winner nonetheless. It’s too bad that 2004’s winner, Crash, took a similar set of narrative ideas and morphed it into an absurd after-school special.

8/10.

On the Waterfront (1954): Shira’s Take

I just love everything about this movie. It was my second time seeing it, and, though I didn’t think it possible, I actually liked it more this time. The signature cinematography is fantastic. I love the edgy angles looking upwards at Terry Malloy’s (Marlon Brando’s) face. Brando’s performance is my favorite of his and possibly in my top five favorite performances of all time. And it’s not just him. Everyone is good in this movie. The first time I saw it, I thought I would end up hating Eva Marie Saint (playing Edie Doyle), but something about her kindhearted demeanor and desire to help those in need is so earnest and endearing.

The screenplay is great. The characters are so incredibly consistent. One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Terry has just gone up to the roof after ratting out Johnny Friendly (played by Lee J. Cobb) and sees that Tommy (played by Thomas Handley), the kid who has been looking up to Terry since he founded the Golden Warriors (a gang of sorts), has killed all of Joey’s pigeons that Terry had been caring for. Terry says, “What did he have to do that for?” It’s incredible, because at that point, the viewer knows Terry so well that he/she can almost predict that he will react that way. It is as though when he sees that his brother, Charley (played by a young, not-scary-looking Rod Steiger) has been killed, he understands why it happened and is therefore sad, but kind of resigned to it. But when the pigeons die, it’s in a way more tragic–the pigeons did nothing wrong, so why did they have to die?

And the ending is just so perfect. I love Johnny Friendly’s pathetic last attempts to yell at everyone going in to work, “I’ll remember every one of you!” For a movie about the three things I care about the least in life (boxing, longshoremen, and pigeon racing), this film is completely relevant to me and to everyone. Perfect, perfect movie. 10/10

On the Waterfront (1954): Eitan’s Take

Unrelentingly dark, On the Waterfront takes us to a place that few of us ever see, and gives us an antihero and a redemption tale that are among the finest achievements in cinema history. The gritty, mob-ridden docks on the edge of Manhattan have belonged to many different oppressed and minority groups (now it’s a haven for poor, crack-addicted transsexual prostitutes), but here they belong to the sort of long-faced men we saw back in How Green Was My Valley; of course, coal miners and longshoremen are kindred spirits — they’re both beholden to the corrupt will of dirty, greedy jerks who pay them nothing and make them witness to some hideous crimes.

In this film, the injustices perpetrated by Johnny Friendly and his band of fat-faced goons are just the frame for our window into the sad lives of the hard-working dock workers. From their midst emerges Terry Molloy, who is played by Marlon Brando with such precision and such gusto that you’d think he lived in a dumpy tenement with pigeons for years before stepping into the checkered jacket. And he probably did. Through his struggle with the long arm of the law, we watch as all the powerful forces in the world — business, justice, murder, Jesus — converge on a small part of Manhattan and play themselves out in epic fashion. The romance works. The noir works. The social justice angle works. And the result is a brutal and beautiful picture that is completely engrossing and awe-inspiring.

Many of the great moments — Molloy walking with blood streaming down his face, the famous cab scene, the near-death experience in the alley way — reminded me of great social justice movies from later in the century, including The Insider (which is heavily influenced by this movie), Do the Right Thing, and Schindler’s List. And, of course, many of its finest moments have clear influences in the classic films of Sergei Eisenstein (especially the end of this movie, which reminded me a lot of the Odessa Steps sequence.) But I couldn’t stop thinking throughout the whole movie about director Elia Kazan’s shameless blacklisting of his own colleagues during the Red Scare. It’s hard to make a movie about standing up for what you believe in, when you’re sending your friends to prison and leading the fight against the good people in Hollywood.

Still, Marlon Brando gives the performance of a lifetime here, as do many others… Eva Marie Saint as the mysterious and tragic sister of the first mob victim, Karl Malden as the paragon of virtue, Lee J. Cobb as the reckless and amoral union “leader.” It’s an indisputably classic movie, filled with phenomenal performances and a haunting and eternally relevant story. To give this masterpiece anything less than a 10/10 would be blasphemy.