In the Heat of the Night

In the Heat of the Night (1967) is about a black Philadelphia detective named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrong place being the Deep South and the wrong time being circa 1967. More specifically, he's sitting in a train station--having just visited his mother--in the wee hours of the night waiting for the 4:05 to Memphis, when a local police officer comes by and decides that Virgil is probably responsible for the murder of a prominent citizen earlier in the evening. After all, Virgil's black, he's well-dressed, and he's apparently not from around here. It's airtight.

Does this cop question Virgil? Not even a little. He sizes Virgil up, he with his polished suit and good grammar, and pure contempt shuts down any reasonable thought from happening inside this cop's brain. Virgil is arrested and brought to the police chief, played by Rod Steiger. Soon enough, they find out Virgil's identity, and he goes from suspect to investigator, assisting the chief in the murder case (at the assistance of Virgil's own police chief back home). Steiger's character has to do a considerable amount of pride-swallowing to ask for help from a man who's apparently the top homicide investigator in Philadelphia and a black man. The rest of the film is about the investigation and the tension between Virgil and this police chief (and Virgil and the whole damn town). Rod Steiger gives us the pleasure of watching moral uncertainty gnawing away at a man who has up until now lived in the sure-footed, ignorant but safe pleasure of White People Are Superior County, occupation 1200. 

In the Heat of the Night (1967) is really a testament to the work of cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who captures the sharp edges of the Deep South without condescending in any way to the characters or the culture. Wexler's camera registers this small town of Sparta, Mississippi, in all its sweaty, gross yet believable contradictions, and you feel as though you've been dropped into this world like a fly on the wall. In the opening sequence, a police officer makes his nightly rounds, stopping at a grimy diner where he makes small talk with the lanky creep running the counter. (There's a fly caught inside the cake dish, and something about that image stays with you.) This whole exchanged has a kind of tilted, cracked feel to it that stays with you through the entire movie. The South really becomes a place of hypnotic, mysterious darkness. The cop also has a nightly habit of passing the house of a pretty young girl who walks around naked at night with the lights on. But again, we the audience are always this sort of non-superior fly, watching the events unfold without being asked to feel superior to these characters. We're trapped in that cake dish and watching life unfold in all its messy, contradictory, infuriating truthfulness.

In a later scene, Scott Wilson is pursued through Mississippi swamps and bramble by police dogs. Wilson manages to elude the pack of cops and hounds only to find himself caught by Rod Steiger, who's waiting for him on a bridge in his patrol car, slowly trailing Wilson until he runs out of energy and surrenders. The comic irony at the end of this scene speaks, in a way, for the whole movie. Such a lot of effort wasted. So many characters in In the Heat of the Night seem to be expending all they've got only to have their endeavors fall apart. 

In line with this idea of wasted effort is the murder plot itself: The murder victim is a rich entrepreneur from Chicago, and he's supposed to build a factory in Sparta that will create 1000 jobs for the community. When his wife (played by Lee Grant) learns that he's been murdered, she nearly falls apart, but catches herself and asks to be left alone so she can cry it out in solitude. (I kept waiting for some kind of actressy mourning scene, and the film almost goes there, but right then they cut, and it seems like the right amount of grief and restraint.) The prime suspect is a gentrified Southern aristocrat who riles the indignation of Virgil Tibbs, but then something happens that sort of pulls the grandiosity out of the mystery. And this is really quite brilliant, but I won't go into detail for fear of spoiling the film. Suffice to say, it puts In the Heat of the Night in that category of bleakly brilliant 1960s and 70s noirs. (The anti-noirs. I love the real noirs of the 40s, but there are a handful of anti-noirs that are quite good too.)

Indeed, we're constantly witnessing tense sequences in this movie that don't end up how we expect them to, and the actions of the characters in the film are hard to predict, yet never false. The film is entirely realistic in that regard. Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant and director Norman Jewison deserve recognition for this too. It's no small feat to try and be a crackling murder mystery and a conscientious movie about race, and to their credit, they manage to balance the two fairly successfully without eschewing credibility. The film holds up nicely as both morality tale and Southern noir, particularly because it doesn't try to ram the message down our throats.

That posturing, prestige picture mentality is partly what I was looking for (and hoping I wouldn't get, and I relieved I didn't get) as I re-watched In the Heat of the Night. We're so pommeled by those kinds of movies--particularly at the end of the year--that are inclined to preach to us some kind of high moral message. But this movie is fun to watch. It's not pre-occupied with being the Big Race Movie of 1967 (that dubious honor goes to Poitier's other film from that year, the overrated Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.) Yes there is a clear attempt in this film to show us the stupidity of racism, but that's the point: it shows us so much more than it tells. And thankfully the movie doesn't end with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger high-fiving before Virgil finally boards his train.

There is a deeper understanding between the two men, but the movie doesn't try and over-explain that. What makes In the Heat of the Night stand out among all the racially charged movies of the 1960s is that it makes room for the weird complexity of racism. (I don't mean to suggest that the impulse to be racist requires complexity of thought, but that racism is so embedded in culture and relationships between peoples that trying to identify it and transmute it is a complex thing.) Virgil Tibbs isn't out to change the minds of every person in the South who hates black people. (He was just trying to catch a frigging train.) But if the stubborn police chief can see the humanity in a black man--and respect him for his considerable talent, skill, and achievement as a fellow human being--then maybe there's a little hope. (I kept imagining Virgil's next phone call to his mom: "Listen. From now on you're coming to Philadelphia.") ★★★½

Belle de Jour

The lovely Catherine Deneuve plays a Parisian newlywed who becomes a high-end prostitute in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967), which captures the convoluted mixture of guilt and excitement in acts of transgression. For a while, Belle de Jour is a sympathetic character: her doting husband (played by Jean Sorel) is certainly nothing to complain about. His worst problem is that he's bland; but he's handsome and loving and a good provider, and reacts good-naturedly when his wife turns him down in the bedroom night after night. No, Belle doesn't turn to prostitution out of an unhappy marriage, even though she feels that she is incapable of making love to her husband. She's a little bored, a little scared of the permanence of marriage, and, possibly, is unable to be with men who respect her. And that curious mixture of indignity and taboo adds to the allure, even though it takes Belle a while to work up to the demands of her clients. (There's also a hint that she may have been abused as a child; this would give credence to the idea that she can't allow herself to be treated right.)

Despite the subject matter, Buñuel's film is tastefully done, never fetishistic or exploitative. This film's aim is not to titillate the audience in a perverse fashion; it's instead interested in exposing the uncertainties people grapple with and the tremendous amount of fear that drives very ordinary people to decidedly outre patterns of behavior. But it's rather difficult to want to throw a pity party for Belle, because she gets entangled with a client who's obsessed with her, and he eventually finds out about her husband, whom he sees as an obstacle. We can only suspect that this man will harm Mr. Belle de Jour, such an affable boy scout. 

You really start to appreciate the normality of blandness in Belle de Jour, because Buñuel offers the fantasy of doing something outlandish and shows us both the excitement and the ugliness of it. It makes the not-so-hip normal life seem rather more appealing, and particularly pathetic when the not-so-hip normal guy is cast down by a cruel twist of fate. 

With Michel Piccoli; Genevieve Page, who gives a wonderfully sympathetic and vulnerable but assured performance as Madame Anais, the lady who runs the brothel; Pierre Clementi as Marcel, the man who becomes obsessed with Belle de Jour; and Francoise Fabian and Maria Latour as two other prostitutes. Written by the director, Jean-Claude Carriere, and Joseph Kessel, on whose 1928 novel the film is based. 100 min. ★★½

Weekend

In Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), a bickering, unhappy husband and wife embark on a nightmarish ride in the country, ostensibly to visit her dying father and hopefully secure their place in his will. They are delayed by a series of strange, even horrifying, incidents, including a very long traffic jam. Godard is full of ideas about the class struggle, the vapid, vain problems of the bourgeois French (and the bourgeois everybody, really), and consumer culture. But he's preachy about it: his characters go on tirades about various problems including Western imperialism in Africa (actually that was the most interesting part of the movie because of the ideas, not because of how they were being depicted). It took me three days to finish the damn thing because it's such a colossal bore. Perhaps I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate this kind of arty film, but I found myself yearning for a compelling story and resentful of all the symbolism. Godard is often praised by critics, and indeed I could find very few negative words about Weekend. 105 min. ★

The Graduate

The ending of The Graduate (1967) is worth sitting through the whole rest of the movie, which is alternately amusing and unpleasant.

Dustin Hoffman plays the main character, Ben Braddock, a recent college graduate who is propositioned by the wife of his dad's business partner. Her name is Mrs. Robinson, and she wears fur coats and leopard printed dresses and has a streak of white in her brown hair: it's not exactly a subtle comparison that the scriptwriters--Calder Willingham and Buck Henry--are making: she's a tiger stalking her prey. Thankfully, Anne Bancroft plays her with delicious cunning and restraint. She utters every word as though she'd just as well not speak at all, and she exercises almost pathological patience with Ben as she leads him into bed without letting him realize it. He's an awkward, oblivious young man who's worried about his future, and by the time the trap has been laid he's too caught up in it to get himself out.

I first saw The Graduate when I was about thirteen, and I was too young to really grasp the impact that this film had: it was part of the counter-culture, simultaneously inscribed by it and inscribing it, and a member of a small club of popular films from the 1960s that represented a sort of cinematic and cultural revolution. Others include Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Midnight Cowboy. The Graduate, with its Simon and Garfunkel music throughout and its self-aware hipness, is a kind of a comic critique of American values: Ben, the privileged upper-middle-class college boy has had everything handed to him, and now at 21 he feels completely at a loss about what to do with the rest of his life. Mrs. Robinson, who years ago was forced into an unhappy marriage because she was pregnant, is an alcoholic and obviously isn't getting any satisfaction from her husband. (They have separate rooms and live amongst each other rather than together.)

In one scene, Ben is forced to show off the scuba diving suit his father bought him, and once he's submerged in the swimming pool, he just lays at the bottom, weightless but feeling smothered by the expectations of his parents and their friends. For most of the movie, the message is: ignore the established values. They are lies and they lead to unhappiness. Break the rules.

But when Ben meets Mrs. Robinson's charming daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), who's on break from Berkeley, he falls for her, which knocks the jealous, conniving mother out of the loop. Apparently love trumps lust, and suddenly The Graduate turns into a more traditional kind of love story. When Mrs. Robinson threatens to tell her daughter about the affair with Ben, Ben beats her to the punch, hoping that his directness will prevent a breakup. But Elaine is furious and heartbroken, and she heads back to college in disgust with Ben. Now he must win her back, and that's when we get to the finale. [SPOILERS] It's such a famous scene: Ben pounding on the glass of the window overlooking the sanctuary, all the wedding guests staring at this raving madman in stunned silence, Elaine looking conflicted but flattered that someone would come for her in such a grandiose style: She's trying to decide whether to stay with the man she's just married or run off with Ben. When she finally does run off with him, the movie once again takes up its counter-culture cross, almost literally: Ben brandishes a big gold cross, fending off the angry wedding party, and then shoves it into the door handles to lock everyone inside the church.

As Ben and Elaine flea the church and hail a bus, we're left with the looks on their faces: It's almost an "I've made a big mistake" moment (ala Arrested Development), except their expressions are more vacant than that: the elation of breaking the rules is already wearing off, and suddenly they're left with real life and all its questions and monotonies. Whether you follow the rules of society or not, sooner or later, the familiar will get you: the dangerous routine will impinge the happy couple.

The Graduate holds up fairly well, but it always leaves me feeling depressed, perhaps because one of the aching truths it wrestles with is that horrible feeling of sinking into a routine, which is so frightening for some and so comforting for others. Or perhaps it's just my puritan upbringing rearing its ugly head. Directed by Mike Nichols. With William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, and Elizabeth Wilson. ★★★

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Richard Burton as George, a prickly, passive-aggressive history professor and Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, his bitter wife, who's the daughter of the president of the college where her husband teaches. They have a young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) over for drinks, late one night after a faculty gathering at the college. Their little after-party turns out to be an opportunity for spectacle that playwright Edward Albee and sceenwriter Ernest Lehman couldn't resist. A night with George and Martha is pure masochism. Burton and Taylor fight like two cats as they churn out clever insults and fling them at each other with ruthless precision. As "raw" as this movie purports to be, it all feels too much like "acting." But the actors are still very good, even if the screenwriting is obviously trying to be "real" and "edgy." It's overly self-conscious, but first-time director Mike Nichols doesn't seem to worried about concealing it, which may be one of the reasons this canned drama works, as an exercise in frothy unpleasantness, but it's hard to watch this and call it a good time. These are some of the most unpleasant people you could ever spend an evening with, and while there's some humor in it, it feels too much like watching movie stars behind-the-scenes after they've had too much to drink.

There is a bit of style to it (Haskell Wexler won an Oscar for his black-and-white cinematography, and the editing by Sam O'Steen nicely lifts the material off the stage, even though it's still very much a talky film), and in 1966, this was probably a lot more exciting than it is in the era of celebrity meltdowns and the desensitizing spectacle that is reality television. I keep wondering: Were people really enjoying, even reveling in, Elizabeth Taylor as the frumpy drunk with the acid tongue? You really miss the Elizabeth Taylor of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Giant and even Suddenly, Last Summer, the one you could root for, even when she was over-acting. She always looked so ravishing, and exuded such electricity on the screen. She turned each of those roles into a performance. That's what's so enthralling, to this day, about Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star. She certainly gives us a performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but somehow, seeing her turn into a vulgar lush (still pretty sexy though) is a disappointment. She won her second Oscar for this movie, and it's as if she had to go ugly and mean to get it. (She won her first Oscar for playing a high-class hooker who's killed in a car crash at the end of Butterfield 8, and the Academy was most rewarding as a result of her punishment.) But when an actress like Elizabeth Taylor is awarded for giving the kind of antithetical performance (and yes, it's a damn good one at times) she gives in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it's a reminder of something that Taylor in her prime always helped us forget: that stars weren't real.

When they're drunk, though, Burton and Taylor have a wonderfully funny chemistry together. And George Segal is enjoyably perplexed as the young new biology professor who, along with his wife, becomes a pawn in George and Martha's matrimonial boxing match. (Sandy Dennis has a bubbly, aloof charm to her, and she gets to have her own mad meltdown as the night winds on and more skeletons tumble recklessly out everybody's closet. This feels like Albee's version of a Tennessee Williams play, full of corny, histrionic lines that are delivered with the right amount of tongue-in-cheek from this cast. They give each bad line a bit of ersatz class. (It would be frightening to see this performed by amateurs.)

Point Blank

In Point Blank, double-crossed crook Lee Marvin wants his $93,000, and damned if he doesn't kill any man who stands in his way. It becomes a series of repetitive encounters with various head honchos, all of them connected in some way to an ominous organized crime outfit known, blandly, as the Organization. Director John Boorman manages to create some very clever set pieces in this 1967 thriller, which has developed an avid following of fans. One particular scene is lifted from the film noir classic The Big Sleep (1946), where the wrong guy is sent into the path of the hired gun. It's those scenes that may sustain your interest, and may keep you hoping that the movie will really go somewhere. Boorman always seems to pull back just as the film's about to get rolling, and so it never really comes to a head. But it's interesting as a sort of case study of male revenge fantasies, and who better to enact a male revenge fantasy than Lee Marvin, using sex-kitten Angie Dickinson as a pawn in his game of vengeance? The supporting cast includes Keenan Wynn, Lloyd Bochner, John Vernon, Carroll O'Connor, Michael Strong, Sharon Acker, and James Sikking.

Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) marked a turning point in American movies, ushering in a decade-long proliferation of sophisticated, grown-up, realistic Hollywood films that culminated in The Godfather (1972). Many people were put off by the movie's humanizing portrayal of the infamous partners in crime, played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. But Bonnie and Clyde was not about glorifying the crimes of two Texas youths with an insane sense of immortality coursing through their veins. Their brutally depicted death scene may lionize them a bit, but it also demonstrates the brutality of the time period, the 1930s, in which the movie is set, as well as the brutality of the time period in which it was made. Like a handful of other movies from the 1960s (notably, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, The Wild Bunch, and Easy Rider), Bonnie and Clyde is an essential remnant of that turbulent time period. It's about the corruption of youth and beauty by materialism and by the system in which we live. As a film, Bonnie and Clyde has a remarkable energy to it, even forty-five years later. It sizzles with life, and Faye Dunaway's performance is a big part of the movie's appeal.

Directed by Arthur Penn. With Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Gene Wilder.