Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1967 neo-noir crime drama, "In the Heat of the Night," directed by Norman Jewison.

Sterling Silliphant adapted the screenplay from the 1965 novel of the same name by John Ball.

The movie stars Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, with a supporting cast that includes Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Larry Gates, James Patterson, William Schallert, and Beah Richards.

The film opens late on a hot summer night in the little town of Sparta, Mississippi.

While making his usual rounds, police patrolman, Sam Wood, discovers a dead body lying in an empty street.

The victim is Philip Colbert, a wealthy industrialist who has recently moved to Sparta to open a factory that promised to bring badly needed jobs to town.

Searching for possible suspects, Wood comes across a well-dressed black man at the railroad station and takes him into custody.

At the station, the recently installed Chief of Police, Bill Gillespie, interrogates the man, whose name is Virgil Tibbs, and confronts him with the large sum of money he's carrying in his wallet, suggesting it was stolen from Colbert's body, but the chief's theory disintegrates when Tibbs reveals that he's a Philadelphia police officer returning North after visiting his mother.

When Gillespie calls the Philadelphia Chief of Police to check Tibbs's story, he learns that Tibbs is in fact the city's top homicide detective.

Already tired of the racism he's encountered in Sparta, Tibbs wants nothing more than to get the next train out of town and return home, but his chief suggests he remain in Sparta instead to help Gillespie investigate Colbert's death.

Neither Tibbs nor Gillespie is happy with the arrangement, but the two men begin to work together to solve the murder.

As they do, they begin to gain some respect for each other's abilities and predicaments, even as events and the malignant racism of the town's residents threaten both the investigation and Virgil Tibbs himself.

Norman Jewison is one of those directors who are known for making films that explore and expose various aspects of the American national psyche without themselves being Americans.

Born in Toronto, Ontario on July 21st, 1926, to a couple who ran a convenience store, Jewison served in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War.

After his discharge in 1945, he traveled in the American South where he saw the consequences of racial segregation firsthand.

After graduating from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1949, Jewison became involved in television production, first in Britain, then back in Canada, and finally, in the United States.

Jewison's first work as a movie director came in 1962, helming "40 Pounds of Trouble," starring Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette.

The movie is now notable primarily for being the first film shot in part at Disneyland.

Jewison directed two Doris Day comedies, "The Thrill Of It All" with James Garner in 1963 and "Send Me No Flowers" with Rock Hudson in 1964.

Jewison successfully expanded his range with the gambling drama, "The Cincinnati Kid," starring Steve McQueen in 1965.

The next year he made the Cold War paranoia comedy, "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming," that ended up being nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

With a string of cinematic successes under his belt, Jewison took on "In The Heat Of The Night" for his next project.

Jewison chose Haskell Wexler to be the film's cinematographer, although Wexler had never worked in color before.

Born in Chicago in 1922, Wexler began his career shooting industrial films in the Midwest and later moved on to documentaries, including films portraying the civil rights struggle in the American South.

Wexler won an Academy Award for best cinematography black and white, for Mike Nichols's 1966 film, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," starting Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

While working on "In The Heat Of The Night," Wexler designed the lighting to properly photograph Sidney Poitier's dark skin.

He was the first cinematographer to film in a way flattering to black actors in a color motion picture released by a major studio.

Because of the success of his previous movie, "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," Norman Jewison was allowed to shoot "In the Heat of the Night" on location rather than on a studio back lot.

The difference may be seen in almost every shot.

Haskell Wexler's textured, slightly faded color cinematography and the details of weathered buildings in a down-at-heels town add to the tension of the story and the malignant racism it portrays, but "In the Heat of the Night" was not shot in the deep South.

It was shot at the town of Sparta, Illinois.

The name of the Mississippi town in the novel was changed to Sparta to take advantage of local signage and storefronts.

The decision to shoot most of the film in Illinois arose from Sidney Poitier's refusal to do location work in Mississippi where he and Harry Belafonte had once almost been killed by a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

When the scene showing Eric Endicott's home and plantation later required several days' filming in Dyersburg, Tennessee, Poitier reportedly slept every night with a gun under his pillow.

"In the Heat of the Night" drew praise from critics on its release in August of 1967.

Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it a film that has the look and sound of actuality and the pounding pulse of truth.

In a review in Life Magazine, Richard Schickel wrote, "Almost everything in this movie is good.

The sharply drawn minor characters, the careful plotting, the wonderful rightness of each scene, setting mood and dialogue.

Most admiral of all is the way everyone avoids oversimplifications."

"In the Heat of the Night" often confounds its audience's expectations.

Rod Steiger's Chief Gillespie at first seems to be no more than a stereotypical Southern sheriff, quick to jump to conclusions and hostile towards outsiders but he soon proves to be both more thoughtful and more complex.

As it turns out, Gillespie is an outsider himself, new to his job and to the town, and he lives in almost complete isolation when not busy with police work.

Similarly, Virgil Tibbs is coolly efficient, and careful in his work, but he allows his prejudices to lead him to waste time trying to connect Eric Endicott to the murder just because he dislikes him.

In that respect, he's not all that different from Patrolman Sam Wood, who arrested Tibbs at the outset of the story just because he was his stranger, and Black.

Tibbs also has a barely suppressed rage that sometimes reveals itself through violence as when he confronts the gang of white men at the warehouse or responds to Endicott slapping his face by immediately slapping him back.

That scene is not in John Ball's 1965 novel, but it's essential to the spirit of the film.

The sudden shock of it led preview audiences to gasp, then cheer.

When it came time to film the scene, Jewison had Larry Gates as Endicott slap Poitier first hard to ensure Poitier wouldn't restrain himself when slapping Gates back.

Gates himself told Poitier to slap him as hard as he wanted.

The scene required only two takes, which was no doubt a relief to both men.

"In the Heat of the Night" was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won five, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Stirling Silliphant, Best Actor for Rod Steiger, and Best Picture.

It also won a host of other awards and now appears on many lists of motion picture bests.

Sidney Poitier later said "In the Heat of the Night" was his favorite of all the films he had made.

In his memoir, "The Measure of a Man," published in 2000, Poitier said the movie interrogated the assumptions of both white liberals and Black militants because it presented complex social situations and characters with distinctive personalities, backgrounds and motivations.

The story he wrote didn't come from unbridled rage, anymore than it came from polite submission.

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."

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.