THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE PHASE ONE: They Call Me MISTER Tibbs (1970)

Now that we’re entering the 70‘s on this little experiment, I am once again confronted with the question of why I am so in love with African American cinema of the decade or, as it’s popularly known, ‘blaxploitation.’  Granted, I have always had an affinity for what could be termed ‘black culture’; I’d chalk this up to growing up in Highland Park, Brooklyn, a very integrated neighborhood but I suspect this goes above and beyond just growing up in such a place.  I was once told by a hip-hop artist I was interviewing back in the 90‘s that he appreciated talking to me because I was knowledgeable and affectionate toward the culture without trying to pretend I’m part of it, but I wonder if my affection comes from its ‘otherness.’  Am I fetishizing what I am not in my celebration of this genre, and have I been doing this my whole life?

I bring this all up because it was fairly clear right from the start that I would be watching this, the second of three films featuring Sidney Poitier as Lt. Virgil Tibbs.  This may be the first mainstream film series from a major studio to have a black man as a lead, and I’m pretty certain this film got green lit four years after the success of In The Heat of The Night because United Artists knew there was some money to be made in urban areas--the fact that it’s named for a line of dialogue from the original that is never uttered during the film’s almost two hour run time, a line that harkens back to the assertiveness Tibbs has in the fact of institutional racism, makes it clear that this is trying to bring in an African American audience.  And if we’re to take into account the success of 1971‘s one-two punch of Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song, there was an African American audience positively starving for movies that were about their experiences...so a new Virgil Tibbs thriller seems like a no-brainer.

Except....

This is a very good movie that benefits from an exceptional cast of character actors.  Even the background actors are amazing; a couple of times, director Gordon Douglas (perhaps best known for one of the best 50‘s sci-fi flicks, Them) pans across crowd scenes and there’s all these wonderfully expressive faces in those crowds that hint at different stories that could be told.  Among the actors in support of Poitier are Martin Landau--and boy, does the camera love his piercing eyes--as an activist preacher; Anthony Zerbe playing the Anthony Zerbe Is A Slimeball role; Ed Asner in full toupee--which looks freakin’ weird--as a Designated Red Herring; Jeff Corey as Tibbs’ superior; Hell, you can spot John ‘Higgins on Magnum PI’ Hillerman as a reporter in a few scenes.  I was taken by the performance of Beverly Todd as the unfortunately named ‘Puff,’ who creates this persona as a professional to slips to show us a much more vulnerable woman underneath.  While it doesn’t take a lot of advantage of its San Francisco setting, there are some action sequences featuring the Golden Gate Bridge and Chinatown.  There’s also an opening sequence that shows Douglas was watching giallo films in its striking use of color and angles.

And yet, it doesn’t quite work because when you take Virgil Tibbs out of the sociopolitical context of In The Heat of The Night, you have...a standard police detective who happens to be black.  Poitier portrays Tibbs as cool, but it’s not the cool the moviegoing audience wanted at the time. This is the cool of ‘calm, cool and collected,’ not the cool of a maverick rebelling against The System.  It doesn’t help that almost all the aforementioned action sequences are backloaded into the last half hour, so that Poitier giving a beatdown come off as...sudden and strange.  And instead of scenes of our hero investigating this murder, we get painfully stilted scenes of Tibbs acting as a parent and playing footsie with a criminally underused Barbara McNair as his wife.

By forcing Tibbs out of a political context (there’s some subplot about Landau pushing a political proposition about housing, but it’s all kinda in the background) and trying to give him an ordinary life, it makes him ordinary, which leeches away what makes the character so notable.  And what remains is just an okay police drama--an admittedly well-acted, well-crafted, perhaps overlong police drama.  And that wasn’t what the urban audience United Artist was pitching it to wanted, as they learn when Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles does give them what they wanted next year.

I would recommend you see it if you like police thrillers or are interested in blaxploitation cinema, as it’s a well-made film with some great performances.  But be prepared, because it’s a bit of a slog.

The candidates for 1971 should be up tomorrow.